DOES MARILYN MUSGRAVE GET A FREE RIDE TO RE-ELECTION NOW THAT ANGIE HAS DECIDED NOT TO RUN?

There are a lot of races across the country for grassroots, anti-war and progressive activists to get involved with. Colorado's 4th CD was a special target for two reasons: one of the worst incumbents anywhere, a wretched homophobic maniac who has never voted in the interests of humanity-- on anything-- since she took office and in the person of Angie Paccione, a truly worthy opponent who would have made an excellent representative of the interests of ordinary people.

Last year 827 Blue America activists donated over $15,000 to Angie's campaign. Over 225,000 votes were cast and only 7,000 separated Angie from Musgrave. W had every reason to hope that 2008 would be a victory for the forces of progressive democracy over the forces of Hatred and Bigotry embodied by the foul Musgrave.

I have no inside information about why Angie dropped out. According to an article about the race in today's Congressional Quarterly "Kyle Saunders, a Colorado State University political scientist who analyzes congressional races, described Paccione as the party’s strongest candidate and said her decision not to run is not great news for Democrats." Instead of a forthright, fighting progressive CO-04 will now have to make due with a moderate establishment insider who is widely viewed as part of the Bush Dog-leaning Salazar machine (i.e.- Republican lite). Better than Musgrave? Absolutely. Worth fighting for? Well... that's a tougher question.

Betsy Markey is unlikely to be the kind of leader progressive nationally are looking for. But she will probably be a semi-dependable vote for core Democratic initiatives and could be a decent representative for CO-04. Blue America will certainly be rooting for her to beat the execrable Musgrave but we'll leave the fundraising to the insiders and machine pols to work out.

We're far more interested in the candidacies of progressives than we are in hack Democrats. Today Sandra from DFA blogged about the latest turn of events in a race we are very much interested in, the primary against Bush Dog Dan Lipinski by Blue America-endorsed candidate Mark Pera. The elder Lipinski, the right-leaning ex-congressman who was able to install his right-leaning shiftless son from Tennessee into the Chicago area congressional seat, is working a scam to help finance his son's tough re-election campaign. Basically, he's using a charitable children's fund to raise money for little Dan. You can help thwart the Lipinskis and defeat an anti-choice, pro-war Bush Dog by helping Mark Pera-- here.

Announcement: Tomorrow (Wednesday) at 7:30pm, EDT Rep. Tom Allen (D-ME) will be a guest at Firedoglake, discussing the Iraq occupation on the 5th anniversary of the authorization for the Use of Force which, of course, he opposed-- and still opposes. Come meet this extraordinary congressman, who's running against pathetic rubber stamp Liebermanite Susan Collins.

GOOD NEWS FROM COLORADO: ANGIE! ANGIE! ANGIE!

General Wes Clark campaigning with Angie

There seems to be something that the Inside the Beltway corporate type Democrats-- the non-values careerists-- seemed to have learned from 2006. They're finally paying attention to Howard Dean's 50 State Strategy because... it worked. And what it shows is that Democrats can and dowin in districts that have been abandoned to the Republicans by the clueless non-values careerists who managed, in Terry McAuliffe's time, to grab control of the Democratic Party. Beltway "professional" Democrats like McAuliffe and Rahm Emanuel don't embrace or even understand grassroots Democratic values and they don't know how to fight Republicans. They only know how to fight against progressives and they know how to fight against grassroots Democrats.

They were shocked to see grassroots, non-Insider candidates like Carol Shea-Porter (NH), John Hall, (NY) Jerry McNerney (CA), Nancy Boyda KS), Paul Hodes (NH), and Dave Loebsack (IA) win "Republican" seats that were written off the insiders. And even more shocking was to see how close other grassroots Democrats came to knocking off entrenched Republican incumbents-- with virtually no help from the DCCC. A few examples:

