All posts by babaloo

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Relief Turns To Indigestion

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Jerry McNerney clarifies today’s WaPo story in tomorrow’s WaPo: (emphasis added)

Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-Calif.), who made waves when he returned from Iraq by saying he was willing to be more flexible on troop withdrawal timelines, issued a statement to constituents “setting the record straight.”

“I am firmly in favor of withdrawing troops on a timeline that includes both a definite start date and a definite end date,” he wrote on his Web site.

But in an interview yesterday, McNerney made clear his views have shifted since returning from Iraq. He said Democrats should be willing to negotiate with the generals in Iraq over just how much more time they might need. And, he said, Democrats should move beyond their confrontational approach, away from tough-minded, partisan withdrawal resolutions, to be more conciliatory with Republicans who might also be looking for a way out of the war.

“We should sit down with Republicans, see what would be acceptable to them to end the war and present it to the president, start negotiating from the beginning,” he said, adding, “I don’t know what the [Democratic] leadership is thinking. Sometimes they’ve done things that are beyond me.”

Crossposted at The Progressive Connection

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Jerry McNerney Talks About Iraq

Back on July 30, Jerry McNerney, on his way home from a weekend visit to Iraq, held a conference call with reporters. Shocked by the ensuing quotes from the Congressman, I publicly questioned his commitment to the ideals he espoused during his campaign in 2006. Now, the quotes were all over the map, depending on which newspaper you read, but the one that started to show up the most reliably in the following days was from the AP story entitled “Democrats Praise Military Progress:

California Democratic Rep. Jerry McNerney had a different take. After visiting Iraq last month and visiting with Petraeus, McNerney said signs of progress led him to decide he’ll be a little more flexible about when troops should be brought home.

“I’m more willing to work with finding a way forward to accommodate what the generals are saying,” McNerney said.

In that single quote, McNerney seemed to be simultaneously backing off of both a timeline with a concrete ending date AND spouting Republican talking points.

That’s why I was relieved to receive an email from the McNerney campaign today setting the record straight. Here is McNerney’s statement:

I am firmly in favor of withdrawing troops on a timeline that includes both a definite start date and a definite end date (“date certain”) and uses clearly-defined benchmarks. I am not in favor of an “open-ended” timeline for withdrawal, as some members of Congress have proposed recently.

As many foreign policy experts agree, setting a date certain for withdrawal is fundamental to forcing George W. Bush to bring our troops home from Iraq and ensuring the Iraqis step up and defend their own country. That’s why — even as I consider all proposals as a matter of due diligence — I am standing strong on setting a definite redeployment end date (as an example, I recently voted for the “Responsible Redeployment from Iraq Act” to safely draw down our troops over the course of nine months).

More on the flip…

Additionally, McNerney urged his supporters to read last weekend’s op-ed in the New York Times, The War As We Saw It, written by seven returning troop members. Based on their shared on-the-ground experiences, these soldiers were able to offer penetrating insights:

Viewed from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)

The claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere. What soldiers call the “battle space” remains the same, with changes only at the margins. It is crowded with actors who do not fit neatly into boxes: Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, criminals and armed tribes. This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army, which have been trained and armed at United States taxpayers’ expense. […]

Given the situation, it is important not to assess security from an American-centered perspective. The ability of, say, American observers to safely walk down the streets of formerly violent towns is not a resounding indicator of security. What matters is the experience of the local citizenry and the future of our counterinsurgency. When we take this view, we see that a vast majority of Iraqis feel increasingly insecure and view us as an occupation force that has failed to produce normalcy after four years and is increasingly unlikely to do so as we continue to arm each warring side.

Coupling our military strategy to an insistence that the Iraqis meet political benchmarks for reconciliation is also unhelpful. The morass in the government has fueled impatience and confusion while providing no semblance of security to average Iraqis. Leaders are far from arriving at a lasting political settlement. This should not be surprising, since a lasting political solution will not be possible while the military situation remains in constant flux. […]

Political reconciliation in Iraq will occur, but not at our insistence or in ways that meet our benchmarks. It will happen on Iraqi terms when the reality on the battlefield is congruent with that in the political sphere. There will be no magnanimous solutions that please every party the way we expect, and there will be winners and losers. The choice we have left is to decide which side we will take. Trying to please every party in the conflict — as we do now — will only ensure we are hated by all in the long run. […]

In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal.

