Against all odds I am considering running for the U.S. Senate against Olympia Snowe, who has been in Washington D.C. since 1979 and is now one of the wealthiest U.S. Senators in America.
Am I crazy? I want America to educate our children, protect our seniors, reward our veterans and keep people healthy and safe. I want corporations and wealthy people to pay their fair share of taxes, and I know that corporations are not people. I want a senator who will stand up for ordinary people and speak loudly for economic justice.
Not since George Mitchell have we had a Democratic Senator in
I would love to hear from you -- the People I wish to serve. Are you ready for change in
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19 comments:
The republicans are not out of touch with the struggles that middle class americans are facing.They just do not care!!!!!
I think the only way to reform the dysfunctional government we currently have is to vote out any and all incumbents we can. So I am interested in hearing from you why you should replace Olympia Snowe. I did a google search of your name and read a bio on the Huffington Post and was fairly impressed. Unfortunately like many Americans I have become distrustful of all politicians and need to be convinced that you will actually work for all the people and not just for the rich.
When it comes to voting, we can never know more about a politician than her party affiliation. As much as Maine likes Olympia Snowe, we can't afford to have two Republicans representing the state in Washington.
I'm with Adam: who are you, and why should we believe that you will behave any differently from the vast horde we have previously sent to Washington to represent our views and aspirations?
Re your apparent emphasis on Facebook, my advice to you is: get real! The vast majority of your potential constituency has little or no use for Faccebook, Twitter, or any of the other flash-in-the-pan "social media" outlets so much in vogue these days.
Please speak to us in plain, simple English, in the newspapers and on our local radio and TV stations, and try to explain your positions and why you think that we should vote for you.
Please trust us to be smart enough and interested enough to figure out if you are blowing smoke or truly offering us something different than the obscenely wealthy and seemingly solely self-interested politicians currently "representing" us in the US Congress.
If you can convince me, a smart, thoughtful, interested, involved, active, and perfectly normal voter in Maine, you are very likely to be able to convince many others too, which may well and truly set you on a road towards a seat in the US Senate.
And please, unlike Faux News and most of the rest of the commercial "news" media, treat us like adults, and we may well return the favor!
From a committed Progressive in Waldoboro.
Seth and Adam have offered very thoughtful, articulate, and comprehensive commentary to which I hope you take heed. Olympia Snow no longer has my respect or loyalty. It is apparent from her recent voting record that she no longer represents Maine or its people. She has become a Senator who can be bought which I find reprehensible and abhorent. Like Jim we can't afford to have two Republican Senators. Taking it a step further, we can't afford to have even one. I've been waiting for a Democratic woman to step up to the plate. Perhaps you can inspire others to do the same. Let us see who you are, be visible, have a well articulated platform, tell us how you're going to resolve the issues currently plaguing not only Maine, but the entire nation. Above all show us your passion. I have contributed to the campaigns of all the Democratic women running for the Senate this year. Perhaps you can be counted among them. This country frankly needs more female sensibility rather than testerone driven male ego.
It takes some 'hutzpah' to run against an entrenched incumbant. I lived in Cape and remember your 'first steps'. Good luck, it'll be hard to do, but many of us agree it's time for our senior senator to retire.
I am very excited about your possible candidacy ad its focus on core issues of value ad meaing to Maine.
I have been monitoring Olympia Snowes voting record daily and reviewing her past posiitions and votes. I find a patter that is bad for Maine and bad for America and a Senator must be both.
Her refusal to work for Bank reform and support the full implementatio of Dodd-Frank is alarming. She even refused to approve the nominee to head up the new consumer protection agency or to speak against the President's plan to grat banks ummuity for their criminal actions. She has publicly stated that these issues conflict with her husbands interests.
Even though the ACLU strongly opposed the arrest without charge and unlimited deftention of US citizens on US soil, Snow voted in favor.
I encourage you all to log i and wtach the votes of all our Maine representatives..Very eye opening.
Thnak you for beig willing to help us back on course.
Senators Snowe and Collins recently voted yea for the NDAA essentially destroying the bill of rights and giving the president and any future president the right to arrest and permanently detain any person they want without charges, trial, or recourse. If you will not move to immediately restore civil rights to US citizens, I could care less what your economic policies are. If you don't decry the Patriot act and the NDAA as unconstitutional than neither you nor Snowe deserve the Senate seat.
