For most progressive Democrats, Alabama is the heart of Mordor. For me, it's home. And yeah, it sucks. This is Trump Country for sure. Our tea-partying, anti-Obamacare governor just forbade our cities from increasing the minimum wage while doling out huge pay raises to his cronies. The GOP holds a supermajority in the legislature, despite the fact that our crooked Speaker of the House is facing 23 counts of corruption. Our state budget is in permanent crisis, naturally. One of our senators, Jeff Sessions, is an unreconstructed racist and an early adopter of Trumpism.
The other senator is Dick Shelby, who's been slithering around Washington since the 1980s, and he's no better than Sessions. He's also up for re-election this year. "SHELBY" billboards dot the landscape, and I can't open up my browser without seeing his smarmy mug promising to "Fight Obama. Every. Single. Day." This diary is about the man who wants to replace him: Ron Crumpton.
First, a quick word about me: I'm a long-time lurker, but I signed up today to make this diary because I thought some would be interested. Didn't join earlier because I don’t want to get involved in the presidential pie-fighting. (For the record, I voted for Bernie but am more than ready for Hillary in the fall.) I'm in no way affiliated with Mr. Crumpton's campaign. Never met him, and he's got no idea who I am. I'm just a member of Alabama's silent minority of progressives. And it looks like, by Election Day, I'll be living in another state. So I probably won't be getting involved in this particular election beyond this post.
And like a lot of folks, I’ve been so enthralled by the presidential-level stuff on both sides that I didn’t pay attention to the Senate campaign here until recently. And, like a lot of folks, I’ve got to get out of that mindset. When I finally got around to researching our party’s Senate nominee, I was very pleasantly surprised.
So I thought DailyKos should know about Ron Crumpton. Because Ron Crumpton ain't your daddy's Southern Democrat, and he deserves all the support that progressives can give him, even if most attention is understandably going toward the presidential race or senate campaigns in swing states.
As he said in an interview with WHTN 19 in Hunstville (link: whnt.com/…)
One of the main reasons that I decided to run was just that I was tired of seeing the Republicans walk in unopposed to Federal office ever year. I basically made my decision to get into this race a little more than two years ago, when nobody qualified to run against Jeff Sessions. And what we have had run the last few years on the Democratic side, I’m not, you know, real happy with. Nobody wants to stand up and be a Democrat. It’s more, everybody runs as Republican-lite. That doesn’t even work in the Republican Party! We need Democrats to be Democrats, and act like it.
So who is he? First and foremost, he's a patients' rights advocate who's spent years doing the thankless work of lobbying the troglodytes in the state capitol for better treatment for patients. He's the Executive Director of the Alabama Patients’ Rights Coalition, the Alabama Safe Access Project, and the Alabama Medical Marijuana Coalition. He's written legislation to relax Alabama's anti-marijuana laws and to provide assistance to people needing service animals.
But that's not all. Crumpton has an "11-Point Plan for Social Justice" that includes, among other things, amending the Civil Rights Act to include the LGBT community, promoting equal pay for women, supporting the WAGE Act that would provide protection to employees seeking to improve working conditions, ending private prisons, and providing a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
Crumpton also supports a $15 minimum wage, creating new jobs through infrastructure investments, expanding Pell Grants, and re-instating and modernizing Glass-Steagall while also making sure that big bankers are held accountable when they break the law. He also firmly supports Roe v. Wade. He's not great on guns from a progressive standpoint—no candidate is perfect—but as you can see, he's no good old boy Blue Dog, either.
To learn more details about what Crumpton stands for, visit his website at crumptonforalabama.com.
Trust me, I know what kind of odds we're facing down here, in a state that Romney carried by 22 points and that gave Shelby 65% of the vote during his last campaign in 2010. And Dick Shelby hasn't held his Senate seat for a generation by being a lousy politician. He’s a master of the hard-right, punch-down, blame-Obama song-and-dance. Plus, he’s amassed a huge war chest (and he doesn’t spend all of it buying himself fancy dinners in D.C.), and he easily swatted down some Tea Party challengers to his right on Super Tuesday, mainly by accusing them of “supporting amnesty for illegals.”
Yes, for progressives, Alabama isn't so much an "uphill struggle" as it is climbing K-2 in a snowstorm. But our all-but-moribund state Democratic Party needs to get jolted awake, and Alabamians need to start hearing what honest politicians sound like. We hear a lot down here from our brothers and sisters in other, bluer parts of the country about how much they support a 50-state strategy. One that abandons no corner of our country, no matter how benighted its politics may seem, and refuses to give an inch in the fight for progress anywhere. I hope it's true, 'cause we need the help.
Ron Crumpton is a progressive fighter who isn’t scared of long odds. I’ve donated to his campaign through ActBlue and I hope others will as well.