After wondering just what to make of McNerney’s confusing and seemingly contradictory positions over the last three weeks, it’s a relief to finally have a clear and concise statement of where Jerry McNerney stands on the Iraq occupation. I imagine that all his supporters are grateful for the clarification. If you’d like to comment directly to McNerney, you can post a comment at his blog.

Cross posted at The Progressive Connection

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A Tale of “Shame”

When I first came across this story on Republican Rep. John Campbell’s blog, I was puzzled. (emphasis added)

Last night, Republicans walked off the House Floor after Democrats changed the outcome of a vote after  the final tally had been called. And this was not just any vote. The vote would have barred illegal immigrants from receiving food stamps and subsidized housing. Republicans had just enough votes to pass the motion, and we won the final vote 215-213.

That should have been the end of it. But not under the Pelosi Congress.

After the gavel had fallen, Stockton, California Freshman Democrat Jerry McNerney (CA-11) changed his vote to oppose the motion, and even though the vote was closed, they allowed the outcome to go the other way.

Say what? More on the flip…

Curious to find out more about this rather extraordinary allegation, I did a little searching and came up with a Congressional Quarterly article that gave this description of the events: (emphasis added)

Late Thursday, the Republicans moved from unhappy to irate when a Democratic presiding officer ruled that their motion to shelve the agriculture bill had been defeated, even though as the gavel fell the electronic scoreboard in the chamber blinked a tally of 215 votes for the motion and 213 against it.

House Republicans declared that unless Democrats honored the 215-213 outcome, the GOP would block action on all but two bills – a modification (HR 3356) of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (PL 95-511) and a bill (HR 3311) authorizing up to $250 million to rebuild the collapsed Minneapolis highway bridge.

The GOP motion that touched off the furor would in effect have amended the spending bill (HR 3161) to bar use of funds to employ or provide housing for illegal immigrants. Instead, Democrats plowed ahead, eventually passing the bill by 237-18 on a roll call boycotted by most Republicans. […]

The floor confusion arose when, with the tally tied at 214-214, two politically vulnerable Democrats, Nick Lampson of Texas and Harry E. Mitchell of Arizona, went to the well of the chamber to switch their votes to “no.” The buddy system would prevent Democrats who voted “no” from being targeted as the deciding vote in future campaign ads. Moments later, three Cuban-American Republicans from south Florida, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Mario Diaz-Balart, moved to change their votes to “aye.”

The five vote switches were called out by the House reading clerk. The two Democratic changes put the tally at 212-216. Ros-Lehtinen’s switch made it 213-215. Lincoln Diaz-Balart evened it at 214-214, but a tie vote fails. As the reading clerk called out Mario Diaz-Balart’s new vote, the Speaker Pro Tempore, Rep. Michael R. McNulty, D-N.Y., banged the gavel, apparently unaware that the second Diaz-Balart’s vote had yet to be counted.

McNulty had his eyes on the electronic scoreboard, which still read 214-214. But almost as soon as the gavel came down, the scoreboard registered Mario Diaz-Balart’s vote, pushing the tally to 215-213. The scoreboard showed those numbers and the word “FINAL.”

Within a minute or so, a flurry of post-gavel vote switches by Reps. Zack Space of Ohio, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Jerry McNerney of California – resulted in an official outcome of 212-216. […]

“Shame! Shame!” Republicans chanted across the aisle.

You can watch it for yourself.

Now, I certainly have my own ideas about what transpired with this vote (note that House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer seemed to be running the show for the Democrats and note, also, that it was five “politically vulnerable” freshman Democrats who won in Republican-leaning districts in 2006 who switched their votes at the last minute). Frankly, I don’t like the conclusion that I’ve reached. If anyone reading this has a more charitable interpretation of these events, I’d certainly be interested in hearing all about it.

