West Virginia Blue
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Nick Casey the Chairman of the West Virginia Democratic Party sent out the following email to remind folks about the fundraiser for John Unger this coming Wednesday...
Just wanted to drop you a note to remind you about the event for John Unger- who is running for Congress in the Second District here in West Virginia. It will held on Wednesday - September 19th between 7:00 pm and and 8:30 at Appalachian Power Park here in Charleston. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recruited State Senator Unger to run because he wins elections. We hope you'll come out and keep his streak alive! If you're not able to come, but would like to help - you can contribute by clicking here (www.ungerforcongress.org) or by mailing a donation to: Unger for Congress PO Box 11530 Charleston, WV 25339 The maximum you can send is $2,300 per person - but any amount helps! Hope to see you there! Nick Casey - Chairman West Virginia Democratic Party
ANOTHER GOP PRESIDENTIAL VISIT,
ANOTHER STANCE ON THE ISSUES
-Former Massachusetts Governor Continues Practice of Flip-Flopping-
CHARLESTON, WV - With smooth-talking Mitt Romney making his way to the Mountain State today, the Chairman of the West Virginia Democratic Party warned fellow West Virginians to take the former Massachusetts governor's views on the issues with a grain of salt.
"Mitt Romney will be here on `Governor's Day' at the West Virginia State Fair, which leaves
me curious - will we see Mitt Romney the Governor or Mitt Romney the presidential
candidate?" questioned Nick Casey, Chairman of the West Virginia Democratic Party.
As Governor of Massachusetts, Romney campaigned as a pro-choice, anti-gun Republican in the
Bay State. Now, as he tries to woo conservative voters for the 2008 race for president, Romney
is changing his stance on those issues.
In addition, Romney has changed his tune on immigration reform. According to the Lowell Sun
(3/30/2006), "I don't believe in rounding up 11 million people and forcing them at gunpoint from
our country, Romney said."
However, he told ABC's `This Week' (2/18/2007) that "Those people who are here illegally
should not get any benefit by being here. Those that have committed crimes should be taken out
of the country. Those that are in our jails should be taken out of the country. Those who are on welfare, require government assistance, should leave the country."
"Mitt Romney has relied on smooth talk to try to gain traction in presidential polls. Here in West
Virginia, we rely on straight talk," Casey said.
###
CAPITO VOTES FOR $2 BILLION TAX INCREASE
ON COAL AND GASOLINE
"Representative Shelley Moore Capito once again followed the Republican leadership, and not
what is in the best interests of West Virginia, by voting for a massive $2 billion tax hike on coal.
This is yet another example of how Congresswoman Capito puts her political party ahead of the
people of the Second District," stated Nick Casey, Chairman of the West Virginia Democratic
Party. "It's about time the people had a representative that puts their interests first."
The Republican motion to recommit on The Renewable Energy and Conservation Tax Act, H.R.
2776, would have amended the bill to include a $2 billion tax INCREASE on coal and gasoline.
(http://clerk.house.g...) Congresswoman Capito, along with just sixty-four
other Representatives, all Republicans, voted for the tax hike.
Don Blankenship the CEO of Massey Energy is pissed. He spent a small fortune trying to take over the West Virginia State Legislature and lost. Now according to the Associated Press he is not only attempting to get revenge by suing the West Virginia Democratic Party, but also the state party chairman Nick Casey. During the 2006 election Nick Casey conducted a massive "Fly-In" all over the state that clearly demonstrated Don Blankenship's efforts to BUY the election. The now well known slogan "Don Blankenship - West Virginia is Not For Sale" was coined during that campaign. You can read the article here.
Evidently Blankenship just doesn't know when to give up. I guess he is trying desperately to prove to the shareholders at Massey Energy that he is just a guy trying to do his job and like many politicians he just gets "misquoted". He certainly told enough lies about Democrats over the years. Now he is trying to legitimize his mistakes.
Lincoln Walks at Midnight has more on Blankenship's penchant for suing folks that tell the truth about him.
