Friday, February 26, 2010

POLITICO: Herrera's useful tools?

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So, yeah... McMorris's people "placed" a blurb in POLITICO, a heretofore reasonably respectable website, waxing eloquent about Ridgefield Barbie.

The problem is this kind of writing, which apparently regurgitated a McMorris press release, is misleading on a variety of levels, and the worthlessness of the article for purposes of information is best summed up from this quote of it:
Herrera, who is running in the GOP primary against another minority candidate, financial analyst David Castillo, served as a policy assistant to Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) before being appointed to a vacancy to the state House in 2007. She’s in Washington this week meeting with party officials to discuss her campaign.
Now, anyone reading this fiction would actually think "party officials" gave a rat's patootee about her campaign. (Although it is of note that in DC, she's reduced to "policy assistant" from "senior legislative assistant." But more on that later.)

But what she's REALLY back there for, of course, was to bury her entire head into the special-interest money trough her keepers set up for her.... much like Martha Coakley, the leftist Scott Brown defeated in Massachusetts. And the idea that she is there for more then the requisite time needed to pick up the checks, left on the political dresser, so to speak, to be picked up on the way out, is a not even clever effort to puff the cardboard cutout into something she's not.

So, yeah, to the extent she bailed on her constituents in the middle of session; a rather frequent occurrence according to Rep. Deb Wallace; and to the extent these lemmings happen to show up, she might talk to them.

But the fact is that this is precisely the same kind of political prostitution so many engage in mere moments after they're elected. Unfortunately for us, that's what she was BEFORE she was elected... and as her constituent, I know we are all worse off for it.

Meanwhile, for me, at least, POLITICO will have zero credibility since they've freshly joined the "useful tool" category of Kos or Huffington Post.

Cross-posted on Jaime Herrera Watch.
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1 comment:

Gr8mochas said...

It seems what is trying to be pointed out here is the "business as usual" of politics. How do you make changes in a "machine" that is so well oiled and has the backing of doing fund raising this way and marketing the individual in a certain way as long as this has been? If Jamie H is being advised by the people who got to DC by doing it this way, she would have to have a lot of personal strength and a mountain of integrity to go against the raging tide of "this is the way its done." It takes a lot of character and strength to tell those people who want to give you a job like this on a silver platter that they're not doing it right. She can't get to DC on the strength of her own talent and abilities, she has do have help from established people, so I guess that would be the measure of who she is as a person. Perhaps she doesn't disagree with the methods, but if she does and can't say so, then what good is she going to do in DC anyway? There's a lot more of the "business as usual" folks back there and they have more influence, power and authority than she does.

It looks as though the choices to be struggled with may be 1) I really want to be a politician in DC, 2) business as usual will be the way to accomplish that because it works and 3) why should I be the one to forfeit my wants and desires in order to forge a different path that may be political suicide, or at the least, less effective?

So have we lost the spirit of our founders? They saw business as usual and forged a different path, but there were enough of them with the same spirit, the same vision to build what turned out to be the greatest country on the planet. We need more of that spirit and less of the business as usual method, but in order to accomplish that we need people who have great integrity, are truly selfless and aren't in it for the name, reputation and notoriety because in accomplishing the construction of a more honest and integrity driven path, there will be those who will be beaten out by the well established machine. Who wants to be the sacrificial lamb for a vision? Is there anyone like that out there?