Cross posted at The Progressive Connection

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Honesty, Integrity & Accountability. Huh.

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(The DCCC announced that they were pleased with McNerney, is this what they have been pushing him to do? – promoted by Julia Rosen)

Back in 2006, when Jerry McNerney was running for Congress in CA-11, he would appear at forums, meetings and fundraisers where he would often be called upon to speak. One of the lines he used often, usually to thundering applause, was “I am a Barbara Boxer Democrat!”  Never once did he say, “I am a Dennis Cardoza Democrat!” I suspect his audiences might have reacted a little more coolly if he had.

And yet his stance on the issues to date has more closely mirrored that of Rep. Dennis Cardoza (CA-18), who is well known for his conservative Blue Dog associations. Why is McNerney making this rightward shift?

Well, I’ve given McNerney the benefit of the doubt over the last seven months, preferring to think that he was getting bad advice from his Chief of Staff, Angela Kouters. I figured that Kouters, who is young, ambitious, inexperienced and thoroughly under the influence of  Inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom, was urging him to take so-called “moderate” positions in an attempt to pander to the DC perception of conservative CA-11 residents.

But it appears that I may have been mistaken. Unfortunately, the news today has brought two separate stories which have led me to the difficult conclusion that Jerry McNerney is not the man he appeared to be. That is to say, it sure seems like he duped many of his strongest supporters.

See why on the flip…

After voting last Thursday against the Hinchey amendment to H.R. 3093, an amendment that would have prevented federal prosecution for medical marijuana usage in the twelve states which have legalized it, he offered this explanation in today’s Sacramento Bee:

McNerney insists he is not a Pelosi clone. Last week, for example, he broke ranks with most California Democrats by voting against an amendment to ban use of federal money to prosecute growers of medicinal marijuana.

“I’m a moderate,” he said.

Well, I hate to break it to the Congressman, but that was not a “moderate” vote. The amendment was co-sponsored by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (CA-46) — yes, you heard me. Jerry McNerney is to the right of Crazy Dana Rohrabacher. If McNerney had bothered to look at the  Field poll done back in 2004, he would realize that Californians statewide support the legalization of medical marijuana by close to a three-quarters majority. Even two-thirds of Republicans support it. Here’s a newsflash to Jerry McNerney. When only 24% of the residents of your state support your position, it’s not moderate. It’s extreme… extreme right-wing.

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But almost as bad as his Hinchey vote is the news coming from Germany today. Rep. McNerney led a bi-partisan delegation of Congressional freshmen to Iraq over the weekend. On his way home from Iraq, McNerney participated in a conference call with reporters during a layover.

From the Stockton Record:

[McNerney] said his conversations convinced him that, at least in Ramadi, the U.S. military was indeed making progress. […]

McNerney said he will be more likely to listen to those who want more time in Iraq.

“If anything, I’m more willing to participate in a give-and-take with that viewpoint than I was before,” he said.

Congress is scheduled to vote on a major defense bill this week that may contain a provision creating a timetable for withdrawal of troops.

From USA Today:

McNerney, the California congressman, also said he saw signs of progress in Ramadi and was impressed by Petraeus, who argued in favor of giving President Bush’s troop surge strategy time to work.

McNerney said he still favors a timeline to get troops out of Iraq — something House leaders may bring to the floor again this week as part of a defense spending bill — but is open to crafting it in a way more favorable to generals’ wishes.

“As long as we start at a certain date I’d be willing to be a little more flexible in terms of when it might end,” McNerney said.

From Josh Richman:

Arriving in Baghdad on a C-130 from Kuwait, he met first with officials including Gen. David Petraeus, whom he said is working very hard and is “very optimistic about what’s happening in the conflict… He’s concerned about being given enough rope to finish the job here.” […]

“We need to put a timetable out there, it needs to make sense,” McNerney added — a plan to bring the troops home, so that the Iraqi government is compelled to unite and take over the task of securing the country. “I think we can work to find a way forward that would be bipartisan, that would accomodate the achievements they have had in the last four or five months.”

