Blue America Chat: Ilya Sheyman
by digby
The first time I mentioned Ilya Sheyman, the progressive Democrat running for the northern Chicago suburban seat held by GOP freshman Robert Dold, it was in a long and rambling post lashing out against conventional wisdom. When I finally got to Ilya, former Field Director for Democracy for America and, more recently, National Mobilization Director at MoveOn, who Blue America was urging to run against Dold, he quoted Paul Wellstone to me:
“Politics is not just about power and money games, politics can be about the improvement of peoples lives, about lessening human suffering in our world and bringing about more peace and more justice.”
Candidates with this kind of mindset are candidates Blue America is looking for to help solve the country’s problems. That’s why we’re enthusiastic about endorsing him today and why we’d like to invite you to meet him at a live blog session at Crooks and Liars at 1pm (Central Time), 11am on the West Coast.
Until his vote to phase out Medicare and replace it with a pathetic voucher system so that the wealthiest Americans get more tax breaks, not many people had heard of Dold outside the 10th CD between Arlington Heights and Waukegan in Chicagoland. But that triggered an angry reaction at Dold’s town hall meeting in Buffalo Grove last week and now Dold has become another right-wing poster boy for Paul Ryan’s dystopian vision of a mean, dark, reactionary America.
Rep. Robert Dold (R-Ill.) cut a presentation on the federal deficit short at a town hall meeting he held last week, after audience members began firing questions at him about the Ryan budget and its changes to entitlement programs, including Medicare and Social Security, according to the Chicago newspaper the Daily Herald.
Senior citizens in the audience expressed their discontent with turning Medicare into a voucher program, calling the change a “shell game” that would bog senior citizens down with uncertainty in dealing with private healthcare companies.
And senior citizens are getting to know Dold better now that he’s been in Congress for 4 months. He may be trying to hide his support for dismembering Medicare but he’s surprisingly open about his contempt for Social Security and what he insists is the need to trim it back. Dold has been the perfect little rubber stamp for the radical House leadership, buying into all their harebrained schemes. “Rep. Dold and the right wing of the Republican Party,” Ilya confirmed “are hell-bent on dismantling Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and eliminating the foundations of the American Dream that have made millions of middle-class lives possible– and we can’t let them get away with it… The fact that he continues to advocate for cuts in Social Security benefits shows just how out of touch he is with the voters of the 10th District [and] his vote for the radical Republican budget that ends Medicare in order to give tax breaks to giant corporations and the wealthiest 2% of Americans should put to rest any notion that he actually cares about the deficit.”
Read on to hear more about Sheyman and then join Howie, John and I at 11AM over at C&L to chat with him about all these issues and more:
Please help us welcome Ilya to the Blue America family and, if you can, please contribute to his campaign through our ActBlue page. An active admirer of Raul Grijalva’s and Keith Ellison’s Put America Back To Work Act, Ilya will be working inside the Progressive Caucus helping to advance real solutions for working families. It’s what he’; campaigning on and it’s what has drawn him into politics. And it’s why Blue America has endorsed him.
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