Blue Mass Group

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Changing Congress one official at a time

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I offer this simple recipe for disappointed Democrats who are dismayed at the current state of our nation and government and who despair about how to change things.

Here’s the recipe for one candidate and one issue:

  1. Identify a specific elected official whose vote on a specific issue you want to change. Resist the temptation to paint with a broad brush — be specific. One elected official. One vote.
  2. Examine the constituency of that official as it pertains to that vote. Use reliable current polling with multiple sources if possible. If it’s a Senator, look statewide. If it’s a Representative, look at their district. Be specific. The opinion of Somerville voters is irrelevant to a Congressional race in North Adams.
  3. Ask if the official is in line with the opinion of their voters:
    • If yes: Change the opinion of their voters. Use media, door-knockers, whatever. Your task is to change the voters that your chosen official represents.
    • If no: Change the official. Aggressively identify and promote an alternative candidate who shares your position. Use media spots that challenge the official: “Why do you vote against the people you represent?”.

If you choose to target a candidate, then pick the top five or six issues that you care about, and gather the data you’ll need at step three for those five or six issues.

Resist the temptation to pick insulting names or let yourself be lured into lazy shortcuts like “because they’re a jerk”.

Most elected Democrats at the national level tend to be pragmatic, and this recipe is an effective way to use that pragmatism.

If you aren’t able to perform this recipe yourself, then find people and groups that will do it on your behalf. It is not difficult to form questions that help address each of the stages. If a particular group doesn’t have specific and believable answers to those questions — and particularly if they are unable or unwilling to back them up with data — then find another group.

Most of all, be PATIENT. This takes time. We aren’t going to solve this in one, two, or five election cycles.

The changes we’re talking about take generations and even lifetimes. Just ask an old-timer who remembers when America’s right-wing was a fringe group — 1964 is a good starting point.

MA Should Follow Boston and Maine, Divest from Fossil Fuels

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Today, Michelle Wu signed a measure into law for the first time as mayor of Boston. The measure is to divest city funds from the fossil fuel industry. This is an astronomical move for a city like Boston and will create the groundwork for many cities nationwide to do the same. Not only will it divest from fossil fuels, but it will from tobacco and prisons as well. Earlier this year, the state of Maine passed similar legislation to divest their state pension fund from fossil fuels. The state of Massachusetts as a whole, however, has not been nearly as proactive.

Despite being leaders in many ways, Massachusetts as a state (or commonwealth) has failed to lead in the matter of divesting from fossil fuels. In this instance, we should follow the path that Maine and now Boston set this year by divesting our $73 billion pension fund from fossil fuel companies.

According to the International Energy Agency we need to leave 80% of the world’s fossil fuels unburned to achieve our goals of keeping the world’s warming under 3.6 degrees fahrenheit. We’ve seen rising sea levels, historic flooding, fires burning the west, and even storms ravaging states like Iowa. The time for Massachusetts to take more action was yesterday.

Financially speaking, this has never made more sense. With the Biden administration determined to be progressive with the environment and rising pressure from the public, the time would be now to move money in pension funds from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Forbes has even recently reported that yields from renewable energy investments more than double that of fossil fuels.

Having a Republican Governor in Charlie Baker certainly doesn’t help the matter. With 2022 approaching, it is time for Massachusetts Democrats to prove they aren’t just NIMBY liberals. We must mobilize around Democratic candidates who will take bold action on fighting climate change, our state and planet cannot wait.

The House and Senate (collectively) are no saints on the matter, though. Democrats have had a veto-proof majority in the capital for years now yet have failed to act. There certainly have been Senators and Representatives willing to fight for bold legislation, but the two chambers collectively have failed to do so. So while we should be fighting for a Democratic Governor who will be bold, we should also be unafraid to primary anyone in the Senate and House who is unwilling to take action.

The earth is at a breaking point. I know that sounds like hyperbole, but it is not. We need to move away from fossil fuels immediately, and Massachusetts needs to be a part of that change.

Let’s call it “Retail Medical Care”.

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The Right consistently rails against any sort of Universal Single Payer system as socialized medicine  and of course putting the government between you and your doctor.

Here’s an idea:  Let’s refer to our current health care / health insurance system as “Retail Medical Care”. 

Further, no one enjoys the retail practice of buying a car and having the sales rep tell you they have to Talk with their Manager  before they can tell you how much the car is going to cost.

No one likes to pay retail.  No one likes the hassle of shady sales tactics.

If I am running for office and if USP is a key part of my campaign, I’m running a “Slice of Life” style ad, you know, like all the ads for pharmaceutical drugs.

A doctor’s office with a middle aged couple sitting on the other side of the doctor’s desk.
The Announcer says “Are you tired of dealing with Retail Medical Care?”, as the couple and doctor speak:

Husband, holding his wife’s hand, both with a worried look: “So Doctor, how much is this operation going to cost, with deductibles, co-pays, and prescription drugs?”

Doctor, in a plaid sport jacket, loud tie, and slicked back hair:  “Well, we won’t know until I talk to your insurance company, the hospital, a few specialists who might not be in network, but I’ll do the best I can for you, just tell me how much you are willing to spend, sign here, and I go talk to all those managers”.