And from the Contra Costa Times:

Leading the delegation was Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Calif., who said he saw signs of progress in Ramadi in Anbar province and was impressed by Gen. David Petraeus, President Bush’s top military commander in Iraq, who argued in favor of giving Bush’s troop surge strategy time to work.

McNerney said he still favors a timeline to get troops out of Iraq — something House leaders may bring to the floor again this week as part of a defense spending bill — but is open to being flexible “in terms of when it might end.”


[Update] And in a later AP story from the Fresno Bee:

“I’m more willing to work with finding a way forward to accommodate what the generals are saying,” McNerney told reporters Monday during a conference call from Germany on his way back to the U.S.

I have a hard time figuring out how Jerry McNerney’s latest words and deeds have anything to do with being a “Barbara Boxer Democrat.” I know, I know, it’s better than Richard Pombo. But is this what we all really put our sweat and blood into? How has the reality of Congressman Jerry McNerney differed from what we might have expected from his primary opponent, the DLC-anointed Steve Filson? How do we, as a progressive movement, demand accountability from the candidates that we support? When they turn their backs on us and our issues, do we just shrug our shoulders and settle for scraps? I’m genuinely at a loss. What do you think?

Cross posted at The Progressive Connection

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Jerry McNerney Wants John Cosgrove To Go To Jail

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( – promoted by kid oakland)

Yesterday, Rep. Jerry McNerney voted against Rep. Maurice Hinchey’s amendment to H.R. 3093. The amendment would have prevented the government from enforcing federal drug laws against the medicinal use of marijuana in the twelve states that have legalized it. McNerney made this vote apparently without regard for the fact that Californians overwhelmingly supported Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act of 1996.

The SF Chronicle duly noted McNerney’s explanation for his vote:

McNerney, who alone among the Bay Area’s all-Democratic House delegation voted against the measure, tied marijuana use to other illegal drugs.

“We are facing a drug crisis with meth and other drug use on the rise. Until we get a handle on the crippling drug use in our society, I cannot support the relaxation of current drug policy,” McNerney said in a statement.

“I have spoken to many law enforcement officials concerned about the effect of drug use on our communities, particularly in San Joaquin County. The problem is real. Just yesterday, Stockton police announced a successful illegal drug sweep — in cooperation with other law enforcement agencies — that led to 51 arrests and the seizure of over 12 pounds of illegal substances,” he said.

More about McNerney’s lame excuse on the flip…

The arrests in Stockton are detailed in this Stockton Record article. You can judge for yourself the role that legalized medical marijuana played in this law enforcement action.

Since then, 51 people have been arrested, 17 of them under suspicion of trafficking in illegal drugs. The remaining suspects were arrested on suspicion of various drug, firearms and probation violations, as well as on outstanding warrants.

Agents seized roughly 7.7 pounds of methamphetamine, 2.3 pounds of crack cocaine, 1 pound of marijuana, 3/4 pound of heroin and 3.4 grams of PCP — with a total street value of approximately $400,000, according to the DEA. Agents also seized $32,901 in cash and 19 firearms, including shotguns and assault rifles.

Just in case you’re wondering what the medicinal use of marijuana by cancer patients such as John Cosgrove has to do with gangs in Stockton, I think Bruce Mirken absolutely nailed it in his response: (emphasis added)

Bruce Mirken, communications director for the national Marijuana Policy Project, said McNerney’s statement “deliberately confuses apples and oranges, and insults every California patient struggling to maintain life and dignity in the face of cancer, AIDS, MS, and other horrible illnesses.

“No sane person considers it a ‘relaxation of drug laws’ that physicians are allowed to prescribe methamphetamine, cocaine and morphine, and no one seriously suggests depriving patients who need those drugs of their benefits just because someone else might misuse them,” Mirken said. “This statement reads like an excuse, not a reason, to justify what McNerney thinks is a politically safe vote.”

