Last week Darcy Burner, a
netroots endorsed candidate (despite the fact she's
still not listed as such at the bottom of the Daily Kos sidebar list - that needs to be corrected!!!), posted
a terrific diary at
Daily Kos, in part re-introducing herself to this national audience, and in part making a pitch for continued and greater netroots and grassroots support.
Darcy wrote:
I am the daughter of an Air Force veteran and a public school teacher. I grew up in military towns and attended public schools. Like many Americans today, my parents struggled to pay the bills while raising five kids. I worked hard in school, put myself through college, and went on to a successful career at Microsoft. I am now married to a military veteran and raising a young son.
She's also very modest and smart as she received a National Merit Scholarship and majored in computer science and economics from Harvard. You can read her full bio at
her Web site.
Her
diary entry captured the attention of kossacks, receiving a considerable amount of comments and recommends, enough to keep it on the
Recommended Diaries list for the entire day.
Jotter had it as the
12th highest impact diary of last week.
Darcy Burner wants to take this country in a new direction. At her campaign Web site she lists a number of issues she will fight for:
In contrast, while guesting on
blogger David (Goldy) Goldstein's
KIRO radio talk show Sunday night, Darcy said the following about Reichert:
"Dave Reichert is a Bush Republican... He has voted with the President on the President's energy bill. He voted with the President on the President's budget reconciliation that slashed funding for student loans and Head Start. He voted with the President to deny health care benefits to the families of National Guards and reservists serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's clear which side he's on and it's not the side of the people of the state of Washington.
...
"The people of this country, very broadly, and certainly the voters that I'm talking to in the 8th, are most frustrated with what is happening at a federal level, and they want somebody who's going to go back to Washington D.C. and fight for them, and they don't have that right now. They want somebody who is going to go fight for Social Security benefits and retirement security instead of allowing companies to dump pension and talking about private accounts, which by the way is the President's position and Dave Reichert's. They want somebody who is actually going to go fight to make sure the troops get the benefits they've been promised. It is incredibly unconscionable that we would be under funding the VA right now.
...
"We're cutting... we're cutting student loan funding, Head Start funding, funding to schools because we would rather give $14.5 billion in tax subsidies to oil companies than to fund education. That makes no sense and that's what's happening in Washington, D.C. right now, and Dave Reichert is not only doing nothing to stop it, he's voted on the wrong side of every single one of those issues. He's voting for George Bush, not for the people of his district."
Burner is new to the scene, but she is not backing down and is putting pressure on her opponent in a way no past Democratic candidate has been able to. While we are fighting for her, she is fighting for you and I. This is the way it always should be.
You can join the fight here.
(And someone at Daily Kos: please update the sidebar list of Netroots Endorsed candidates to include Darcy Burner! - Yes, I have tried to contact the powers here about it, so maybe others can try to as well?)