Tag: David Cook

AR-Sen: The Big Dog is coming back home to stump for Blanche Lincoln, the first time he’s done so this race. Meanwhile, the SEIU just tossed in another $100K for phonebanking and another $100K for field on behalf of Bill Halter. (There’s also an amusing negative $100K entry for “reverse phonebanking.”)

CA-Sen: Chuck DeVore is as insane as this ad. A true must-see. In news of the normal, President Obama kept to his promise to return to CA for two more Barbara Boxer fundraisers. The events raised $1.75 million, $600K of which will go to Boxer and the balance to the DSCC.

KY-Sen: Heh, that was quick. Rand Paul is already planning the dreaded “staff shakeup.” The only problem is that he can’t fire himself. Barring that, Mitch McConnell is telling his least-favorite fellow Kentuckian to shut the fuck up and hide under a rock – “for the time being.”

PA-Sen: I agree – this is a magnanimous move. Arlen Specter introduced Joe Sestak to his Senate colleagues at their weekly lunch yesterday. Very gracious.

AL-06, AL-07: Unsurprisingly, corporate lawyer Terri Sewell is the only Democrat airing TV ads in the primary to succeed Rep. Artur Davis, spending about $200K so far. With $783K, she’s far outraised her chief competitors, Earl Hilliard, Jr. ($328K) and Shelia Smoot ($100K). Sewell can also count among her contributors Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz.

Crazily, though, ten-term GOP Rep. Spencer Bachus is also airing ads in advance of his primary in AL-06, some $70K worth. Bachus has spent an amazing $680K on his campaign so far, even though his challenger, teabagger Stan Cooke, has raised just $29K total. This is the reddest district in the nation according to Cook PVI (R+29), which may explain Bachus’s anxiety, since he is the ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee and voted in favor of the bailout.

AR-01: A similar situation in AR-01 as in AR-02 below, where first-rounder David Cook endorsed the somewhat less-conservative Chad Causey over the extremely conservative Tim Wooldridge in (you might be a little surprised to hear me say this if you don’t already know the names) the Democratic runoff.

AR-02: Some runoff endorsements on both sides from the also-rans. Patrick Kennedy and John Adams (great names, huh?) both endorsed Robbie Wills in the Democratic race, while David Boling endorsed Joyce Elliott. I suspect national Dems would prefer Wills over the more-liberal Elliott, but this race is probably too touchy to get involved in.

DE-AL: Joe Biden returned home to do a fundraiser in Wilmington for John Carney. No word on whether he’ll also do one for Senate candidate Chris Coons, but it’s not like it’s a big schlep.

FL-25: The statewide Florida AFL-CIO, following the lead of its South Fla. branch, endorsed little-known longshoreman Luis Meurice in the Democratic primary, rather than Joe Garcia. The union, Florida’s biggest, backed Garcia in 2008.

IN-05: This is exactly the kind of weird that Dave Weigel specializes in. Tim Crawford, the teabagging “Democrat” who snuck to victory in the Democratic primary here, abruptly dropped out of the race after an unpleasant meeting with, you know, actual Democrats… and then wrote a long, rambly email saying he was un-dropping-out. Ah well.

IN-09: Speaking of Joe Biden, he’ll also be doing a fundraiser in late June for Rep. Baron Hill in Jeffersonville, Indiana.

NC-08: I would really freakin’ love to see Tim D’Annunzio pull this one off. The entire NC House GOP delegation just collectively endorsed former TV sportscaster Harold Johnson, terrified as they are of the spastic-fantastic Tim-diana Jones. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, click here stat.

RI-01: Scott Brown is coming to Rhode Island for a fundraiser with state Rep. John Loughlin, the GOP’s candidate in this open seat. To date, Loughlin’s raised about $344K, which might not seem too bad, but in fact he’s been running for a long time, since well before Rep. Patrick Kennedy announced his retirement.

VA-11: Businessman Keith Fimian has a new poll from McLaughlin & Associates showing him with a 36-23 lead over Fairfax Co. Supervisor Pat Herrity in the GOP primary. A March poll had Fimian up 29-17. Herrity had his own poll out last month, though, showing him with a 42-21 lead – and pointed out that Fimian claimed his internals had him just three points behind Gerry Connolly before election day 2008, but lost by twelve.