CHARLESTON -- In the 2006 general election, nearly one quarter of all Democrats who voted in West Virginia decided to exercise the option of voting a straight ticket.
They checked one box, and with that singular action voted for every Democrat on the ballot.
More than 57 percent of the state's registered voters are Democrats, so that strategy almost guaranteed wins for the blue party. And Democrats said they plan to encourage straight-ticket voting again in the upcoming 2008 election season.
"2006 was a very good year to do straight-ticket voting if you're a Democrat," said Nick Casey, chairman of the West Virginia Democratic Party. "We had a good ticket with Sen. (Robert C.) Byrd (D-W.Va.) at the top, and it was a short ticket. There were few county races and no statewide races. ... You could eyeball the whole ballot at one time and feel very comfortable voting straight-ticket."
Republicans, obviously, simply didn't have the numbers in some areas to defeat a spate of straight-ticket Democrat voting. In Kanawha County, for example, 9,748 Republicans voted straight-ticket -- no match for the 16,092 Democrats. Statewide, an estimated 11 percent of Republican ballots cast were straight-ticket.
snip
According to Casey, 23 percent of West Virginia Democrats who voted in November 2006 checked the straight-ticket box -- and not because they were lazy voters.
"Quite the contrary," he said. "We had a really focused campaign that said now is the time to send a message. There's never been a better time to vote Democrat."
Casey said an anti-Republican sentiment at the national level invigorated Democratic voters and motivated them to pay attention to candidates and get to the polls.
"When you have an energized electorate, they tend to be more attentive," he said. "They know the candidates and can feel very comfortable voting straight-ticket."
We've got a great slate of candidates this year too, which must have the WV GOP and vulnerable Republican Rep. Shelley Moore Capito shaking in fear (they seem an easily frightened lot anyway which is probably why they tend to be chickenhawks).
With the high approval ratings of Gov. Joe Manchin at the top of the ticket, the Republicans haven't yet fielded a credible candidate to face him. The WV GOP can't find a candidate to challenge Senator Jay Rockefeller because it's a given he'll win easily. Then we've got Congressmen Nick Rahall and Alan Mollohan up for re-election after landslides in 2006 with no credible challengers in sight. Next we've got State Sen. John Unger, who crushed his Republican challenger in 2006 to win re-election despite being in a predominantly Republican district in Berkeley (65 percent of the vote in '06) and Jefferson (67 percent of the vote in '06) counties facing a vulnerable Republican Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, best known in Congress for being a rubberstamp for an endless Iraq occupation.
For Manchin, who deservedly is often touted as a potential candidate for a national office, the real test in 2008 for him will not be his own final vote tally. It's how well he helps the entire slate of Democratic candidates do, from those running for Capitol Hill to those running for the statehouse.
Yes, Manchin's got the "mojo" to deliver for the entire slate in 2008.
UPDATE: it's not just the dirty hippy bloggers that think this. It's also the dirty hippy magazines like the conservative The Economist that writes the Republicans will lose in 2008 and more importantly deserve to lose.
The easy scapegoat is Mr Bush himself. During his presidency, the words Katrina, Rumsfeld, Abramoff, Guantánamo and Libby have become shorthand for incompetence, cronyism or extremism. Indeed, the failings of Mr Bush's coterie are oddly reassuring for some conservatives: once he has gone, they can regroup, as they did after his father was ousted in 1992.
Yet this President Bush is not a good scapegoat. Rather than betraying the right, he has given it virtually everything it craved, from humongous tax cuts to conservative judges. Many of the worst errors were championed by conservative constituencies. Some of the arrogance in foreign policy stems from the armchair warriors of neoconservatism; the ill-fated attempt to "save" the life of the brain-dead Terri Schiavo was driven by the Christian right. Even Mr Bush's apparently oxymoronic trust in "big-government conservatism" is shared in practice by most Republicans in Congress.