Darcy Burner (WA-08) nearly took out Reichert with less than 7,000 separating the out of over 250,000 cast
Larry Kissell (NC-08) came within 350 votes of beating Hayes
Angie Paccione (CO-04) nearly beat Musgrave with 43% against her 46%
Gary Trauner (WY) held Cubin to a 48/48% virtual tie with only 1,000 votes separating them
Charlie Brown (CA-04) nearly beat Doolittle with 46% against the incumbent's 49%
Victoria Wulsin (OH-2) almost took out the contemptible Mean Jean Schmidt with 49%
Eric Massa (NY-29) almost beat Kuhl with 48%
Phil Kellam (VA-02) came close to beating Drake with 49%
Tessa Hafen (NV-03) almost beat Porter with 47% against his 48%
Linda Stender (NJ-07) came close to beating Ferguson with 48% against his 49%
Dan Maffei (NY-25) came very close to beating Walsh with 49%
Mary Kilroy (OH-15) came within 1,100 votes of beating Pryce

All of these candidates are poised for victories in 2008. But instead of rallying around these and other Democrats who now have high name recognition and a real comfort level with the voters, careerist type Dems, some backed by the very worst elements of Inside the Beltway hackdom think they can waltz into the district and take over where last year's "amateur" challenger left off. Rahm Emanuel and Ellen Tauscher tried that on McNerney in 2006-- after he had come close to beating Pombo in 2004-- and their well-financed "professional" shill was completely trounced by the grassroots. The Emanuel, Tauscher and other Insiders said they appreciated McNerney's energy but that he was too progressive, too anti-war, too non-Establishment. He kicked their candidate's ass from one side of the district to the other and then went on-- regardless of Emanuel's attempt to sabotage his race-- to give progressive, grassroots America one of it's most important and satisfying victories, sending Dick Pombo to a lobbying job with a margin of over 10,000 votes.

Although Emanuel is no longer contaminating the DCCC and Chris Van Hollen has vowed to maintain a hands off policy in terms of primaries, many of our best candidates are facing challenges from dubious Democrats who think it looks easy. One just got a great lesson that she needs to think about carefully. Angie Paccione is beloved of the grassroots in her part of Colorado. She held Musgrave down to under 50% and is capitalizing on her experience to put together an even stronger campaign this year. Ken Salazar is one of the more reactionary senators on the Democratic side of the aisle and his brother, John, in the House isn't any better. Senator Salazar has a staffer, a Betsy Markey, going up against Angie.

Although the Salazar machine is firmly behind her, many Democrats, especially the grassroots variety that nearly won it for Angie last time in the 4th district, are disgusted. Today the second quarter FEC figures came out. Angie raised $112,000. The Salazar Machine candidate raised $36,000. (She also lent her campaign $25,000, a pretty sad statement of non-support from the district.) This will be McNerney vs Filson all over again with Salazar playing the role of Tauscher.

Tomorrow morning we'll have Darcy Burner joining us for a live blog session at Firedoglake at 12 noon Mountain Time (11am PT and 2pm EST). We can hear what she has to say about the ex-Republican that announced today that he's officially announcing on Tuesday (as a Democrat) that he's running against Darcy in the primary. It's a waste of time and a waste of money. Similarly other opportunists who are sniffing around races are pestering Eric Massa and Victoria Wulsin. All 4 of these candidates can win in 2008 and all 4 are on the Blue America ActBlue page (open now).

BLUE AMERICA: ANGIE-- NO ASTERISKS, NO PARENTHESES

Before we welcome Angie Paccione back to Firedoglake today, I want to ask you to humor me for a moment. The video, below, takes 1 minute and 19 seconds to view and it neatly sums up why Blue America is Angie Paccione Country. (Besides, if you don't watch it, you won't understand the title of today's post.)



If you've watched it you understand why more than 800 of us contributed over $15,000 to Angie's campaign last year and why we decided to use our Blue America PAC to place hundreds of radio ads all over Morgan and Yuma counties. You will also understand why the Denver Post urged its readers to vote for her and why I was on the phone to Angie several times after the election asking her to consider running again. A few weeks ago she called me and told me she's decided to go for it, this time with help from part of Ed Perlmutter's winning '06 election team. Here's the archive of her first FDL session.

