Mike's Election Guide (18 page)

After a career serving in the Air Force, the country’s continued involvement in the Iraq war has inspired Brown to run for office. Before the war began, he didn’t believe there were any WMD and did not support the invasion. He also wants Congress to implement the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. Domestically, he supports a ban on members of Congress becoming lobbyists within 5 years of leaving office. He also supports allowing the federal government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies to bring down the cost of prescription drugs for Medicare recipients. He’s against Social Security privatization and supports raising the income cap on Social Security to help make it sustainable.

COLORADO’S 4TH DISTRICT

Betsy Markey

Winning with the slimmest margin of any candidate in 2006, the Democrats see Republican Marilyn Musgrave’s seat as prime for the picking. Musgrave is notorious for using divisive social issues to boost conservative turnout, and she’s doing it again this election cycle. She supports a state ballot measure on “personhood” that would define a person as “any human being from the moment of fertilization.” It’s the first ballot measure of this kind in the country, but if it helps the desperate Republican Party hold on to seats in November, you can bet your Rocky Mountain high that other states will give it a go.

She was on
Rolling Stone
’s list of the 10 worst members of Congress because of her career focus on “regulating the bedroom behavior of her fellow Americans.” This includes running for school board on a platform of eliminating sex education; she was able to achieve “abstinence only” programs with sex-related passages scrubbed from health textbooks. In the U.S. Congress, she’s proposed a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, calling it “the most important issue that we face today.”

Challenging a seat that has been held by the Republicans since 1973 is Democrat
Betsy Markey
. She is a former aide to Colorado Senator Ken Salazar and a former State Department official, as well as a businesswoman. She counts healthcare and education as two of the most important issues facing America and has the backing of Emily’s List. Her economic plan also includes something we don’t hear people propose or mention too often—cutting government spending by cutting the federal government’s PR contracts by 10 percent. This includes no-bid contracts given to the likes of conservative commentator Armstrong Williams, who was given tax dollars to promote No Child Left Behind in his newspaper columns and his pundit stints on cable TV.

CONNECTICUT’S4TH DISTRICT

Jim Himes

Christopher Shays is a rare bird: a Republican congressman in New England. In the 2006 elections, the species nearly went extinct, with Shays—who supported the war in Iraq—the lone survivor. With Obama topping the Democratic ticket and voter registration on the rise, the Democrats have an opportunity to remove the term “New England House Republicans” from the political lexicon.

When it comes to issues that will lead to Shays’ exit from Congress, the first three that come to mind are Iraq, Iraq, and Iraq. He voted and vouched for the war and the Bush-Cheney Middle East policies. Five years after voting for the war, Shays admitted that he had yet to read the pre-war National Intelligence Estimate of 2002. He has openly stated that “I’ve been carrying the bucket when it comes to the war,” but representing a liberal district in Connecticut, he’s about to kick that bucket. And in a strange, creepy (and what I hope is a) coincidence, like Joe Lieberman at a previous State of the Union Address, Shays was caught on camera exchanging a kiss with the goofy-sounding guy who’d just stumbled his way through the speech. A changing position on Iraq is too little and too late to overcome his kiss of political death.

Democratic candidate
Jim Himes
was born in Lima, Peru, and moved to the United States at the age of 10. He went to Harvard and won a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford. For the past few years, Himes has been an executive at a non-profit organization that addresses urban poverty by helping low-income families with tax preparation and financial assistance, funding affordable housing in the Northeast, and using green technology to lower energy costs. He wants to bring these types of solutions to government in Washington.

FLORIDA’S 24TH DISTRICT

Suzanne Kosmas

Republican incumbent Tom Feeney is also from the Jack Abramoff-wing of the Republican Party. In 2003, he took a trip to Scotland with the imprisoned former lobbyist and poster boy for the Washington culture of corruption. This is the same golf junket that led to Rep. Bob Ney being jailed on corruption charges. Feeney may avoid doing hard time, but he should start looking for another job.

He’s voted against withdrawal from Iraq and in favor of funding the war with no strings attached. He’s also voted for the FISA domestic spying bill to give the government more power to eavesdrop without a court order, and voted against SCHIP, the state children’s healthcare fund. Feeney is a reliable Republican vote, having sided with the GOP over 90 percent of the time.

Democratic opponent
Suzanne Kosmas
has served in the Florida House of Representatives and on local boards of the United Way Women’s Initiative, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Southeast Volusia Habitat for Humanity, and Volusia County’s Cultural Arts Advisory Board. She helped create the first local “Women Build” program with the United Way and Habitat for Humanity, which recruits female volunteers to build affordable housing for single mothers. She has the backing of many labor unions and Emily’s List.

ILLINOIS’ 10TH DISTRICT

Dan Seals

In 2005, Democrat-turned-Republican Mark Kirk said he was “OK with discrimination against young Arab males from terrorist-producing states.” He was immediately criticized by State Senator Barack Obama and Rep. Jan Schakowsky but stood by his comments. This is one guy the Democrats weren’t sad to lose. The incumbent Republican candidate has also been a war-enabling obstructionist, voting against the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and in favor of funding the war with no strings attached. In a vote to allow the federal government to directly negotiate with drugmakers to lower Medicare prescription drug costs, the Democrats voted in favor, the Republicans voted against, and facing re-election, Kirk was a no-show; he didn’t vote.

Democratic candidate
Daniel J. Seals
hopes to be part of a rising tide—led by Barack Obama—sweeping Democrats into office in Illinois. He’s aggressively going after his opponent for supporting the Bush administration, making false claims of “independence,” and failing to keep the price of gas in check. He also calls healthcare a “moral issue” and says that the government should “develop a national program of health insurance that provides a basic level of healthcare that is portable and affordable.” A future co-sponsor of Rep. Conyers’ HR 676?

ILLINOIS’ 11TH DISTRICT

Debbie Halvorson

Republican Rep. Jerry Weller is retiring, so the cash-strapped Illinois GOP is looking to ready-mix concrete magnate Martin Ozinga III to fund his own campaign for the open seat. He did a four-hour stint manning the pumps at a local gas station in June of ’08 to promote his “energy policy.” It was a perfect setting for a man whose less-than-innovative energy proposals include drilling the crap out of everything in sight in search of oil, building more refineries, and doing away with the Illinois state gas tax. He calls alternative energy a “second energy priority.”

All of this nonsense should hopefully make it smooth sailing for Ozinga’s opponent, Democratic candidate
Debbie Halvorson
. Halvorson is the first woman to be elected Majority Leader in Illinois and has been in the state Senate for 10 years. She was a leader in the effort to get low-cost prescription drugs to Illinois seniors and disabled individuals and has been called “arguably among the most powerful women in Illinois.” She told Emily’s List that “Our district has been underserved for too long, and I want to provide real leadership on the issues that matter to Illinois families.” Halvorson supports tax cuts for middle- and low-income families, she’s for closing the wage gap between the rich and the poor, and supports providing affordable, quality child care and healthcare for America’s working families.

LOUISIANA’S 4TH DISTRICT

Paul Carmouche