From this perspective, the worrying parallel for the right is not 1992 but the liberal overreach of the 1960s. By embracing leftish causes that were too extreme for the American mainstream-from unfettered abortion to affirmative action-the Democrats cast themselves into the political wilderness. Now the American people seem to be reacting to conservative over-reach by turning left. More want universal health insurance; more distrust force as a way to bring about peace; more like greenery; ever more dislike intolerance on social issues.
Be careful what you wish for
So some sort of shift seems to be under way. Would it be a change for the better? The Economist has never made any secret of its preference for the Republican Party's individualistic "western" wing rather than the moralistic "southern" one that Mr Bush has come to typify. It is hard to imagine Ronald Reagan sponsoring a federal amendment banning gay marriage or limiting federal funding for stem-cell research. Yet Mr Bush's departure hardly guarantees a move back to the centre. Social liberals like Mr Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger are in a minority on the right. On the one issue where Mr Bush fought the intolerant wing of his party, immigration, the nativists won-and perhaps lost the Latino vote for a generation.
Overall, the Democrats are much more confident: 40% of Republicans believe that the Democrats will win, but just 12% of Democrats believe that the Republicans will win. They are more motivated: in the second quarter the two leading Democrats raised $60m, against just $32m for the two leading Republicans. And 61% of Democratic primary voters are happy with their choice of candidates, compared with only 36% of Republicans. Generic polls show voters expressing a preference for a Democratic president by a 24-point margin, a gap unheard of since the Watergate era.
The Democrats are also likely to keep Congress. The tide that enabled the party to pick up 31 House seats and six Senate seats in 2006, along with six governorships and 321 state-legislature seats, is still swelling. The Republicans will be defending more vulnerable Senate seats than the Democrats in 2008, and they are losing the race for cash. The public favours Democratic control of Congress by a margin of 10-15 points. Off the record, Republicans use words like "catastrophe" and "Armageddon" to refer to 2008.
The issues that people care about are also tipping the Democrats' way. A Pew Research poll in March discovered growing worry about income inequality combined with growing support for the social safety net. The proportion of Americans who believe that "the government should help the needy even if it means greater debt" has risen from 41% in 1994, at the height of the Republican revolution, to 54% today. The poll also revealed a decline in support for the things that drove the Republican resurgence in the mid-1990s, such as traditional moral values.
How about the Iraq war, which vulnerable Republican Rep. Shelley Moore Capito has voted in lock step with Bush to keep the troops in Iraq forever?
The most obvious cause of the implosion of the Bush presidency is the disaster in Iraq. The Republican Party's biggest advantage over the Democrats has long been on foreign and defence policy. You voted Democratic if you cared about schools and hospitals. But you voted Republican if you cared more about keeping America safe in a dangerous world. September 11th 2001 turbo-charged that advantage. The Republicans used the "war on terror" to roll over the Democrats in elections in 2002 and again in 2004.
But the war in Iraq has buried this vital advantage under a mound of discredited hype ("mission accomplished") and mind-boggling incompetence. A CBS News/New York Times poll found that only 25% of people approved of Mr Bush's handling of the situation in Iraq. An ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 63% of respondents did not trust the Bush administration to report honestly about possible threats from other countries. The damage is not limited to the Bush administration: a Rasmussen poll on July 25th-26th found that Mrs Clinton outscores Mr Giuliani as the candidate voters trust most on national security.
The Economist touting Senator Clinton's national security polling over Rudy Giuliani's? Ouch! That's gotta hurt. Someone call an ambulance for Bow Tie Boy, Vic Sprouse and especially Gary Abernathy who is hopefully (and from the writings on his web site is) advising any of his candidates to tout their support for keeping the troops in Iraq forever.
But isn't it just Bush's fault? No, according to The Economist, which blames the Republicans in Congress like Capito for creating the mess.
In fact, the Republican Party in Congress is just as responsible as Mr Bush for most of the recent troubles. The Republican majority routinely appropriated more spending than the president asked for. It also larded spending bills with as much extra pork as possible. The number of congressional "earmarks" for projects in members' districts increased from 1,300 in 1994, when the Republicans took over Congress, to 14,000 in 2005.
