Dear BMG,
We have a crisis on our hands in Massachusetts.
Every day as a doctor in the emergency room, I see that people are struggling. They are struggling to find affordable health care. They are struggling to find good, sustainable jobs. They are struggling to find some hope of recovery in a recession that is weighted on the backs of working families and has taken from those who already have the least.
You met me recently through a Left Ahead podcast and a follow-up blog post on BMG. I’m the candidate running for the State Senate seat formerly held by Scott Brown who believes that progressive values can make real, meaningful change in the Commonwealth. Now is not the time to disown government, but to make it work better for us.
With this election, we have the opportunity to show Massachusetts – and symbolically, the nation – that our progressive values of affordable, quality health care, sustainable job growth, and a fair, solid public education belong in crucial debates regarding our future. But, I need your help to make this happen.
Here are some of the best ways you can help the campaign today:
1. Contribute to our campaign at www.petersmulowitz.com. Then, join Act Blue and help us continue to raise the money needed to get our message out by asking your friends, family, and colleagues to donate along with you (www.actblue.com)
2. Host a phone from home party from your house with you and your friends to identify supporters.
3. Come join us knocking on doors and volunteer on primary day, Tuesday, April 13th.
If you can do any of the above, please contact our campaign today at smulowitzforsenate@gmail.com or 781.444.0881.
Your support today brings us one step closer to putting a progressive Democrat in the State House. The stakes are high. With just under five weeks left until the Democratic Primary, we must come together and not lose this chance.
And as always, if you have any questions or want to find out other ways to get involved, please visit www.petersmulowitz.com.
Thank you so much,
Peter Smulowitz
Candidate for State Senate
Norfolk, Bristol, and Middlesex
http://petersmulowitz.com
http://www.actblue.com/entity/…
You mean The People’s Seat!!
Thank you for throwing your stethoscope into the ring. My personal opinion that voters are best served, and elected officials best held accountable, by contested elections at both the primary and general level.
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p>Something you apparently said at the Needham caucus is causing consternation among democratic voters around town (including myself), so I wanted get your side of the story and thought you might value the opportunity to address it publicly. The story is (and this is from multiple people there, some of whom were neutral prior to the caucus) that when the time came for candidates to speak at the caucus you said that if your were to make it to the general, you would definitely not take a three week Caribbean vacation like Martha Coakley did. Did you really say that as part of your remarks?
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p>While it’s more than fair the criticize Martha’s campaign for many things including not coming across as active enough for much of the campaign, IMHO this Martha taking a multiple weeks long Caribbean vacation thing is basically a right-wing smear along the lines of the Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet thing- a ridiculous exaggeration, loosely based on a kernel of reality, but presented as fact. And no one who wants to be a dem leader should be letting claims like this go unchallenged- much less actually supporting these damaging falsehoods by spreading them themselves at a Democratic caucus.
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p>Frankly, I hope there is a misunderstanding or misinterpretation of what was said. Look forward to hearing your side of it.
I don’t know, this seems like pretty thin-skinned stuff here.
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p>I certainly have made my own complaints about Coakley’s ATROCIOUS campaign–vacationing is the least of it.
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p>If we can’t admit our failures as Democrats–being out of touch and doing a crappy campaign–then we deserve to keep losing.
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p>Whether or not Smulowitz said those things I have no idea. I just can’t really fathom why this would be a point of consternation. What am I missing?
I definitely agree we should learn from our mistakes, and there are more than enough real things to critique that campaign for- without having to resort to parroting false republican smears. If you google it, or listened to the radio during the election, you know that this particular wild exaggeration about Martha has been portrayed as reality far and wide (always without sourcing, of course). Just saying you won’t go to the Caribbean for half the election is not really constructive criticism anyway, it’s obvious and it’s piling on.
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p>I think part of the cause of consternation at this incident is that, regardless of how hard Martha worked, a lot of people did work hard on that election (especially people who go to the caucus) and at the time of the caucus the loss was still very raw. Making bombastic, insulting, and false claims about a candidate that people had just busted their butts for is clearly not the best way to win friends and influence people. It shouldn’t really be that surprising that repeating a GOP smear of a freshly defeated Democratic candidate at the Democratic caucus bothered some people.
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p>That said, maybe people were being touchy and the remark was misinterpreted which is why I thought it should be addressed.
So I can’t say what’s what. I’m not clear from your post, were you at the caucus?
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p>Arguing about what someone might have said and what he or she meant by it and whether or not it’s offensive or inoffensive feels really really overly sensitive. In fact, it even seems to me like someone’s trying to manufacture a controversy.
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p>Feelings can be raw. I busted my ass for Martha and I am the HUGEST critic. If I were in that room and I heard that comment, I would probably understand it as an acknowledgment of running a different kind of campaign. I’m a sarcastic person and I would probably say something exactly like that.
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p>I don’t know. I didn’t realize it’s a republican smear that Martha campaigned terribly.
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p>In fact, I think that Republicans are goign out of their way to DOWNPLAY Martha’s disastrous campaign choices, as it delegitimizes Brown’s win (if a lot of it is b/c she sucked as a campaigner, then maybe it’s NOT all about his awesome truck and rippling abs).
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p>You certainly pique my interest, but in general I have very very VERY little patience with that kind of “My STARS!” parsing he said she said.
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p>I hear you that maybe it really was a huge gaffe. I don’t know. I am just more inclined to believe it’s people making hay, mountains/molehill, and campaigning with pettiness.
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p>But I’m incredibly cynical in addition to being very sarcastic and generally politically incorrect when it comes to saying the right thing.