But that political calculation is wrong, Mirken insisted; three quarters of California voters support the state’s medical marijuana law, “and those who worked and donated money to put McNerney in office will be the most bitterly disillusioned by his betrayal of the most vulnerable Californians.”

Cross posted at The Progressive Connection

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“They Should Be Inundated…”

“… their phones should be ringing off the hooks.”

— Bernie Ward, KGO radio host

Monday night on San Francisco’s KGO-AM810, Bernie Ward sounded off about Jerry McNerney’s vote on the McGovern bill. For those of you who may not be familiar with Bernie, he was an early supporter who hosted McNerney on his radio show, giving him an invaluable megaphone throughout the SF Bay Area.

And I think it’s safe to say that Bernie Ward is not happy with Jerry McNerney’s vote against bringing our troops home from Iraq.

Click here to hear Bernie Ward on Jerry McNerney’s vote on H.R. 2237.

And be prepared. It’s long, and it’s a harsh indictment of McNerney’s lack of courage and integrity.

To quote Bernie Ward, “He needs to hear; he needs to understand that that vote made no sense.”

The Offices of Congressman Jerry McNerney

Stockton Office
2222 Grand Canal Blvd. #7
Stockton, CA 95207
Phone:(209) 476-8552
Fax: (209) 476-8587

Pleasanton Office
5776 Stoneridge Mall Rd. #175
Pleasanton, CA 94588
Phone:(925) 737-0727
Fax: (925) 737-0734

Washington D.C. Office
312 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
Phone:(202) 225-1947
Fax: (202) 225-4060

Cross posted on The Progressive Connection

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Oops! She’s Doing It Again

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Cross posted from The Progressive Connection

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at PhotobucketSeems like it’s about time for Ellen Tauscher to check herself into Interfering Politician Rehab. You might have thought that after last year’s Steve Filson debacle in the CA-11 primary, she’d have gotten the message that Democratic voters are perfectly capable of choosing their own candidates. But nooooo, the woman is out of control.

With Guy Houston being termed out of his AD-15 seat, there are presently five Democrats vying to replace him:

  • retired airline pilot Steve Filson
  • electrician Steve Thomas
  • retired entrepreneur Fred Klaske
  • small businessman Davies Ononiwu and
  • high school principal Chris Van Schaack

So you might look at this group and ask yourself, “Exactly what’s missing from the mix; what more do we need?” And the answer would be — why, it’s the Ellen Tauscher Seal of Approval™. Apparently, Filson has fallen out of favor; I’m guessing that Tauscher feels like he let her down in CA-11, rather than the more obvious alternative: that, just maybe, Democratic voters resent Tauscher’s interference in their elections.

So meet the new, sixth candidate in AD-15, Joan Buchanan. A 17-year member of the school board in San Ramon and generous contributor to Tauscher’s past campaigns, Buchanan appears poised to catapult to front-runner status based on her powerful political connections to Friends of Ellen and her prodigious fundraising potential. Sound eerily familiar?

What is Tauscher thinking? Isn’t there anybody who can stop her before she hurts someone? K-Fed? Anyone?

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Winning Friends And Influencing People

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Cross posted at The Progressive Connection.

In a diary posted at both Calitics and the California Progress Report last week, Josh Grossman of Progressive Punch put forth a treatise on the importance of Bay Area progressives working to spread their message throughout more conservative Democratic enclaves in California’s Central Valley. In particular, he was focused on Stockton:

The fact of the matter is that Blue California is mostly quite blue and Red California is quite red. But there is a thin strip of politically semi-arid but not yet desert land, like the Sahel region just to the south of the Sahara in Africa, which we can call Purple California. This land could be fertile terrain for political progressives, as long as it received a modest irrigation flow of money and political expertise. This land is called Stockton.

With a working class population bolstered by some ancestrally Democratic Okies (though not as many as settled in the southern Valley) during the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s, San Joaquin County was traditionally Democratic – though quite conservative.

Grossman goes on to explain his strategy for spreading the progressive agenda throughout San Joaquin County.