DSCC: Uh, good, I guess. The DSCC has cancelled plans to have EPA chief Lisa Jackson headline an NYC fundraiser next week – but what a retarded idea in the first place. It seems pretty inappropriate to me to have cabinet members doing hackwork like this (can you imagine Hillary Clinton or Eric Holder shilling for dollars?), but it’s even worse when you’re talking about the head of the EPA in the midst of the oil spill crisis in the Gulf. I also find it unctuous that the original invitation promised that the event would be “intimate, so each of you will have a real opportunity to get to know and to speak to Lisa about issues of concern to you and our nation.” Pretty gross when it’s our team selling access to the ultra-wealthy. Barf.

Ideology: Alan Abramowitz has a great piece up at the Democratic Strategist, looking at the correlation between ideology (as measured by DW-NOMINATE) and election performance by Republican senators. Using a modified eight-point DW-N scale, Abramowitz finds: “For every additional one point increase in conservatism, Republican incumbents lost an additional three percentage points in support relative to their party’s presidential candidate.” But shhh… don’t tell the Republicans!

For the longest time, I thought I wasn’t going to have anyone in the Dem primary for my district that I could vote for without holding my nose.  Almost all (and yes, this post is about the one exception) of the Democratic candidates, without failing, have come out against health care reform, EFCA, so on and so forth.  The presumed front runner is the worse, going above on beyond even being a conservative Democrat, sitting on the board of a hate group and introducing a bill to bring back public hangings in the legislature:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/…

Now this is a district where a bit of conservatism (social conservatism-it has a New Deal style populism) is necessary.  For example, no candidate is going to get anywhere saying anything bad about guns.  But these goons are going overboard, big time.

But there’s one candidate in the race that’s talking like a Democrat, acting like a Democrat, and is not ashamed to say that he is, in fact, a Democrat.  And if the only poll is to be believed, it’s helping him pick up substantial support.

Meet state representative David Cook.

I interviewed Representative Cook for Blue Arkansas, and walked away impressed.  He’s not the most polished or charismatic candidate, and he’s not what a lot of you guys would consider liberal.  But by Arkansas standards, he’s really good.  Go ahead, watch for yourself:

http://bluearkansasblog.com/?p…

David Cook is the only candidate in this race who said he would have voted for health care reform.  He stood up for EFCA at the second debate, the only candidate to say he’d support it, and people sat up and took notice when he started talking (surprisingly poetically) about all the things that unions and working people have done for this country.   You could tell by the reactions, the way he did it A) resonated with the audience, and B) set him apart from the other candidates who are all trying to mimic each other.  What’s more, he’s leading on the issue of taxing excessive bonuses of the bailout firms, and while he is socially conservative enough not to drive away voters in this district (he’s very pro-gun, which is a must here, and his abortion record is largely conservative as well) he did answer my questions on ENDA and DADT in ways that satisfied this gay man.  In other words, he’s conservative enough to be a good fit for this district, but he has a populist streak that makes him a very appealing option.

What’s more, Cook is running a great grassroots campaign, and I really am impressed by how much harder he’s working than everyone in the district.  I’ve had a chance to take a good look at everyone’s operation here, and his is better even than the candidates that have bigger wallets.  Arkansas, especially this part of Arkansas, is one of those increasingly rare anachronisms in this country where retail politics matters more that big advertising campaigns, and if the only poll taken so far is any indication, Cook’s approach has landed him in second place (with lots of undecideds to reach):

http://bluearkansasblog.com/?p…

I could go on and on about Representative Cook, but I’ll let him speak for himself.  This is the message he relayed to Blue Arkansas after we endorsed him:

http://bluearkansasblog.com/?p…

Read for yourself, and tell me this guy doesn’t have a great story to tell the voters of the 1st district.

   From the Office of David Cook for Congress

   I would like to take this opportunity to thank Blue Arkansas for their hard work and their dedication to Democrats everywhere. While we won’t see eye to eye on every issue, I have found that the staff here are fair and more than willing to give credit where credit is due, even if they don’t completely agree with the person. For these reasons, and many others, I am proud to have the official endorsement of Blue Arkansas.

