MyDD :: Hotline Smearing Blogs, Ciro Rodriguez

Hotline Smearing Blogs, Ciro Rodriguez

by Matt Stoller, Tue Feb 14, 2006 at 05:04:56 PM EST

It's not just the Club for Growth smearing Rodriguez; insider media hacks are scared of the netroots beating Cuellar.

In past Dem primaries, candidates who run afoul of the party's traditional interest groups have suffered (see Martinez v. Solis in '00). Both the AFL-CIO and Change to Win Coalition are working to dethrone Cuellar, who has received little money from labor. Cuellar has the advantage of incumbency and claims his centrist voting record fits a district that voted 53% for Bush. This proxy battle pits the party's liberal, activist wing against the centrist pragmatists. If the left wins this fight, activists will be emboldened in challenging other centrist incumbents -- a worrisome prospect for Dems as they try to win back the House.

No matter that Cuellar has no support from anyone in the party. No matter that our picks aren't ideologically oriented. No matter that this is a primary where the Republicans will not have a competitive candidate. Keep smearing us, Hotline.

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Tags: Hotline, blogosphere, Ciro Rodriguez, Club for Growth (all tags)

Permalink :: 14 Comments :: Post a Comment

Re: Hotline Smearing Blogs, Ciro Rodriguez (none / 0)

Hotline is insane.

Cueller is pretty fucking far from being a "centrist".

Rodriguez is a REAL centrist.
Cuellar is right-wing trash.

Swing State Project: Campaign & Election News - Covering Key Races Around the Country

by HellofaSandwich on Tue Feb 14, 2006 at 05:29:52 PM EST

I don't get it. (none / 0)

The last line doesn't make sense to me.
If the "left" wins how is that a worrisome prospect for democrats as they try to win back the house.
I would think it was a worrisome prospect for the republicans.

by carsick on Tue Feb 14, 2006 at 05:35:23 PM EST

Re: Hotline Smearing Blogs, Ciro Rodriguez (none / 0)

good lord - this:

"Cuellar has the advantage of incumbency and claims his centrist voting record fits a district that voted 53% for Bush."

means "i don't have a spine, i just vote how everyone else votes around here to get elected. and if that means lovin' bush, then i love me some dubya too."

by poprenaissance on Tue Feb 14, 2006 at 05:44:27 PM EST

Re: Hotline Smearing Blogs, Ciro Rodriguez (none / 0)

Ciro needs to speak as the Representative of WORKERS

He can parlay union backing into a moderate vote block grabbing narrative if he talks directly to people who work for a living.

The Working Class.

From Garret Keizer's article in the latest Harpers

Meaningful change in America will not come from the "progressive" conferences and op-ed hand-wringing and better target-marketing to the coyer identity groups. It will not come from reinstating the same players who posed with such smugly affected arrogance for Annie Leibowitz in the pages of Vanity Fair after the first Clinton victory. (Those photos, if you can find them, will tell you more about "what happened to our country" than anything I'm writing here.) Not to put too fine a point on it, change will not come from deciding which former member of Skull and Bones will get to drape the coffin of American labor with the Stars and Stripes. Change will come only when people who work, who love to work, whose conception of the world is of a work in progress, come to realize they have no choice but to fight. Fight, or accept a world in which a shrinking pool of players lords it over a multiplying pool of slaves.

RODRIGUEZ: I'm a fighter. I fight for the people who work for a living.

He'd be golden.

by dereau on Tue Feb 14, 2006 at 06:06:10 PM EST

Retribution for Hackett (none / 0)

support rodriguez

by aiko on Tue Feb 14, 2006 at 06:38:15 PM EST

Re: Hotline Smearing Blogs, Ciro Rodriguez (none / 0)

I'll support him if he runs as an independant, or if Bernie Sanders' campaign chooses to give him some money on my behalf.

Not a penny more to any Democrat.

by redstar66 on Tue Feb 14, 2006 at 08:12:09 PM EST

Re: Hotline Smearing Blogs, Ciro Rodriguez (none / 0)

To ANY Democrat?

I think that's a little extreme... I mean, even if you hate the guts out of the party apparatus, there are still at least a handful of good people in the party (and, in my opinion, much more than just a handful) who could use your support.

My attitude is this: if you boycott the Democratic party, you're giving up on the chance of a lifetime to crash the fucking gates, take over the local operations, and use the hollowed-out framework of a party to steer it back into shape. It'd be a hell of a lot harder to do that by only supporting independents, where you're starting from scratch.

Swing State Project: Campaign & Election News - Covering Key Races Around the Country

by HellofaSandwich on Tue Feb 14, 2006 at 08:33:35 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Hotline Smearing Blogs, Ciro Rodriguez (none / 0)

Nope.

I'm counting on an election like 2006, where the GOP is wracked by scandal, is riven with an incredibly weak slate of candidates, a weakening economy with the middle class getting nickled and dimed like never before (though nowhere near so much as the working class over the past two decades), continued quagmire in Iraq. A GOP which will have been down in the polls to a generic slate of Democrats by 10 percentage points for the better part of the year. But a GOP which in the end of the day holds its own against a fundamentally soul-less and incompetent Democratic political leadership and holds ib to both chambers.

I'd like to think that such a circumstance will finally convince the Hillary Clintons, the Bidens, the Kerrys, the Schumers, the Boxers to get the f*uck out of the way. Wishful thinking> Probably. But the status quo is no longer sufficient for me, I've been voting strategically for Dems for damn near 15 years with nothing to show. Its time to go for broke. No moeny for dems, no votes for dems. Of any stripe. For any office. Simple as that.

Only then will these assholes take notice.

by redstar66 on Tue Feb 14, 2006 at 09:37:24 PM EST
[ Parent ]

The Boxers??? (none / 0)

BARBARA FUCKING BOXER ISN'T LIBERAL ENOUGH FOR YOU? WTF?

Pardon my Freedom Fries, but damn. What planet do you live on?

by Geotpf on Wed Feb 15, 2006 at 11:19:43 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Boxers??? (none / 0)

My bad. I meant Feinstein. Same state, sex and job and party, different Dem.

by redstar66 on Thu Feb 16, 2006 at 02:37:12 PM EST
[ Parent ]