Today Angie joins us after having won 97,670 votes (43%) against Musgrave's 104,876 (46%) in a district with 170,294 registered Republicans (40%), 145,759 unaffiliated voters (34%) and only 108,642 registered Democrats (25%). Look closely at those numbers! It appears that almost all the registered Democrats turned out for Angie and only 60% of Republicans voted for Musgrave, nearly negating the GOP registration advantage. (Bush won the 4th CD against Kerry with 58%.) It might also be worth bearing in mind that Angie spent $1,951,000 and Musgrave spent $3,212,000. The difference this year is that where Angie was only well known in her own Larimer County in 2006 (which, unlike previous Democrats, she won), this year her name recognition district wide is an astounding 84%. Many incumbents don't have name recognition that high.


It often takes more than one try for a candidate to defeat an incumbent. In 2004 Pombo beat Jerry McNerney 61-39%. Two years later McNerney's grassroots campaign came roaring back and helped make America a better place by taking out Pombo 53- 47% in a Republican district Bush had won with 54%. In 2004, far right lunatic Jim Ryun (KS-02) beat Nancy Boyda 56- 41% and last year Boyda turned the tables on the nutcase, 51- 47%. The DCCC offered McNerney and Boyda no substantive support; they ran grassroots campaigns and the difference in 2 years in both races was name recognition garnered from the previous cycle. I'm certain you follow my drift.

This year, even though Angie is wildly popular among CO-04 Democrats-- especially in Larimer and Boulder counties, where she increased Democrat margins and beat Musgrave-- before Angie can challenge Musgrave again, she has to face some Democrats who have decided to take advantage of the work she and her team have done in the district. One guy, state Senator Brandon Shafer, who was supposedly being touted by Inside-the-Beltway types, and who Angie described to me as "high quality" and "a rising star," quickly got a sense of the district's loyalties and almost immediately bowed out. However, if Washington reactionaries are backing away, local reactionaries aren't. Colorado's horrible right-wing Senator (not Allard, the other one-- Salazar) has dispatched one of his staffers, Betsy Markey, to take on Angie. Salazar has a crappy overall voting record, votes with Republicans to confirm Bush's worst anti-choice judicial nominations, and voted with Republicans for the anti-consumer/anti-worker bankruptcy bill. If Markey reflects his positions she may be better than Musgrave, but not much better.

And Angie? I asked her how we're going to end the occupation of Iraq. "We've got to separate the notion of supporting the troops from the notion of supporting this president's agenda." In 2006 Angie strongly opposed Bush's occupation of Iraq. Two days ago she told me "I'm against this president's agenda for Iraq... and against his agenda for Iran. I supported going into Afghanistan and I think we should have done a better job there. I'd like to ask President Bush about Osama bin-Forgotten."

Locally she says there are several issues that are resonating with the voters. "When it comes to health care, people are ready for a solution. They've had enough. There are nearly 800,000 people in Colorado without health insurance, particularly children and older women. People I meet when I'm campaigning are telling me that they're spending more on medical insurance than on their mortgages!"

Fixing what the Republicans have done to public education is another of Angie's key issues. Makes sense; she was a teacher for over 2 decades. She told me "No Child Left Behind is a hollow soundbyte. An educated population-- with fully funded quality public schooling from kindergarten through college-- is essential for genuine national security in the 21st century."


So Angie's back on the Blue America list and I hope you'll join me in donating some money to her campaign. We're not going to find a better candidate, not anywhere, to help us reclaim our country. Avalon Books sent us a box of the just-released YOUNG J. EDGAR: HOOVER, THE RED SCARE, AND THE ASSAULT ON CIVIL LIBERTIES. Each book has been autographed by author Ken Ackerman and it sells in stores for $28.95. Every Angie donation for $30 or more gets a Blue America thank you with a book (until the box is empty.) Add a cent to your donation if you don't want the book. One more thing, Jacquie is already planning out an aggressive paid-media strategy for CO-04 in '08 so if you want to stick some dough in the Blue America PAC, please don't be shy.