   I want to specifically address something Blue Arkansas mentioned in their endorsement. They said it was my substance that made me different. I want to let you, the readers, know exactly what they meant by that. It isn’t my 5 years in the Navy. It isn’t my 6 years in the Legislature. It isn’t even my 32 years in education or my 3 college degrees. I am proud of all these things, but they aren’t what separate me from the other candidates. You know how, as parents, you read to your children? As a child, I read to my parents. I was born on the banks of the St. Francis River by midwife. Both of my parents were illiterate as neither had attended a day of school in their lives. My mother believed in America, she believed in Arkansas, and she believed that with a good education, a little luck, a little help and a whole lot of hard work that her children could have a better life than her. She made sure that her children went to school… but that wasn’t enough. We were dirt poor. From before I can remember, I went to school then came home and picked or chopped cotton till after dark. When I was 12 I got promoted to plowing behind a mule which was great because it meant I got a nickel raise. I worked hard to help support my family. I’ve put in spill-ways on rice levies with a shovel and a role of tar paper on my back. I’ve had to count the strips of bacon on my plate to make sure there was going to be enough food for the whole family to eat for the rest of the month.

   I know what it’s like to be hungry. I know what it’s like to be poor. I know what it’s like to be sick and have no money for health care or medicine. And I understand that there are a lot of hard-working, good Arkansans that aren’t looking for a hand-out… No, they just need a hand-up so they can work their way to a better life for themselves and their children. I know that without the hand-ups I received in my life, I might still be making my bed on that old river bottom today. For me a hand-up was my high school coach helping me out with food money or clothes and letting me work it off on his farm, or my high school sweetheart’s family finding the money to buy me another pair of shoes when my only pair was stolen out of a gym locker at college.

   These are more than just stories of my life. They have defined my life. These are WHY I spent 32 years as an educator. It’s WHY I went on to work as a Legislator. It’s WHY I voted to increase minimum wage, to reduce the grocery tax twice and to reduce health care cost for seniors. It’s WHY I worked so very hard to improve the educational environment for students and staff. And it’s WHY, when you send me to Congress, you can rest easy knowing that a man is there who gets it. You’ll know a real Arkansan with real Arkansas values is fighting like a scrappy dog to do everything he can to give you the hand-up you need for a better life.

This is a guy who could be a good Democrat in Congress.  This is a guy who can win in this district.  And unless you want to be complaining about a “Democrat” in Congress who sits on the board of a hate group, supported both Bush and Huckabee, and is still trying to explain why he wanted to bring back public hangings, you have every reason to throw ten or twenty dollars his way on ActBlue: http://www.actblue.com/entity/…

(Full disclosure: I don’t work for the Cook campaign and neither does anyone that works with me at Blue Arkansas.  We are activists and supporters, and except for volunteering our time we don’t have any role in the campaign whatsoever.)

Remember back when Marion Berry’s retirement in the R+8, trending-the-wrong-direction AR-01 was going to hand one more vulnerable southern seat to the Republicans? Turns out… eh, not so much:

Arkansas’ filing deadline passed Monday afternoon and while Republicans made a lot of noise about their chances in the 1st district in the days after Rep. Marion Berry (D) announced his retirement, all the sound and fury may have actually signified nothing….

In the end, the only Republican to join the contest after Berry announced his retirement was Princella Smith, a former congressional aide to freshman Louisiana Republican Rep. Anh “Joseph” Cao.

Smith will face off against the equally unknown and untested Rick Crawford, an Army veteran, farm broadcaster and businessman who entered the race in May 2009.

Republicans had sought to get one of several state legislators into the race — state Sens. Davy Carter or Johnny Key. However, both said no, leaving the GOP without a backup plan. Meanwhile, top-tier Democrats piled into the race in this historically-Democratic district, including state Sen. Steve Bryles, former state Sen. Tim Wooldridge, state Rep. David Cook, and Berry’s former CoS, Chad Causey. Like PA-12, here’s a district where the Democratic tradition and the disparity between the two parties’ benches may just save our bacon despite an ominous trend at the presidential level.

Filing information about the rest of the Arkansas races is here. AR-02 is still a very vulnerable seat to Republican takeover, with former US Attorney Tim Griffin armed with lots of money and Beltway connections. Dems still have a top-tier recruit here, though, state House speaker Robbie Wills, so even here we’re in Tossup territory. Mike Ross in AR-04 seems to have emerged with only bottom-rung opposition, so hopefully he can contribute some time and money to shoring up the other races in the state. Democratic State Sen. Shane Broadway also seems poised to hold onto the Lt. Governor seat being vacated by Bill Halter; he faces off against only a pastor and a pizza restaurant owner.

RaceTracker Wiki: AR-01