Blue America Chat
by digby
Today Blue America is endorsing its first all-new candidate for the year– Washington state Senator Craig Pridemore who is running for congress in WA-03. Howie Klein will be hosting a live chat at 11AM over at Crooks and Liars, if you’d like to meet him.
Meanwhile, check out Howie’s introductory post today. I think you’ll see why we are proud to add him to our list of endorsees and we hope that you’ll take the time to listen to what he has to say. I don’t think I need to tell anyone about the desperate need to elect better Democrats to the congress. Helping to elect Craig Pridemore would substantially help us achieve that goal:
Craig is a 49 year old highly decorated former military intelligence officer who worked after college as a financial analyst the Clark County Public Works Department before being elected a County Commissioner (beating a Republican incumbent heavily financed by the developers’ community. It’s how he learned about grassroots campaigning, walking 117 miles eight days, meeting with hundreds of people from battleground and Yacolt to Richfield and Camas. He was re-elected and the challenged another Republican incumbent for a state Senate seat. He was re-elected to that job in 2008 with 62% of the vote.
As a state Senator he wrote and passed one of the first successful pieces of legislation for greenhouse gas caps in the U.S. Senate Bill 6001, in fact, directly prevented the construction of a dirty coal plant in Washington, saving untold numbers of people from asthma, heart disease, cancer and a whole battery of chronic lower respiratory diseases. His two main opponents, the aforementioned Rep. Deb Wallace and a millionaire investor, Denny Heck, are both what is euphamistically called “business-friendly” Democrats. That’s what Blue Dogs are called before they grow up to be Republicans in Democratic clothing. Heck, particularly– who has stated no policy positions on anything but who refers to himelf as “the only working capitalist in this race”– has started raking in a great deal of money from all the wrong sources.
Electing Craig Pridemore is an opportunity to make the House a more progressive place and to elect a leader who doesn’t just go along with the flow. The first time I spoke with him he told me that “the conventional wisdom up here is that a Democrat can’t win if he/she stands for Democratic values. I am absolutely committed to changing that perception and to make WA-03 a reliable, progressive seat in the future.” I hope you’ll join me in helping him to do just that– at the Blue America ActBlue page, where Craig joins our two other 2010 endorsees, Alan Grayson and Marcy Winograd.
The live chat will be starting at 11 AM pst. Check it out.
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