You probably all know there's been a bit of news about Renzi's corruption lately. I'll leave the many able folk at dailykos to dissect the details as they develop. I want to tell you a bit about Ellen.
Back in May, I was looking around for a campaign to join. A dear friend of mine, the Democratic Party chair of one of the counties in the district, told me I had to talk to this new woman who was running. I did, and never looked back. Why, is after the break...
Ellen was born and raised in Cleveland, where her parents came after surviving the Holocaust. They taught her that America was the land of freedom; when she became a lawyer, she began her career with legal work in the civil rights movement.
Later she founded a civil rights law firm in Cleveland that specialized in workplace rights. She won a huge number of landmark cases in employment rights - the first case of someone fired for having cancer, age discrimination cases, sex discrimination cases, the list goes on. Her cases made new law. She was routinely up against big teams of corporate lawyers, all by herself. She made 'Best Lawyers in America'. And as Renzi loves to remind us, for a while she volunteered as president of the Cleveland chapter of the ACLU. She 'retired' to Sedona, in the middle of AZ-01, because she loved it out here.
All this is just biography, of course - impressive biography, but you could read it anywhere. What I want you guys to understand is that when you meet Ellen - when you see her start talking about an issue, and her eyes light up and she says something like "It's IMMORAL for us to leave 46 million Americans without health insurance!" - you immediately see part of how she won those cases. And when you're a staffer on her campaign and you make a mistake, and suddenly you find the mild-mannered 5'2" woman is cross-examining you within an inch of your life to find out where you went wrong and make sure you don't do it again, you see the other part.
That kind of passion paired with that kind of intelligence is a very powerful combination. Like many of our candidates in this remarkable year, Ellen is much more than just a convenient improvement on an awful Republican incumbent. She'll be a tremendous Congresswoman, and she'll hold her seat for a very, very long time.
But, of course, we won't get there without a lot of help.
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