Bay Area progressives need to scour Stockton and link up with indigenous activist groups who A) have their act together, B) are progressive & C) are angry with the right wing pro-developer, pro-big-agribusiness, pro-corporate mentality that’s resulted in the San Joaquin Valley (including San Joaquin County) having a variety of negative social indices more like those of a third world country than those of the Bay Area.

After laying out his proposal for Bay Area progressives to proselytize their less fortunate brethren in the Central Valley, Grossman offers his conclusion:

California’s coastal progressives ignore the Valley at their peril.

To which I say —

No, Josh, you’ve got it dead wrong. California’s coastal progressives patronize the Valley at their peril.

You see, our neighbors to the east are not indigenous sub-Saharan Okies who inhabit a third world setting — to the contrary, they are regular people who are REMARKABLY LIKE YOU AND ME.

In San Joaquin County, the Democratic Party currently enjoys a 2% registration advantage, 42.44%-40.45%.  In 2006, Jerry McNerney ran and won handily with a clear progressive message. Dedicated progressive activists who live in San Joaquin County are hard at work as you read this trying to build organization and infrastructure to recruit and support Democratic candidates at every level of local government. But they don’t need your condescension; they need your physical help. They don’t need Josh Grossman sitting in his study playing Battleship with their county; they need him out walking a freaken precinct (well, actually, given his attitude, maybe not). The point is that Grossman’s kind of haughty approach to progressive Democratic party-building does nothing to help spread our message of inclusion and empowerment; it serves no one but cynical newspaper reporters looking for an angle to exploit.

And none other than Hank Shaw of the Stockton Record pounced on this one:

I knew it had to happen. Jerry McNerney’s win in CD 11 last year has the Berzerkley crowd feeling frisky… Today Berkeley’s Joshua Grossman of Progressive Punch penned his plan for the Bay Area progs to oust the Valleycrats in San Joaquin and remake the local Democratic Party in their own image. […]

Does Grossman think we’re some sort of Banana Republic whose politics can be dictated by Bay Area sophisticates? Wait. Apparently he does, because he’s calling our local Democratic clubs “indigenous,” much like the head-hunters of Borneo no doubt. And don’t forget that kind reference to us being a Third World country.

Ya gotta love inter-regional political fights. It ain’t new, and it ain’t pretty.

Been there, seen this. Only before it was the Christian fundamentalists who attacked the Chamber-of-Commerce Republicans in the 1980s and 1990s. The jihadists won and swung the GOP to the right. That swing of the pendulum appears ready to change direction.

To see it on the Democratic side is, well, interesting from a political observer’s point of view.

As appalling as Josh Grossman’s condescension is, Shaw’s eagerness to label the entire Bay Area progressive community based on the writing of one person isn’t much better. After all, if Josh Grossman speaks for all Bay Area progressives based on a shared zip code and party registration, isn’t it fair to assume that, say, Don Imus speaks for all other white, middle-aged males… like Hank Shaw?

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

UPDATE:  In a comment that he left at The Progressive Connection, Hank Shaw was very gracious:

Me-n-Imus? Ouch. 

Hey Babaloo — thought I’d give you the heads up. I got lots of responses to my last blog post (from all sides, BTW), so I reckon I oughta send you this one.

To speak to the point, did I over-emphasize Grossman’s place in the prog pantheon? Apparently so. It was not intentional, however. Glad to see his views, which, as your other commenter noted are not alien to us in the Valley, are not quite as pervasive as I’d feared.

h.

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McNerney Activist Falls On Hard Times

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(Oh, my! This is terrible. However, we can help by going to The Progressive Connection and helping out one of our own. – promoted by atdleft)

Cross posted at The Progressive Connection

By mid-2005, Jerry McNerney’s second Congressional race against Richard Pombo was shaping up to be a rerun of the first one in 2004. A small core of his earliest supporters was dedicated to McNerney’s campaign in CA-11, but they were struggling to paddle against an increasingly strong current. Ellen Tauscher and the DCCC had introduced their candidate, Steve Filson, into this environment, and many in the district assumed that McNerney’s star (such as it had been) was on the decline. Into this breach stepped a veritable force of nature named Vicki Cosgrove.

