Being a northeast Connecticut DTC member means you get to talk to a lot of interesting people this time of year, and tonight that meant regretfully skipping Kossack
Sherri Vogt's event in favor of the Killingly DTC's "meet the candidates" night. (Yes, there were
two competing Democratic spaghetti dinner fundraisers in the same town on the same night, due to an unfortunate last-minute schedule change.) Probably the highlight of the night - which was energizing on many levels - was the best, most unified effort I've seen yet to bring the Lamont message home to town committee members who are still Lieberman supporters, or on the fence. The night also featured rousing speeches from
Joe Courtney, Tom Swan (Lamont's campaign manager), State Senate President Pro Tempore Don Williams, and other folks all along the Democratic list. The message from everyone: Be energized and get out the vote!
crossposted at myleftnutmeg
The night started with a lot of networking, talking about recent debates, and food. (Somehow I don't think Karl Rove is doing $10 per person dinners, but this event was more about message and energizing GOTV than fundraising. While this area broke heavily for Lamont, Killingly and Putnam still have a lot of Lieberman support.) I was able to chat for a bit with Joe Courtney (who I'd spoken to at length
previously about Iraq and Iran. He didn't have to be polite about Lieberman anymore, and we joked about how he'd distanced himself from Lieberman even before the primary. (Courtney's signs deliberately just say "Courtney" - he avoids the word "Joe" as political poison in Connecticut.)
I think Courtney is going to be a great congressman, especially replacing the slitheringly reptilian Rob Simmons in the closest district in the country (decided by 4 votes in 1994), but I still don't have the nerve to ask him if anyone ever tells him he's a dead ringer for Jean-Luc Picard.
Joe Courtney
Courtney led off (several of the candidates had proimised to stop by Sherri's event also), and I was glad to hear he wasn't just giving a stump speech. The candidates all knew and respected the local audience, and knew they were speaking to a politically sophisticated (and cynical) audience as well.
In this election, all politics is national, and Courtney tied Simmons to Bush at every turn. "There is no scenario for taking back Congress that doesn't involve winning the Second Congressional District," he said - which was certainly true before Mark Foley and Masturgate, theough possibly less so now - and Simmons "is an enabler who empowers their agenda.
Simmons focused on lost education spending (and Simmons's failure to attend a key meeting of his district's school superintendents today) and the Medicare Donut Hole (contrasting his own plan to close it by negotiating better prices with drug companies vs. Simmons's position that the state should pay for it).
Courtney finished up by talking about his debate with Simmons, again tying him to the administration and using Iraq to batter Simmons. According to Courtney, Simmons's performance at the debate was like a "speech out of Karl Rove's playbook," heavy on talking points, but "not once did he menion the word Iraq. The only way to change things is to "Take George Bush's Congress away from him."
He ended with the newest polling numbers: Simmons is still ahead by two points in registered voters, but among likely voters, Courtney has taken a two point lead. That drew a big cheer.
Susan Bysiewicz
Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz went second, reinforcing Courtney's message and deepening it on several levels, while starting to build in the Lamont and De Stefano themes. She emphasized that we registered 30,000 new Democratic voters during the primary - far more new Democratic voters than Republicans. But she emphasized that this campaign won't be won by counting on numbers, it will be won by energizing friends and by knocking on doors. In a small town gathering where many of the people in the room have held elective office, that really resonated. "When you knock on every door, you win just about every vote." While Courtney had worked the theme of nationalizing the local election, Bysiewicz reminded people to localize the national election as well.
She told a heartbreaking story of a friend's son, whose tour of duty in Iraq has just been extended, reminded everyone of backdoor drafts, of failing to vote for protective gear (thank you, Joe), and of all the ways we are failing to support the troops - mostly by leaving them in the middle of an Iraqi civil war.
She also talked about pension funds, and how important it was ot elect a Democratic governor while we still had pension funds to rescue.
Perhaps most importantly to all of us who harbor secret Kenneth Blackwell nightmares, she talked about how important it was to make sure we are counting every vote. (And she brought sample material from the non-Diebold electronic voting machines - with paper trail - that are being adopted by the state.)
Nancy Wyman
State Comptroller Nancy Wyman followed. (We're proud of our ccnstitutional offices, and four of the six in Connecticut are filled by women, incidentally.) As the state fiscal watchdog, she had a lot to say about financial responsibility and open government, starting with governor Jodi Rell and her carefully cultivated "sweet grandmother" reputation. "It's nice to be a grandmother," Wyman said. "I'm a grandmother... but what we need is a leader." We need a governor who will be open to new ideas, and accessible to all parties, but "right now that door is closed to everybody." She stressed the importance of a governor open to solving the states pressing problems in health care, transportation, and sprawl, "someone who believes... so we don't have to negotiate down what we believe."
The biggest laugh comes when she invokes how keyed up we all our about the election, "which comes in 27 days and one half hour." But after she tells us it's time to get her old friend Joe Courtney out of Coventry by sending him to Washington - pointedly contrasting his integrity to the feeding-trough mentality of the `pubs - she gets cheers for saying that electing Courtney and Lamont is "one way to mow down that Bush."
Nancy DiNardo
I have to confess I haven't always been a big fan of Nancy DiNardo, but she was on fire tonight, on-message and on target. She started by talking about how strongly unions have been pushing GOTV this cycle, and worked her way into the message, subtly working the room. "Connecticut can change America," she said, to an already energized room, and reminded even the Lieberman supporters that "Lamont has energized Connecticut Democrats like no one before." She didn't let the Lieberman loyalists get grumpy, though - the pro-Lamont message was worked into a theme of Democratic revival with a much broader appeal. "Connecticut used to be number one in a lot of things," with California one of the two states that led the country in progressive ideas and in schools (hyperbole, of course, but inspiring). The message, naturally: We can go back to that.