Like I said, I heard the same story from a bunch who were and people have been talking about it.
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p>Saying Martha’s campaign was bad is not a repub smear, but implying that she was working on her tan and sipping pina coladas for weeks of it is.
Doesn’t it make you feel silly to talk about this like it’s serious and important?
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p>I’m embarrassed that Im party to extending the conversation.
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p>(And I’m still unclear: did Martha go on vacation during the campaign or not?!!)
It was a one-week vacation.
The general confusion displayed here on the veracity this ridiculous claim is indicative of the perniciousness and potency of this particular smear, and why it is important to be called out. Of course she didn’t go on a freakin’ three week Carabbean vacation! As far I can tell, the whole Martha vacation meme started with this Herald article, and Scott Brown accusing her of being “on vacation” at a time when she had only two public events in the six days between Christmas and New Year. Just pretend the figurative is literal, drop in a humorous false detail like “Caribbean”, then rinse, lather, and repeat. That is how false history is made, and dems lose elections. If Al Gore had a nickel for every time a mainstream publication published or dem leaning person chuckled at the ridiculous lie that he claimed to have invented the internet, he would have enough money the cover the moon with wind farms. The Martha/Caribbean vacation meme is the exact same phenomenon, just on a smaller scale.
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p>Not only is it worth discussing, it is absolutely essential that this process be understood and dems stop buying into this crap.
…are you actually saying she didn’t go on vacation?!
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p>Two people have said she did. You say, “NO actually”…
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p>So how is it you know that Martha didn’t go on vacation? Im’ really stymied here. If indeed it’s a complete media fabrication, then I certainly wasn’t aware of that, and as a someone who did a lot of 5-stages-of-grief reading of the interwebs after Jan 19, I have not seen one thing saying that that was a false statement. Except for you.
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p>???
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p>Maybe it’s not the common knowledge you seem to think it is. If it’s a Republican fabrication, I want to know that. But obviously I don’t already know that, and two other people don’t already know that…
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p>So I wonder if instead of taking him to task on a gaffe in front of peers (and I hear that Smulowitz busted HIS ass for Coakley, too), you might make a different case, one that corrects the record (and I’m still skeptical, but willing to say, “You’re right!” with some sourcing!) w/o “attacking” for supposed “attacking”.
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p>I mean, isn’t raving about whether or not a candidate put his foot in his mouth about a disastrous campaigner EXACTLY as bad as you are saying the “Martha went on vacation” meme is???
The “no, actually” was in answer to your do I feel silly about talking this topic question (weird question because you evidently want to keep talking about it). It’s certainly possible Martha took an evening or even a day off during the campaign…if you and Scott Brown want to call that a “vacation,” go ahead. But, the notion that she spent much of Dec and Jan literally in the Caribbean is absurd- and dems who want to win in the future should stand up to that bs. Your insistence that a negative be proved before standing up to what has become conventional wisdom is merely evidence of the difficulty in fighting smears like this.
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p>And no, it’s not at all the same thing that I’m doing by asking the candidate about it directly, isn’t that kind of stuff what this place is for and why candidates post here? This has become an issue in dem circles around Needham. I do have some concerns (which I did not hide), but I recognize that it’s a situation with nuance and things could have been misinterpreted by the people who were there- I’m more than willing & eager to hear a clarification if the good doctor wants to make one. If anything, it’s a favor to him to bring it up and try to bring it head, rather than let things fester and smolder until the truth is completely unrecoverable. Is directly asking about a concern to harsh or something? Or is this just a bulletin board for press releases & statements (with no feedback) whenever candidates want to make them?
I think it’s fine to ask questions. I just think some questions read as really silly.
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p>Question–are the people for whom this is an issue openly supporting someone else? I’m still suspicious that this whole line of consternation is an effort to undermine by making a mountain out of a mole-hill. Knowing whether or not the “consternated” are already actively campaigning for someone else might clear that up for me.
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p>I’m still not going to stop saying that Martha Coakley ran a disastrous campaign and the fact that she may have gone on a vacation for two days or one week is hardly the worst of what she did. If I were her, I’d prefer that I talked about her vacationing than all the other mistakes she made (like, run a ground campaign and refuse to debate/engage), which were much worse and true.
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p>I guess I’m feeling annoyed here, partly b/c Martha doesn’t need to be rehabilitated. It doesn’t matter if she went to the Cape or the Caribbean, if she went on vacation or didn’t, if it was for a week or 2 days. Her campaign sucked. Maybe going on vacation (or not) was the very very very least of it.
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p>And if a false (or is it true? no one knows!) meme that she went on vacation keeps new candidates like Smulowitz from taking the electorate for granted and getting out there and actually running a grassroots campaign, then I’m all for it!!
let me apologize; I have ended up venting frustration at you as a proxy for Martha and her shitty, shitty campaign.
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p>I hope you get a response to your original query.
No worries, Apricot. I understand where you were coming from.
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p>Hope I get an answer too, a little surprised I haven’t yet.
DID Martha go on vacation?
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p>Has this been shown to be untrue? I’m confused.
For two days, to the Cape (not the carribean). Those days were Christmas eve and Christmas.
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p>This is what Martha herself said at her thank-you party for volunteers.
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p>Look, the issue is not whether or not Martha took two days off from the trail. It’s that when she WAS on the trail, she and the campaign weren’t doing enough of what needed to be done. I think that much is clear.
Yeah, not getting it done. That camnpaign was batshit bad. Let’s talk about Raw.