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Vicki Cosgrove giving Jerry McNerney a hug as the winning votes

are found in the Alameda County Registrar of Voters’ office at the

end of the recount for
McNerney’s write-in campaign in the 2004
primary.


Vicki, who is almost iconic in Bay Area progressive circles, was and is an ardent DFA supporter; she served as the Northern California Field Representative for the Courage Campaign and as a member of the steering committees of California for Democracy and East Bay for Democracy; additionally, she served as president of the Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club in Berkeley. She knows everything that’s going on, and she knows everybody. In short, Vicki is the East Bay version of Paul Revere. So when Vicki Cosgrove stood up in the fall of 2005 and said, “I’m sticking with Jerry; he’s my guy,” there was a sudden sea change in McNerney’s fortunes.

Vicki introduced her friend Matt to the race, and he started the blog SayNoToPombo. And Matt, in turn told his friends about the race, friends like Eden James and other bloggers like kid oakland and Howie Klein of Down With Tyranny and FireDogLake. A few months later, a reader of SayNoToPombo, “AC,” made some comments that were published on that blog — AJ Carrillo at first thought that Steve Filson was the obvious candidate to back, but after following SNTP, he began to believe that McNerney might have a chance.

And Vicki Cosgrove immediately moved to draw these people in — by December, AJ was managing the campaign; soon Eden was coordinating volunteers and managing online outreach; then Eden brought in Miles Kurland, whose redesign of the JerryMcNerney.org website was a masterpiece of both readability and high-level functionality. In the meantime, Vicki had turned her eye towards fine-tuning the campaign’s message, bringing in Chris Finnie, a local professional copy writer who volunteered her time to polish McNerney’s ideas. And amidst all this activity, Vicki was using her vast social network to draw scores of committed activists throughout the Bay Area into the race — and they, in turn, activated their social networks. Think of Vicki Cosgrove as Jerry McNerney’s fairy godmother — whenever the McNerney campaign needed someone to fill a hole, Vicki pulled out her wand and managed to produce that person.

As much as McNerney’s election was an incredible combination of powerful forces that combined to defeat Richard Pombo, it all would never have happened without Vicki Cosgrove. In the early days, she worked full-time in McNerney’s office on a volunteer basis. Her husband, John, worked two jobs to support their family so that she could fully commit her energies to progressive activism. In the later days of the campaign, Vicki was brought on as a (minimally) paid staffer, handling scheduling for McNerney.

During this time, Vicki and her family continued to sacrifice so that she could devote herself to the campaign. Vicki started having gallbladder attacks during the months leading up to the 2006 election, but she ignored them so that she could see the McNerney race through to completion. In recent months, however, the attacks have become so much of a problem that she finally decided to have surgery to remove her gallbladder. But in the last few weeks, something has happened that pushed her surgery plans aside. Her husband, John, has become suddenly and obviously very ill, losing 40 pounds over the last month. After tests last week disclosed a growth on his pancreas, John’s doctors scheduled a Whipple procedure for April 18. John is expected to be in the hospital for at least 14 days for this surgery, which will remove his gall bladder and portions of his pancreas and duodenum. The surgery is typically followed by a course of radiation and/or chemotherapy. John will obviously be unable to work for a long time to come, and Vicki is unemployed.

Vicki will be applying for unemployment benefits this week, but that is not going to be enough to pay the bills.

So it’s my hope that the progressive community which has been so well-served by Vicki’s tireless efforts can join together and repay her for all she’s done on our behalf. The Progressive Connection is linking to a PayPal account to raise money for the Cosgrove family, to help them in their everyday expenses until they’re able to get back on their feet.

Please donate whatever you can afford — this is our chance to really come together as an activist community and take care of our own. Because if we don’t, who will?

[Note: This diary won’t accept the html for the PayPal button, but you can go to The Progressive Connection to make a donation. Sorry for the inconvenience.]