Another nice thing: She invokes Nancy Pelosi as a force for positive change. There's a Rove talking point that clearly didn't have any traction.
Tom Swan
In lieu of the overscheduled Ned Lamont, we got campaign manager Tom Swan, who has strong local ties. Swan looked slightly rumpled and bearish, more like he's just gotten out of a boxing ring than a campaign operative - but passion carries a lot more weight than pretension hereabouts, and he exudes passion.
Still, he knows he's playing to a crowd that has a lot of Lieberman supporters in it, even if they've been primed to hear what he has to say. They don't need to hear the Lamont message from him, but from Don Williams, who they know and trust. So Swan leads off by praising Williams (who will follow him), "the best president of the Senate." More to the point, he keeps the focus on DiNardo's message. "It's seldom that Connecticut has the ability to influence the national scene the way it does this year." (That's Lamont's doing, of course, but why rub their noses in it?) He reminds everyone that Connecticut "took a whack in Homeland Security funds again," that our troops are stuck in the middle of a civil war. That we took our eye off North Korea. It's all said in a way that acknowledges Lieberman supporters, but reminds them of all the ways they disagree with Joe. And he finishes by reminding them of those 30,000 new Democratic voters - something even the Lieberman supporters here, most of whom are longtime DTC members who have worked hard at building voters in a traditionally Republican part of the state, can well appreciate.
Don Williams
It falls to State Senate leader Don Williams (whose district I live just outside of, alas) to close the deal, and he gives a show-stopping speech. He opens by returning to Courtney's theme that all politics is national this election, and everything can be tied to Bush. The Republicans in Hartford and in Washington are tied together like a combination of two movies tied together, he says: Titanic and Dumb and Dumber. That got a laugh, but he quickly got to the heart of his point. Because of the financial hole that Bush created, because of threats like privatizing Social Security, we need to elect Courtney - but we also need a Democratic Senate.
He said the word with an emphasis; there wasn't much mistaking what he meant. But he didn't stop there.
Williams supported Lieberman during the primary, he reminded us. While he disagreed with many of Lieberman's positions, he felt that he owed Joe the benefit of the doubt as a Democratic incumbent. But during the primary, he saw what happened - not only was there an incredible energy and the largest turnout ever in Connecticut, but Ned Lamont won. "I was never so disappointed," Williams said, "as when Joe Lieberman bolted the party." Williams used an analogy drawn from the gubernatorial primary to explain his feelings: "This is our process. Your opponent won fair and square." Once Joe refused to abide by the party process, Williams changed his support. "It's very important that we have a Democratic Senator who stayed true to the Democratic Party," he said, and perhaps more importantly, "We can't afford Joe... who flirted with privatizing Social Security," who was part of the No Child Left Behind disaster, and who has supported the war so blindly. (The war was very much an issue, but it was very much not the first issue anyone raised - this was not a night to feed the illusion of Lamont as a "single issue" candidate.)
Williams then turned to the gubernatorial race, and managed to rhetorically tie Jodi Rell to George Bush - a fairly neat rhetorical trick. (In her debate against John De Stefano, Rell couldn't think of a single mistake she might have made, nicely echoing Bush's famously similar debate moment.)
This is a chance, Williams reminded us in a GOTV exhortation, "to change the direction of our state, to change the direction of our nation."
Local Candidates
State Rep Shawn Johnston played up the themes of corruption and unfairness - one the state level as a metaphor for the national level. By talking about Rell's hiring semi-qualified cronies to fill key state posts, he compared her to Bush's cronyism by implication. She may be a sweet grandmother, but this election is a referendum on Bush, an financial bumbling and governance by corporate tax break. While he touched on the war, Johnston mostly spoke about Democrats as the party of fiscal responsibility and competence, the party that appoints qualified people to jobs.
He finished by talking about his support for Dan Malloy in the gubernatorial primary - how by calling everyone and educating them, by working the district hard and not counting on mailings, he was able to help malloy to a 57-43 finish in Thompson (Johnston's hometown) while Malloy won the rest of the area. This nicely reinforced two points - that GOTV is essential, and that you could be passionate about the Democratic ticket even if your candidate was the primary loser.
I missed most of Assembly candidate David Gladdings's speech while talking with Williams and Swan. But he did have a funny hat.
The night finished with a brief speech by local fixture and judge of probate David Griffiiths. He brought up a cornucopia as a prop for his GOTV speech: "You know what this is. You know how we got it." He made sure we all got the image of bounty, of America as we were taught it's supposed to be. "If we want this," he said with a shake of the cornucopia. "If we want the country you want, the state you want... we need to put in our selves, our energy... we need to tell people why. Don't be sitting on Thanksgiving, wishing you'd done more." Things rapidly segued into an auction from there, with the cornucopia fetching $50 and a book signed by Al Smith fetching $55. (It's a small town... we're poor.)
Altogether a much stronger group of speeches than I expected, and a much stronger, more unified GOTV message than I've ever seen before in this area. There's a lot of energy here on DKos and among my students and among the DTC of my town and people I talk to - but tonight I was feeling energy from a room full of people I was afraid were just going through the motions, or might be sitting this election out - people without email addresses.
It was a little scary when I introduced myself to Don Williams and he already knew who I was. I'm used to being recognized as a writer, but "you're the blogger" was a new one to me. Any chance we can see you on DKos soon, Senator?
Note: I'll try to post a new publishing diary tomorrow night around this time, even though no one seems to have noticed the last one. [/pout]