Nothing earth-shattering here, just a few peculiar things I’ve noticed lately.
- The ongoing campaign to get David Koch booted off of local public broadcasting powerhouse WGBH’s board of directors has taken a very peculiar twist: Harper’s published an essay entitled “PBS self-destructs,” which discussed the campaign and is apparently critical of Koch’s relationship to public television (I can’t say for sure, as the essay is available only to Harper’s subscribers). In response, and in what sure looks like an act of retaliation, PBS yanked a bunch of ads that were scheduled to run in upcoming issues of Harper’s. The publisher of Harper’s told the NY Post, “I have to say I am shocked…. You’d think PBS would be above that kind of tit-for-tat mentality.” Indeed you would … but you’d be wrong.I wonder if Jim & Margery will find any time in their newly-expanded 3-hour (!!) daily yak-fest on WGBH radio to talk about this. Not holding my breath.
- A recent press release from Martha Coakley’s campaign said, at the bottom,
Copyright © 2014 The Martha Coakley Committee, All rights reserved.
Really? Copyright protection on a press release? I’m all for people looking after their legal rights, but that seems a bit much.
- If your inbox resembles mine, it’s chock-full of desperate fundraising emails from candidates not only around Massachusetts, but around the country. Here’s an odd thing I’ve noticed in several of them: when they tell you how much money or how many donations they desperately need, they often do it using the letter “O,” not the number “0.” In other words, when Kay Hagan (running for reelection to the US Senate in North Carolina) tells me she wants to record ninety thousand donors before the end of September, she asks whether I can chip in to get her to “9O,OOO grassroots supporters,” not “90,000 grassroots supporters.” I’d love to know why that is.
- And speaking of desperate fundraising emails, Ed Markey is still emailing me just about every day about a race that nobody in America thinks is seriously contested. One of his recent emails hilariously proclaimed the following:
I know that many of you have been working on this race for months now. I know it’s tiring, and I know you’re getting tired of these emails — believe me, I’d love to not have to send them.
Guess what, Ed: you don’t have to send them. You could not raise a single dollar between now and election day, and you’d still beat Brian what’s-his-name by 25 points. I’ve said this many times before, and I’ll say it again: please, Ed, if you’re going to email us this often, raise some money for someone other than yourself. Jeanne Shaheen up in NH could use the help. So could Tom Udall in NM, or Al Franken in MN, or the aforementioned Kay Hagan in NC. Those are races where a few extra bucks could actually matter. Yours isn’t. To paraphrase, I know you’re getting tired of my saying this — believe me, I’d love to not have to keep saying it.
(I appreciate the collection of short bits, here.) It’s fair to critique our own candidates, if only on these admittedly nit-picky points.
My bet is either
(a) it typesets better, or more likely IMO,
(b) it’s better at getting past spam filters.
I don’t have evidence or much theory behind this; it’s just a hunch.
Yesterday I saw a bumper sticker that said “Evan Falchuk, Independent for Governor.”
He isn’t — he’s running as a “United Independent Party” ticket, and seeking official state recognition for his party.
I hate little political lies like this. In his Youtube ads, he says the party’s name. But it should be prominent everywhere. If you’re not an actual independent, you shouldn’t run as an independent.
I know, small potatoes, and he won’t win. But he could easily get 5%, and then we have a new, official state party, on less than candid premises. It stinks.
On the ballot he will be listed as such. If his party does get statewide recognition, than he would be dishonest proclaiming himself as an ‘independent’ rather than a UIPer.
But they ran as Greens.
By definition, he is not an independent. He is running under a party banner.
1) He isn’t running under a recognized party banner
He will appear listed on the ballot as an ‘independent’ so this is technically true
2) Were his party to get recognized, wouldn’t we call him an Independent?
A Capital I independent like Perot who had the Independent Party nomination for a time (before changing it to Reform party for 96′). We are technically members of the Democratic Party and are thus Democrats, thus a member of the UIP would be an Independent. This does not imply that the Democrat is opposed to our republican form of government nor that a Republican is against a democracy. I trust voters to make that distinction.
3) ‘Most’ independents sound like him
With the fiscal conservative, socially liberal mix. Our own CMD is an independent who fits that mold, as did most Perot voters, as do Senator Angus King and senate candidate Greg Orman in KS. Bernie Sanders is an independent, but most people know he is clearly a ‘social democrat’ but couldn’t run under that label. Several friends parents are active in the Socialist Workers Party but are registered as unenrolled in MA.
I don’t see the offense, I don’t see him misleading any voters who wouldn’t have been attracted to his brand of politics in the first place.
Say what? Are you talking about the ballot?
You seem to be twisting a lot of logic knots to justify this. In my view, he’s just lying because it’s more convenient for him, and because it BROADENS his appeal.
Granted his appeal is limited, but in a razor-thin race, his role looms.
Furthermore, I stand by my record of whacking politicians when they outright lie, like Hillary Clinton (the sniper fire) and Cory Booker (the homeless guy anecdote). The truth will set us free. The truth in this case could not be simpler; if he’s building a party, no one should have any doubt about that.
