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March 04, 2006

Good Hackett Quote

Lord knows I have my issues with MyDD-ism, but I really liked what Jerome Armstrong, one half of the site's founders had to say about Paul Hackett's exit from the Senate race in Ohio:

But Armstrong sounded nonchalant about Hackett: “The real reason Hackett couldn’t go on is because he got squeezed on the money end. But you know what: on the Dean campaign that’s what we did in the last three months of 2003; that’s the exact same tactic we used. We squeezed all the money out of Edwards, Kerry, Lieberman, Gephardt. That’s a tactic that has nothing to do with people-powered campaigns or anything — it’s just the reality of politics.”

This is a very good point -- it's just politics. Campaigns do the same thing with all aspects of the campaign, whether it is media, volunteer recruiting, endorsement seeking, whatever. If Hackett's campaign had been dissuading people from volunteering for Brown by saying in effect that Hackett was the only candidate worthy of donating your time, well if potential volunteers found that to be a compelling argument than I doubt the netizens would be bitching about how unfair, undemocratic or unDemocratic that was. In fact, that happens all the time, prominently so among the Dean campaign, which was very good at persuading potential volunteers to come over to their side even if they weren't fully with the candidate yet. When a campaign does something similar on a money angle, I don't know understand why the first response has to be that their must be some sort of conspiracy.

Posted by Chris at March 4, 2006 05:57 PM

Comments

Here's to clean elections and making them publicly funded. Interestingly my friends in Arizona say it's really leveled to playing field and not always for the Dems or Progressive candidates. The biggest challenge is still getting decent candidates to run and work a real field campaign.

Posted by: Tim [TypeKey Profile Page] at March 5, 2006 01:16 PM

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