full disclosure - I work for SEIU as a regional new media specialist
One day before we celebrate the birth of our nation, Nebraskans gathered at a scheduled healthcare roundtable to call on Senator Johanns to support an American solution to our healthcare crisis.
Instead of greeting the teachers from NSEA, veterans, and SEIU workers Senator Johanns' staff called the police, ordering the Nebraskans to leave the Medical Center grounds.
If it's as much a Democratic year as the three special election victories and current polling suggest, the utterly unthinkable not very long ago is conceivably in range: 60 Democratic seats in the Senate. There are a lot of races in play, and with a strong wind at our back, we could have a legitimate shot at it. But the only path to getting there is that some uphill races are going to have to come through. Races in states like Alaska, Mississippi, Kansas, North Carolina and Texas- Republican states with extremely well-financed and well-established incumbents- are going to be damn tough to pull off. Sixty is potentially within reach, but we in the progressive community are going to have to invest in a variety of different uphill gambles to give ourselves a chance.
I'm going to argue here that the Scott Kleeb race is one of the places we ought to make that gamble in. Nebraska is a Republican state, for sure, but so are the others I listed above. Scott's opponent Mike Johanns is a fairly well-liked former governor, so he will be tough to beat, but he's not an incumbent and compared to the well-established incumbents referenced above, he's no more formidable than any of them, and can't point to seniority, committee chairmanships, or pork he's brought home as the incumbent to bolster his case. The fact that Johanns was Bush's Agriculture Secretary, given the messy politics of the farm bill, isn't going to help him either.
The polling on the race also shows that Scott has a shot at this thing. One private poll I'm aware of shows only a 10-point gap, which would put this closer than Slattery in Kansas, Hagen in NC, and Noriega in TX, all races that many of us think are potentially winnable. And what that poll does not reflect is that young people in NE are registering Democratic by a two-to-one margin over Republicans, and that there is some serious outside organizational money being put into youth registration and turnout in NE.
That polling also doesn't reflect the real weaknesses in Johanns' record, starting with the farm bill fiasco, or the split in NE Republican politics between the more moderate Hagel Republicans and the right-wingers. And it doesn't reflect Scott's strength as a candidate- this is a guy who ran a competitive race in the 5th-most Republican congressional district in 2006.
I would add one final note here: unlike a lot of these Senate races, Scott is a grassroots, netroots kind of guy. I hope Lunsford in Kentucky, and Shaheen in New Hampshire, and Hagen in North Carolina, just to name three examples, all win their races this fall, because they are better than their Republican rightwing opponents and get Democrats closer to 60. But they are all more conservative, establishment candidates. Taking a gamble on Scott is worth doing because he relates to our values better than those kinds of candidates.
I will admit my bias here, with NE being my home state and Scott and his wife being friends, but I am pretty hard-nosed when it comes to politics, and I hope you will give Scott some coin before the June 30th quarterly deadline passes. He's a good fundraiser and is raising some decent money, but to get any DSCC help, he's going to have to have a big quarter. I think it's a gamble worth taking.
I used to laugh when the 1990s right-wing Clinton scandalmongers would send their pseudo-journalists and private eyes to Arkansas to look for Clinton's connections to all the nefarious characters the right-wing media machine reported about. They were effective at spinning these tales to traditional big media reporters anxious to play "gotcha", but the simple fact known to anybody who has ever done politics in a small state is that everyone is connected in one way or another to everybody else. Every time I go back home I am reminded of this connectedness.
Take me in the two states I've lived in before moving to D.C. It's been 15 years since I've lived in Iowa, but I still know the governor, lt. governor, secretary of state, attorney general, secretary of agriculture and the House and Senate majority leaders. Most of them are personal friends.
Or go back even further. It's been almost 25 years since I moved from Nebraska at the age of 22. In spite of this, I still know a ton of people in politics back home. The current mayor of Lincoln, who I've known since before I left, is the son-in-law of two of my mom's best friends. The previous mayor, who I've known since I was born, goes to the church I grew up attending. The mayor before that has been one of my best friends for almost 30 years. My wife used to run in 10K races and marathons with Bob Kerrey before he ever ran for governor the first time, and another close friend of my mom's worked for his dad. Ben Nelson's chief of staff was a friend of mine in high school. Even on the Republican side, I have personal connections. Former Governor Mike Johanns used to be a liberal Democrat, and I worked on his first race for county commissioner. And current Attorney General Jon Bruning is the son of one of my wife's best friends, and one of his top aides was my best friend in elementary school.
So what's my point in listing all these connections? I think we need to understand that the politics and language in small states has a different feel and rhetoric than the politics of big states and cities. Sometimes all those personal ties can make the political jousting really ugly and petty, like all the Clinton-era Arkansas attacks. But more often, when you know people on such a personal basis, it doesn't generally feel right to hammer them as hard as we do in national politics. I would love to know what bloggers and the OpenLeft.com community members who live in small states think about this and how it affects their political work and their writing.
I know for me, being from a small state has changed the way I do politics even though I've lived in D.C. for so long. I still try to get along with a wide variety of folks, and I still try to see the point of view of my opponents even when I think they are fundamentally wrong. Although I've given up entirely on the Bush and DeLay-style politicians who have taken over the Republican Party, because I think they are mean-spirited to the core, I still try to assume the best about most other people in politics until they prove me wrong.
I'm not at all saying, by the way, that folks from big cities or states are less likely to be like what I've described above. And God knows there is nothing idyllic about these states- there are plenty of bullies and cheats and liars in the small states I described, too.
I'm just saying that growing up in a small state has driven these kinds of attitudes that I described deep into me.
So I'm curious what folks think, especially those of you from small states, since we have to win plenty of Senate races in these small states to have a majority in the U.S. Senate- how does the kind of connectedness dynamic make the strategies for winning politically in small states different than in bigger states or cities?
