Heather Mizeur is the future of the Democratic Party
by digby
One of the first candidates Blue America endorsed in this cycle was Heather Mizeur for Governor of Maryland. We think she’s the future of the Democratic Party. Here are a few reasons why:
Her platform … contains nearly every next-wave energizing idea in liberal politics—the sort of stuff that, she thinks, by 2016 or 2020 will be a necessary on Democratic presidential candidates’ primary platforms.
The central item is a plan to legalize and tax marijuana and use the receipts to fund a pricey universal pre-kindergarten program. She wants to increase the minimum wage up to a living wage—$16.70/hour and indexed to inflation—gradually by 2022. She’s outspoken on environmental issues and has fought the fracking industry in natural-gas rich Western Maryland. In the criminal justice system, Mizeur wants to eliminate mandatory minimum drug sentences and replace the cash bail system with a risk-assessment program. She would reinstate the state’s lapsed “millionaire’s tax” on upper-income earners and give a modest income tax cut to everyone else; similarly, she’d fund tax rebates for small businesses with the revenue derived from closing the “combined reporting” loophole that allows certain large companies to avoid paying the state’s corporate income tax. On health care, her immediate goals are to put in place a series of measures to make Medicaid enrollment smoother. By 2017, though, she intends to make use of an innovation waiver for which states will be eligible to “look at ways to go above and beyond what was ever laid out as a vision for health reform under the Affordable Care Act”—meaning, perhaps, eliminating the insurance “middleman” altogether.
That’s from a story about her race in the Daily Beast. (And yes, she is a pro-pot lesbian, as the headline states, but as you can see that’s only one element of her awesomeness.)
This is what Blue America is all about. We believe that by helping candidates like Mizeur make this case in races around the country we just might be able to move this country back in a sane direction. It’s hard to turn a ship this big, especially one that’s been turning hard to starboard for so long. But it can be done. Over time. With patience and persistence.
If you’d like to see more people with Heather Mizeur’s platform running for office, supporting Heather Mizeur is a great start! Win or lose this race, she is a very serious politician with a very bright future. She’s out there spreading the good word every day, working very hard to win — and she could do it. The Democratic Lieutenant Governor who is in the lead in this race is also the guy who was in charge of Maryland’s disastrous Obamacare roll-out. Heather Mizeur, on the other hand, is a health care policy expert. She wrote John Kerry’s health plan in 2004. Just saying. You can donate to her campaign here.
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