The "moderate Republican" image that both of Maine's Senators have worked so hard to paint is an illusion.
While they do sometimes cast a vote that is contrary to their party's position, it is nearly always a calculated vote. Their party's leadership has counted the vote and found that the vote of one or both of Maine's Senators were not needed - so they got permission to cast their "moderate" vote. When their party needed their vote they were loyal Republicans.
If you prove that you're focused on attacking the true Root Cause of the 'symptoms' we're suffering, i.e. corporate money dominating our electoral and legislative processes, you'll have my support.
The additional fact that our media sources of news and information are also dominated by corporate interests means that We The People can't get the information we desperately need to fulfill our obligations as an "informed electorate".
Until we can get corporate money out of our way, we're all in a tragic, exhasting "dance of death" for American democracy.
In your letter, you share nothing about yourself. Do you live in Maine, or did you move here to run? What is your political background? I am not familiar with you, though that does not mean other people are not, but why would I think about supporting you when I have no idea who you are? Certainly, we need someone to run against Snowe, but we need somone who can win. Why do you think you can win? Your communications strategy so far would indicate to me that you cannot. Convince me and I will support you.
I'd second the comment that Facebook will reach some people, but many of us avoid it like the plague and will thus be left out of further communications.
We need someone in touch with the people of Maine. From the bit I know about you (mostly gathered from emails you send) you certainly have the right views. Do you have that X factor that grabs the voters and says, "I am the one". I hope so, and if so, I will donate time and money to help.
Although I disagree that FB isn't followed in Maine, there are very good comments here. Snowe has slowly slid over to a point too far from most Maine folks.
But one of my real apprehensions is that this will be another LePage debacle. The Democrats and the Greens and Indy voters MUST stick together to effect any change at all. Perhaps we can't get all we wish for, but divided we will definitely get another term for Snowe.
The big talk is 'compromise', which is just what the anti-GOP gov't of Nay cannot comprehend. If those of us opposed to more of the same go our separate ways rather than compromise Snowe wins.
We can work on individual wants and issues AFTER ousting her!
I've followed you for a while; not in your district but knew your predecessor a bit and admired his work.
While I agree that we need to end incumbent dominance in Washington, and while I too find Republican framing of issues and "solutions" increasingly scary, I'm not sure sending another party Democrat in the place of Olympia Snowe will make much difference.
You've just been elected to the Maine Senate, after serving in the House during a time of Democratic dominance so spectacularly ineffective that the Dem. candidate for governor won less than 20 % of the vote. What are the accomplishments from your tenure in the House that you think are relevant to a run for the US Senate?
You made some promises when you were elected last year, positioning yourself as a potential Senate leader in the three more years many Mainers - especially the most vulnerable - are likely to see their basic quality of life decline under Paul LePage's "governance." Do those battles no longer need to be fought? Have you decided you can't be effective fighting them? That you are more likely to help folks in Maine from Washington?
Or is there some consultant or playbook somewhere that says "get some name recognition" or "incumbents may be even more vulnerable next year?" And if so, so what? Just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should.
If your goal is to fight the ideas that Republicans are advocating nationally, it seems you have a pretty good opportunity to do that here. If you're effective doing that here, I might be interested in supporting a national candidacy.
But like the others here, I'm very skeptical of politicians with ambition. Republican, Democrat, liberal, moderate or conservative, most end up functioning in ways that are more the same than different when it counts.
And while I share some of Seth's antipathy towards an over-reliance on social media, his alternative, to speak through "the newspapers and on our local radio and TV stations," seems to ignore the last 100 or so years of US history. How does he think we got where we are now? How have the traditional media served the cause of democracy in the US?
The "get real" for me is that ultimately it comes down to each of us as individuals learning enough to make informed and wise voting decisions. It our fault, not that of some demon media outlet (though Fox certainly qualifies as demon), that we keep voting the same kinds of folks in the same kinds of parties and think something significant is likely to change. Sort of like re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, but in that case, it was only the 1% who went down.