The Republican majority also cheered Mr Bush all the way to Baghdad. Add to this the corruption of congressmen like Tom DeLay, a conservative hero, and the semi-corrupt institutional relationship that the Republicans formed with lobbyists, and you see that Mr Bush was only part of a much bigger problem.
Nor can conservatives claim that Mr Bush is a country-club Republican like his father. He has devoted his energies to giving "the movement" what it wants: the invasion of Iraq for the neoconservatives (who had championed it long before September 11th); tax cuts for business and the small-government conservatives; restricting federal funding for stem-cell research for the social conservatives; and conservative judges to please every faction.
This desire to pander to the conservative movement is partly to blame for the administration's practical incompetence. Mr Bush outdid previous Republican presidents in recruiting his personnel from the conservative counter-establishment. But this often meant choosing people for their ideological purity rather than their competence or intelligence. Some 150 Bush administration officials were graduates of Pat Robertson's Regent University, including Monica Goodling, who put on such a lamentable performance before a House inquiry into the firing of nine US attorneys. A more pragmatic president would surely have sacked many of the neoconservative ideologues who have made a hash of American foreign policy
The Republicans' problems are creating a civil war on the right about how to dig themselves out of their hole. This is producing some spectacular intellectual fireworks-fireworks that prove there is still a lot of intellectual life in the right. But such internal strife tends to put off the voters. And this civil war has the added problem that, from the point of view of broadening the Republican coalition, the wrong side has won too many important battles, not least on immigration.
Now The Economist does have harsh words for Democrats -- for rolling over on FISA among other things.
Fortunately for those of us in West Virginia four out of five of our Congressional caucus voted against the new warrantless wiretapping law. The one vote for it - Capito. Now we may disagree on this site on whether Senator Rockefeller should have been more vocal in opposition to the law - I think he said the right things, One Citizen makes good points that Rockefeller could have been more outspoken - but one thing I think we all agree on: Capito has got to go.
Read the entire editorial, it's all good... it's hard to pick what to excerpt. Here's a few choice lines:
Independence Day is about having the courage to oppose what is wrong and unjust. There is nothing courageous about staying the course in a war fought for uncertain objectives and for questionable reasons.
For four long years, Mr. President, you and Rep. Shelley Moore Capito have overseen and pushed policies to continue a war with no end in sight. Mr. President, you have incited and provoked our enemies with careless and irresponsible rhetoric. You have turned a blind eye to the needs of the men and women returning from service — many with visible physical wounds and many more with less visible, mental ailments.
Really, read the whole thing. It's a short concise July 4th themed indictment of Pres. Bush and Rep. Shelley Moore Capito's failed policies.
A little over a year ago I made my first Partnership contribution to the West Virginia State Democratic Executive Committee. This was an easy thing to do and a Partnership starts with a contribution of just $35. What we all get with our support of the Executive Committee is a lot of support in the field. Here in Mercer County we received great help from our one of the three Field Organizers who worked closely with our local grass roots group (Mercer United Democrats) in training, canvassing support, and organization. We even had some outstanding support from Nick Casey the state Chairman at a couple of our meetings during the election. The state party raised and spent over $700,000 during the 2006 election.
An important part of the Partnership program is being able to stay in touch with what the state party is doing as they send out the monthly Democratic Digest newsletter as well as regular emails.
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Don Blankenship the CEO of Massey Energy is pissed. He spent a small fortune trying to take over the West Virginia State Legislature and lost. Now according to the Associated Press he is not only attempting to get revenge by suing the West Virginia Democratic Party, but also the state party chairman Nick Casey. During the 2006 election Nick Casey conducted a massive "Fly-In" all over the state that clearly demonstrated Don Blankenship's efforts to BUY the election. The now well known slogan "Don Blankenship - West Virginia is Not For Sale" was coined during that campaign. 
