Joe Sestak-- All Fired Up And Ready To Take On Corporate Shill Arlen Specter

This has been a very good week for Congressman Joe Sestak, the actual Democrat running against Arlen Specter, a Republican senator claiming to be a Democrat. As Senate Guru pointed out the polls are trending away from the very well-known Specter and towards the relative new comer Sestak. A former 3-star admiral and a champion of America's military veterans, Joe Sestak is no new comer to men and women who served in the military and this week he was endorsed by VoteVets.org. "The decision to endorse him," they wrote, "wasn't hard."

When we launched VoteVets.org PAC, Joe was one of our very first endorsed candidates, in his successful race for Congress. He has one of the most tremendous records of service of anyone in Washington.

During a distinguished 31-year career in the United States Navy, Sestak attained the rank of 3-star Admiral and served in the Clinton White House, Pentagon, and in operational commands at sea, culminating with command of the USS George Washington Aircraft Carrier Battle Group. In fact, he is the highest-ranking former military officer ever elected to either branch of Congress.

His record in Congress is just as impressive, in a short time. He is one of the few representatives to serve on three committees, serving as Vice Chair of the Small Business Committee, and a member of the Committee on Education and Labor and the Armed Services Committee. In the current Congress he has had more of his bills pass than either of the state’s two Senators.

In the end, Joe Sestak will bring the same honesty, integrity, and hard work with which he’s always served America to the U.S. Senate. Joe understands the unique challenges facing America – especially those of us who served and are serving, and stands firm on his principles. You always know where Joe Sestak stands.

That same unshakable integrity and honesty-- especially when contrasted to one of the most corrupt hacks to have ever served ion the U.S. Senate-- is what makes the choice a no brainer for DWT as well and it's why we added Joe Sestak to our ActBlue page the same day he declared he was running.

Yesterday we talked a little about how a very conservative Democratic Party machine just across the stateline in Ohio is attempting to foist an utterly reactionary Democrat-- anti-choice, anti-gay, anti-union fanatic Jennifer Garrison-- on to Democratic voters. Ed Rendell (along with Joe Biden, who reputedly once spent a few weeks in Scranton as a child) are trying to do the same thing with someone millions of Democrats in Pennsylvania know as a partisan Republican who they've voted against for years. Career politicians have their own calculus and what is never included is that is what's good for ordinary American families that are the backbone of this country, Arlen Specter is no more a Democrat than George Bush or Dick Cheney, whose policies he slavishly supported for the past 8 years, are Democrats.

Even under intense pressure from Rendell, Biden and White House hitman Rahm Emanuel, most of the state's congressional delegation have refused to take sides.

Specter had hoped for more support from the Pennsylvania congressional delegation.
During a conference call with reporters on April 28, Specter said, "[Pennsylvania Gov. Ed] Rendell [D] wants to come to Washington to get Casey and [Rep. Robert] Brady and the delegation together to make a formal endorsement."

But since then, only Casey, Fattah and Holden have officially announced their support for Specter. Brady (D-Pa.), meanwhile, has remained uncommitted.

Last night Sestak hosted a very civil health care town hall meeting in Philadelphia, a far cry from the mayhem Specter presided over earlier in the week. Sestak, who unlike Specter, is not in the pockets of Big Insurance and the Medical Industrial Complex, stayed at the town hall for 5 hours explaining the bill in a straight forward manner to a large audience which had come to listen and debate rather than to disrupt and act out for TV cameras. It was night and day-- a real leader as opposed to a pathetic hack-- compared to another disaster for the bumbling and confused Specter earlier in the day when he was violently booed and jeered at Penn State.

The two men will meet up and debate the issues at Netroot Nation in Pittsburgh on Friday morning. Sestak is well-liked in the blogosphere and Specter is almost universally detested as a Bush supporter and as a career-long corrupt corporate shill. Perhaps Specter is counting on doing so badly that he picks up some kind of sympathy vote. But I doubt it; he probably thinks being joined at the hip to party boss Ed Rendell is going to help him. It won't.

Wednesday Time Magazine warned that Sestak could be far more of a challenge than Specter and his allies ever dreamed.

Franklin & Marshall College pollster Terry Madonna says his own polling and discussions with voters suggest that Specter is on the trickiest ground of his career. "There's sort of a nagging concern voters have," Madonna says. "They're concerned about his past — voting with Bush and Reagan for Bush and Reagan tax cuts, for the war in Iraq, support for the Patriot Act." There's also an undercurrent of worry about Specter's age and health, Madonna says, although voters tend to say so only in whispers. Specter is 79 and has suffered two bouts of Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer of the blood.

One issue that may dog Specter is health care. In two town-hall meetings this month, he has been confronted by angry constituents who claim the current proposal in Congress tramples on their constitutional rights. At a particularly turbulent meeting in Lebanon, Pa., on Tuesday, one man yelled that "One day God is going to judge you and the rest of your damn cronies on the Hill." But it's not clear that voter anger over health-care reform will help the challenger either — Sestak is himself an outspoken backer of President Obama's efforts to reform the health-care system, so it's unlikely the angry protesters crowding Specter's town halls would see Sestak as an alternative.

...While the state party establishment is likely to try to keep large donors away from Sestak, he can probably count on younger and more liberal democratic donors, including some nationally in what's known as the Netroots movement of progressive bloggers and Internet users — the same people that helped Democrat Ned Lamont upset longtime Democratic incumbent Senator Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut primary in 2006. Lieberman quickly switched to independent and won his seat back anyway, but Pennsylvania law would prevent Specter from doing the same if he loses the primary.

"Sestak is a proven fighter," says Markos Moulitsas, founder of the influential progressive website Daily Kos, in an e-mail. "The fact that he is bucking the party establishment to fight a righteous fight makes him even more admiration-worthy."

Regular DWT readers have known Joe Sestak for years. He's a straight shooter who never shies away from answering tough questions. When we endorsed him on August 4th I wrote that he's "consistently been one of the most open members of Congress with our community. His instincts are great and there are few members of Congress I respect more, even members with whom we agree on a more regular basis." His most recent blog session with us was at FDL on May 3 and something he said in response to a question from Mike Stark stuck with me:

Frankly, I have had my career. It’s over after 31 years in the military. I have simply looked at politics as a passion to pay back the country after my daughter’s tumor when this nation was there for us. Good governance is not supposed to be about “me” but rather how can one help. Maybe that’s why I feel so strongly that something just “doesn’t feel right” about the decision regarding Arlen. The final decision needs to be made I think regardless of restrictions by state or national if it is the right thing to do.

For as long as I've known Joe Sestak, "the right thing to do" has always been what I've seen guiding him-- not the right thing to do for his campaign donors (Arlen Specter's modus operandi, but the right thing to do for America and for America's ordinary working families. That's why I feel alright asking you to think about donating whatever you can afford and feel comfortable giving to Joe's campaign. Specter will have all the money corporate America can dish up. He gets more from the more venal interests in the country-- Big Insurance, the banksters, the Medical-Industrial complex than anyone in the Senate who hasn't run for president. And no big donor ever felt they didn't get their money's worth when contributing to Arlen Specter's shameful career.

Watch Joe talking with Carlos Watson a few days ago on MSNBC, explaining his ideas about the health care issues: