Burner and the irony of change

Everybody understands that campaigning is hard. It's the toughest job interview there is. But what impresses me about Darcy Burner's campaign for Washington's 8th Congressional District is just how hard everyone from Darcy to her campaign managers, staff, and on down to the army of volunteers working on her behalf, works at it. Day and night, seven days a week.

You hear them say things like "It's all right, I can sleep in November."

These people are working incredibly hard, pushing themselves to exhaustion, and they've been doing it for months and months and months straight. And they'll keep doing it for the next five weeks, too. Probably even harder than they have been.

Why do they do it? Because we need change in Washington. Both Washingtons.

The irony is that the change we need is really just a re-affirmation of the traditional values of thoughtful governance and respect for our Constitution, the rights it guarantees its citizens, and the system of checks-and-balances codified within it.

While Republicans have called themselves the party of conservatism for decades, what they're selling is a sham. They're not even trying to conserve anything, and frankly, I don't think they would know how even if they wanted to.

They're not conserving the environment, nor civil or Constitutional rights, nor the middle class, nor our standing in the world, nor the health of our financial system, nor the effectiveness of federal agencies like FEMA, NASA, the FDA, or the EPA, nor the very concept of representational democracy itself. Nothing.

Very little shows this more clearly than this ridiculous 700 billion dollar Wall Street bail-out package. It's not that there are no other ideas out there for how to address this financial mess.

It's that none of the others are getting any press next to this one idea being ramrodded through the legislative branch at the Bush and Paulson.

The irony is that the "change" we really need is "un-change". To undo the horrible changes of Republican sham conservatism began by Reagan and kicked into warp drive by George Walker Bush and his enablers in Congress.

The irony is that top caliber Democrats like Darcy Burner and Barack Obama are actually better conservatives--in the sense that they actually understand what it means to conserve something--than any of the so-called conservatives that fly under the red banner.

This irony is not lost on Darcy Burner. In a recent video, taken shortly after the bailout was first proposed, she calls out the irony that after 8 years of robbing from the taxpayers to give to the wealthy, the solution to this financial crisis seems to be to steal another $700 billion from taxpayers and give it to the wealthy.

[UPDATE: Burner issues statement opposing the bailout.]

Now poor Dave Reichert, who has established a reputation and record for doing precisely nothing during his time in D.C., is facing the toughest challenger he could imagine. And the RNC is set to bail him out again to the tune of a $1.1 million dollar cash contribution.

They're doing it because Reichert has proven that he'll happily vote however they tell him to, and since they're looking at a greatly reduced number of seats in the next Congress, they'll want to maximize their ability to vote as a bloc against progressive measures necessary to fix what Bush broke.

To put that into some context: If the $35 average contribution amount that Darcy is pulling on ActBlue is a good estimate of her general fund raising averages (and I have reason to believe that it is), 1.1 million dollars is roughly the amount that Darcy can raise from the contributions of 31,500 individual donors.

Would you honestly rather have a Congressional Representative who is beholden to special interests, or would you prefer one who is beholden to literally tens of thousands of her own constituents?

I know which one I prefer.

I'm one of those constituents, and I'm sick to death of having a congressman who honestly doesn't care what I think or what happens to my family.