We seem willing to elect more and more of the 1% who are more and more willing to drive us right into the iceberg. It's not their fault for using their money and connections to run for office in a system that makes money and party the only ways to get elected. It should not surprise us that once elected, they act in ways that protect their office and party rather than the people they were elected to represent. It should not surprise us they all promise NOT to be that person when they are running. Proof, unfortunately, is in the very stinky pudding that results.
Ms. Dill:
While I find you well qualified, and share your desire to see the useless and partisan, as well as very wealthy (for a government "representative")(I can't believe that her wealth is the result of honest endeavors) Olympia Snowe put out to pasture ASAP, I wonder why you, with a family and living in Maine, would want to live in Washington DC for 6 or 12 years.
Personally, I would recommend that you run for Governor of Maine, because I think (1) that LePage will not have a chance at re-election, and (2) that it would be a better step, and certainly a better quality of life for you and your family to remain in Maine.
I would also recommend that you run as an Independent, as Eliot Cutler did, because many of us former Dems are not willing to vote Democratic anymore.
After what the Democratic Party in Maine did to torpedo Cutler's campaign, leaving us with LeRage when it was very clear that Libby did not have a chance in hell of winning, has made me not want to ever vote for a Democrat in Maine again. The Dems have been yapping for over 10 years about how Nader lost the election for Gore (which is not true, a corrupt, partisan and political Supreme Court threw that election) and then they go and, instead of throwing their support behind Cutler when they should have, they lost the election for a person who was very experienced, in high level Democratic administrations and would have not been the ignorant extremist that LeRage is.
As I have VOWED to never vote for a Democrat in Maine again, this would affect my support for you. I have decided to abandon the Democratic party in general, for their continued cowardice and spinelessness. I will not vote for Mike Michaud again because he joined in the backstabbing of Anthony Weiner of NY, one of the most effective Dems in the House, and the ONE who stood up for medical benefits for the 9-11 first responders who suffered so much from the effects of their selfless work at the WTC site. I will not vote for the lesser of two evils anymore, because we still end up with evil.
As a mental health worker in Maine whose hours have been cut back from full time due to budget cuts, and whose job may be gone in 6 months, I can tell you that I do not look to the Republican-Democratic parties for solutions, but to the Occupy! movement to force a return to the Rule of Law and to do what is needed to right the wrongs in our state and country. So I hope this point of view will be helpful to you.
I have to agree with Seth and others who've posted here. I get an email out of the blue asking me if I think it's time for a replacement for Snowe. Sure! You betcha! But ... where's the beef?
I go to your blog and your Facebook page, and I don't see any position papers, views on the issue, exactly WHAT you consider the core issues to be, what you hope to do when you get to Washington, what you've done of relevance in the Maine legislature, etc., etc. You know, a real campaign website.
And above all that, how do actually intend to be of help when your other 99 colleagues are all bought and sold prostitutes?
I note in your "likes" that you've listed the Democrat party and Barack Obama. As a mostly-habitual Democrat it pains me to say that those are already two strikes against you. Tells me that you stand for business as usual. Prove me wrong.
Sorry to be so negative, but these are catastrophic times that call for more than a cheery popularity poll. We don't need a pretty new face in Washington who will, nonetheless, be doing the same old bleep, buying a little more time for our overlords as they continue their scorched earth campaign against the American people. We need a real representative and a whole new way of doing business. Are you up for that?
Cynthia, we need you in Augusta, not a martyr to a Republican juggernaut. As much as I would love to see Snowe go, I don't think there is a Democratic Candidate who can break her stranglehold on the seat. At the same time, we MUST recapture the Maine Legislature. You are in a great position to hold your seat for a progressive movement to coalesce around. Stay put!
Respectfully, we should not just throw out all incumbents; we should throw out the obstructionists, the corporate apologists, and the one-percenters. Cynthia represents my district with passion, shared values and deep knowledge. She's not someone who gets the wool pulled over her eyes. She won the State Senate because of her effectiveness over three terms as a State Representative. Unfortunately, being effective today means doing your best to slow the Republican juggernaut at the state level. At the Federal level, it means showing the courage to get things done. All you need do is look over the bland newsletters from Snowe and Collins to see just how small-bore are their agenda and ambitions. They both need to go.
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