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McNerney: Don’t Walk On The Grass(roots)

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(babaloo, a contributor to Say No To Pombo, has a new SoapBlox blog, The Progressive Connection, from which this was cross-posted. – promoted by Brian Leubitz)

Stories about Jerry McNerney have been featured prominently in the blogosphere over the last week. First the information came to light that McNerney’s 2008 race has been targeted by Karl Rove; then an ugly attack by the NRCC was launched. Meanwhile, against this background, McNerney’s online staff managed a successful campaign to win a personal fundraising appeal from John Kerry, and McNerney blew past his first quarter fundraising goals.

Based on McNerney’s Congressional record of fully supporting Speaker Pelosi’s agenda, his support for Rep. Lynn Woolsey’s H.R. 508, which would bring the troops home from Iraq within six months, and his leadership on water and energy issues, progressives everywhere have been rejoicing. Well, almost everywhere. You see, all is not quiet on the home front.

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket Back in 2004, a small group of committed activists worked to support Jerry McNerney in his initial race against Richard Pombo. Not very many people, bloggers or non, had heard of McNerney back in those days. But in 2005, as the `06 race started taking shape, that core group of mavens brought more and more new people to the table, and the grassroots/netroots phenomenon of the McNerney campaign began to take form. Even so, right up until the June primary, when McNerney decisively beat the DCCC’s much better funded candidate, Steve Filson, there just weren’t that many people who took McNerney seriously. And even after the primary, the McNerney/Pombo race was routinely considered second tier.  It wasn’t until the last few heady months of the ’06 race that more casual observers began to share the faith in McNerney that had been demonstrated by his core grassroots supporters all along. And, of course, now that he’s a Congressman, everyone has jumped on the bandwagon, basking in the McNerney glow.

But among that early group of mavens who formed the base of McNerney supporters, there is a sinking feeling that something is going hideously wrong. Allow me to make an analogy here — one from high school and one that, if you’ve ever met McNerney, should resonate. Imagine Jerry McNerney in high school.  Now, you know he was not cool; you just know it. He probably hung out with the math geeks and was a member of the chess club. Imagine, if you will, that McNerney’s high school self was suddenly tapped by the Kewl Kidz and included in their activities, becoming totally immersed in their world. And further imagine that once he joined in with the KKs, he stopped talking to his geek friends, other than to ask them for their notes. What do you think the talk would be at the chess club?

Well, substitute Democratic club for chess club, and you’ll pretty much get the drift of this post. McNerney has recently blown off scheduled appearances at local Democratic clubs, while important channels of communication between him and local activists have been slammed shut, and key early supporters have been unceremoniously thrown overboard.

So what’s behind this? Well, frankly, I don’t believe that McNerney is fully aware of the situation and the damage that’s being done to his grassroots support. I lay the blame for this growing problem squarely on his Washington staff. There is a major power play being made for Congressman McNerney by the DC apparatchiks, starting with his chief of staff, a former DCCC employee by the name of Angela Kouters. Kouters is very young and ambitious — she hit the DC insider track straight out of college in 2000. She’s also very inexperienced, particularly for the powerful role that she’s assumed, and easily threatened by any criticism of her abilities. So apparently she’s figured out that the best way to tamp down any challenges to her competence is to simply put a wall so high and so impermeable around McNerney that no criticism of her can reach him. And her accomplice in this is McNerney spokesman Andy Stone, whose less-than-stellar work on the website for the infamously bad 2006 Angelides campaign makes him equally vulnerable to criticism. Together Kouters and Stone have effectively sequestered McNerney from his grassroots/netroots supporters, positioning themselves as the sole gatekeepers to the Congressman.

But back home, the rumblings and grumblings are loud and clear to anyone who bothers to listen. The real question is whether Jerry McNerney is going to hear them and move to repair relations with the local grassroots. If he doesn’t make some changes and put his DC staff in its proper place soon, he may be sadly surprised in 2008 when his old chess club friends suddenly find more important things to do.