On the actual ballot, he is not listed as a member of a recognized party but as an independent. He isn’t lying about his aims of getting his party recognized,which he frequently mentions in interviews and on the trail and is information freely available and clearly visible on his website. Moreover, what would we call a member of the United Independent Party if not an Independent? It’s what Perot’s party was called between the 92′ and 96′ campaigns along with its members and candidates. Is his ideology, pox on both houses rhetoric, paen to centrism and technocratic problem solving not the very thing ‘independents’ from Bloomberg to King to Perot to Orman to those unity 08 or America Elect fellas keep talking about?
Is it ok for Bernie Sanders to call himself an independent, which he technically is, even though he is really a social democrat?
Either way, this guy isn’t going to win nor will his party get access, so what’s the big deal? It’s not an intentional misleading, what else would you want him to call himself?
There is a distinction between
I raised this issue knowing that some people will think I’m making too much of it.
No, it’s not OK.
It IS an intentional misleading. What, they couldn’t fit “United Independent Party” on a bumper sticker?
True independents are truly independent, and avoid party politics. Evan Falchuck is engaged in party building. That’s a HUGE difference. It’s only a small lie because he’s polling so low. I’ll wager that some of his voters would not vote for him if they knew he was building a third party. (Yes they could easily find out — but they might think twice about their protest vote.)
That Herald poll you wrote about shows 8% undecided. If Falchuk gets 5%, the United Independent Party becomes a permanent part of the Massachusetts landscape, with all that that entails. I have no problem with that, if it’s done honestly. That does not seem to be the case.
I think he says the ‘unenrolled’ out numbering both parties in registration and thought ‘I will make a party for them’, one that he feels would attract them-which we’ve all been told is the fiscal con/social lib mix that Broder once swooned over. That seemed to be the tenor of his website and interview with our own Massmarrier, and he is up front about building a party for independents. I would agree that it would be nice if we had true independents like Edmund Burke or George Washington (though even they aligned with one of the two parties in their day more than the other).
The reality, which he discussed at length in his interview, is that the party status would give him the opportunity to get himself and like minded centrist/independent minded candidates on the ballot. Its what the Moderate Party in RI attempted to do, what Elliot Cutler and Angus King have done in Maine, and what the Modern Whigs tried to do as well. The signature requirement would be much lower and they would actually be able to raise more funds as a party than they would just running as independents.
I think his idea is to give independent voters and candidates the benefits that official party status would designate. Its sort of the whole point of his campaign, so I really don’t consider it a ‘lie’ or ‘misleading’, at least in comparison to Hillary and Cory making things up out of thin air. Obviously, party names are somewhat misleading to begin with. There are plenty of Democrats on Beacon Hill utterly terrified of democracy, plenty of Republicans who don’t like checks on executive power (unless a black man is in the White House, when they suddenly get downright Madisonian), and I would argue that George Wallace was neither a true American nor an independent thinker when he invented and ran on the AIP</em> line in 68′.
…that he founded the United Independent Party. He is independent for legal purposes since he gets to follow the non-party deadlines for various filings rather than the party deadlines.
Charlie Baker is trying to tell me he’s an independent candidate as well.
One of my favorite lines is “If you’ve saved your payment information, your donation will go through immediately.” It’s as though, in the 30 seconds that it will take you to re-input the information, the Republicans will have already won.
particularly odd.
Like David, I’m on email lists across the country. To date my favorite email was from Kay Hagan on September 13th. The subject line –
“We Need Money”
Points for directness.
If you’d have asked me three months ago if I thought Hagan and Pryor or Landreiu and Braley had the better shot at keeping their seats, I would’ve said Hagan and Pryor are goners for sure. Looks like it will go the other way. Similarly, I’d have said Nunn would’ve been a better favorite than Alison, but Grimes is still in it while Nunn is slipping out of reach. Begich having an easier time than Udall, its a strange cycle. And then there is the whole Greg Orman thing to consider, a real life Mr. Sterling on the horizon.
especially because voter turnout in NC is topsy turvy. It’s not a POTUS year, a black citizen isn’t at the top of the ballot, and the North Carolina GOP has passed laws to restrict voting that are currently in the courts and may or may not be rolled out in time for November 2014.
Hagan still needs help. Then again, so does Team Dem candidates in Iowa and Alaska and Colorado — as well as Arkansas and Louisiana. Kentucky and Georgia are bigger stretches, and like North Carolina, we have leads that aren’t insurmountable in Michigan and New Hamster.
Thing is, NC, NH, and MI aren’t enough. To hold the senate, we need some of those other states. If you’re going to donate, you better do so quickly to make that money useful. The September fundraising numbers need your dollars (unlike Markey).
But she is definitely looking better than she was three months ago, while Landrieu and Braley are looking a lot worse.
Obviously, they all need our help, its a tough year, and its important we back their effort to deny McConnell the Majority Leadership he craves. Particularly since we may have an AG vacancy, and possibly future SCOTUS vacancies to deal with in the last few years of the Obama administration.