Wife looks at husband, tear in her eye, and says, “I just hate this part of being sick, it’s like buying car but we’re talking about my life.”

Somerville Mayor-elect Katjana Ballantyne shows why I support her

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In a recent WBUR interview, Mayor-elect Katjana Ballantine shows why I like her so much.

On affordable housing in Somerville, a dense and diverse city of immigrants, and the idea of lifting the state’s moratorium on rent control:

I think that we need to use every tool possible in Somerville to create more affordable housing that’s using financing tools, that’s using zoning tools, that’s using incentives to developers to build more affordable housing.

But you know, at the at the end of the day, when it comes to rent control, the state law doesn’t allow us that option. So we need to work with our state delegation to try to do something for that. If the state makes that change, then we have to make sure that renters, owners who care about keeping diversity in our community and preventing displacement are at the table to figure out what’s the best way to move forward.

On COVID recovery, small businesses and what local workers need:

On COVID recovery, we need to help small businesses. We need to help families to recover from this, and we need to help making sure that our education system, our schools, are able to to move forward. And I think they’re all interlocked.

I was supportive of the small business relief program that Somerville put together. I was supportive of funding $5 million to create a gap between what the federal government was doing with relief and what we could do. Moving forward, I would say it’s deferring and forgiving the cost of municipal utilities or licensing or permitting taxes.

It’s extending and enhancing the relief funds to include flexible and forgivable financing options and additional funds. It’s giving help to small businesses to apply for SBA loans.

We need to use our ability to market our community and remind people who are here to shop locally so that can stimulate the economy. And then, you know, it’s constantly talking with our small businesses. It’s asking them, what are they seeing? Are they seeing some recovery? What kind of technical assistance do they feel they need? And what kinds of support? We’re all in this together, and we should be working together to find the solution.

It’s a great interview and I invite you to read/view it.

Virginia

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Terry McAuliffe was co-chairman of President bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign, chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 2001 to 2005, and chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 208 presidential campaign…and he just got spanked and shellacked in the Virginia’s governor’s race.

Can we please run genuine, working class, of the people, honest to goodness Democrats, not Democrats sympathetic to Republican values, and hold onto the house and senate in 2022?

Or should we just give up now and save our political donation dollars?

Election day in Somerville

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Today, Somerville will elect a new mayor for the first time in eighteen years.

We also choose four at-large city councilors, and in my precinct (Ward 5, Precinct 2) a city councilor to replace the retiring incumbent.

I’m writing this to observe that I’ve been put off by the very aggressive and, in my view, misleading (at best) tactics of several local organizations that self-identify as part of the “Defund” movement. So far as I can tell, these groups are the Democratic counterpart to the Tea Party movement that kicked off the GOP death-spiral into its current white supremacist dysfunction.

In the first round of campaigning last summer, it apparently became crystal clear that an overwhelmingly large portion of Somerville voters categorically rejected the “Defund the police” item that was explicitly highlighted as a top-level bullet in the first generation of campaign flyers. The response of nearly all candidates on “the slate” was to revise their literature and sloganeering to obscure their position — while remaining committed to the premise of that bullet.

Whatever may be true at a national level and in some cities and states, I see no evidence that the Somerville Police Department is guilty of any of the various behaviors that motivate the “Defund” movement. To the contrary, the Somerville Police Department is doing everything it can to be a model law enforcement agency. Current city councilors tell me that the largest discretionary item in the Police Department budget — and therefore at the top of the list to cut if demanded by the city council — is the Spanish Language translators program.

An immediate practical effect, in Somerville, of the “defund” agenda is to reduce Spanish Language translation resources in Somerville.

I’ve been discussing various matters like this with all the candidates this year — I think I’ve met with or spoken with every candidate at least once. The interactions I’ve had with candidates on the “slate” promoted by these groups remind me most strongly of discussions I’ve had with men and women pursuing ordination with the the Episcopal church. The various bullets are treated as articles of faith that each candidate “interprets” to fit themselves and their immediate audience. I find the entire experience creepy.

The candidates that I like, contributed to, and voted for spoke candidly, directly, and frankly about what can and cannot be done in Somerville right now by the city government we elect today. They spoke from first-hand experience with city council meetings and from familiarity with workings of city government. In my several decades of Massachusetts experience, I have watched skilled professional politicians make mincemeat of sincere, eager, and idealistic town meeting members who are unfamiliar with the nitty-gritty how cities and towns are actually run.

The election results from Somerville are more important to me than any of the several elections that will on the networks all night tonight.

I hope that the voters in Somerville reject the demagoguery of the several “defund” movements in favor of real people with real ideas and real experience. Oh — and by the way — of the six votes I cast today (one for Mayor, four for councilor-at-large, and one for Ward five councilor), five were for women.

More Posts from this Category

McCarthy’s Demogoguery

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Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy says in two adjacent sentences that: 1. Defunding of police has destroyed American cities; 2. That the first time he heard the idea and term of “defunding the police” was last year in … [Read more...]

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