Jeff Merkley Is Not A Garden Variety Politician

Today is Jeff Merkley's money bomb. We gave you a heads up yesterday. Merkley isn't just one of the biggest success stories Blue America has had in backing a progressive because he was able to beat a Republican incumbent; that was just the beginning. Since getting into the Senate, Merkely has been one of the most outstanding members fighting for working families and being in the forefront of every important issue the Senate has taken up.

As you can see from our Senate page, Blue America donors have become infatuated with the prospect of electing Shenna Bellows to the U.S. Senate from Maine. She has hundreds more contributors than any of our other Senate candidates. Like Merkley, she comes from a working class background and she is deeply rooted in the urgency of equality of opportunity and in completely imbued in an unapologetic progressive vision of governance. Bellow, busy crisscrossing Maine by foot, urged her supporters to back Merkley as well:

Jeff Merkley is one of the strongest progressive voices in Washington, and he's an inspiration to me in my campaign. His economic and civil liberties work has made him a hero to millions of Americans who believe we need to get back on the right track, and his push for filibuster reform has made him a leader among his peers in the Senate. Oregon voters did all of us a big favor when they turned a Republican-held seat into a center of power for working class people, and I'm working hard to make sure that's what Maine voters do in November.

They are from what Howard Dean termed the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," not the corporate/Wall Street-oriented Republican wing of the party. Yesterday, when Justin Amash addressed his supporters at his primary victory party in Grand Rapids after fending off a vicious challenge by lobbyists and corporate whores in the GOP, he could have just as easily been speaking about the same types of scumbags who surround Steny Hoyer, Steve Israel, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Joe Crowley. "I want to say to lobbyist Pete Hoekstra, you're a disgrace. I'm glad we could hand you one more loss before you fade into total obscurity and irrelevance." That isn't just an attack on every premise of Boehnerland; it is also an attack on every premise of Hoyerworld. Those are two crooked operatives on different sides of the aisle but working for the same "generous" special interests that have financed each of their rises to power and prominence. Two very mediocre men, neither with an even remote sense of ethics who have risen to the top of the corrupt heap! Like Amash, Jeff Merkley will never been part of that heap and neither will Shenna Bellows or-- please, God-- any other candidate vetted by Blue America.

There was a report by not always dependable Edward Klein in the NY Post a few days ago that some members of the Kennedy family just cannot bring themselves to support Hillary Clinton, who-- along with her husband-- is all about being at the top of that heap. For them, being better than Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, Rand Paul or any of those raving sociopaths is just not enough of a qualification for the presidency of the United States. They want to see the best run-- and that isn't Hillary Clinton. Better than Ted Cruz or Jeb Bush or Mike Huckabee? Yes, of course, by a landslide. But she doesn't hold a candle to Elizabeth Warren.

The question of whom to back in the 2016 presidential race has split the Kennedys down the middle. Robert Kennedy’s widow, Ethel, and their eldest son, former US Rep. Joe Kennedy II, favor Warren-- the darling of the party’s left-wing base who now sits in Ted Kennedy’s old seat-- while Bobby Jr. and Max Kennedy remain loyal to Hillary Clinton.

Over the past several weeks, the Kennedys have tried to settle their family quarrel by inviting Clinton and Warren to their compound in Hyannis Port, where each woman has been put through a kind of audition for the role of party standard-bearer… Despite the death of the family patriarch, Ted, the Kennedys still consider themselves the torchbearers of the Democratic Party.

…“Joe thinks Hillary has too many ties with Wall Street,” this source added. “He loves Liz because she’s a full-throated liberal like his Uncle Ted. She has Ted’s voice-- loud and angry and triumphant.”

[Caveat: Edward Klein is a right-wing propagandist who is famous for lying about the Clintons. It's impossible to ever know when he's telling the truth when he writes about them. Presumably when you sift through his manufactured diatribes against them, you might find something true. Example: the part about Elizabeth Warren being at the Hyannis compound is a typical Edward Klein bold-faced lie. But you don't need his story to be true to know that there are two very different wings to the Democratic Party-- and that Jeff Merkley and Shenna Bellows are part of the same wing Elizabeth Warren is.

Like I said, today is Jeff Merkley's money bomb. Let's catch him up in contributions to Shenna.