Ten Reasons

I love the four other candidates in the Air America contest. They are all great bloggers and a couple of them I am delighted to call friends. This is an election, though, and I like competing in elections, so I thought I would give you reasons you should consider voting for me in spite of the high quality of my competitors. I am not going to call it my top ten reasons, because I might think of others later that are even better, but for today, here are ten:

1.Progressives fight for underdogs and I am a serious underdog in this race. The whole nature and mission of the progressive movement is to fight for the underdog, and I am a really serious underdog. The other bloggers have more traffic on their sites. Karl has the whole massive organization backing him up, for God's sake. Digby is the huge favorite, because she is well, Digby. OpenLeft is just this modest little blog devoted to helping the movement get stronger, so I don't have much of a natural base by comparison. And speaking of reasons for being an underdog...

2.I am an evil insider. I know, I know, this will actually be seen by many of you as a reason to vote against me. But here's my argument: if I win this contest, I think it will give me added leverage with the insiders I am trying to push in a progressive direction. Right now, the people in DC who talk to me do so because they know me - I have worked with them on campaigns (issue and electoral), I have served on boards with them, I worked with them while in the White House. But if I am also seen as an influential blogger, it gives me that much extra leverage when I am leaning on them to move more to the left.

3.OpenLeft is an important blog and deserves attention. OpenLeft is one of the most important blogs in the progressive blogosphere, a place where important new projects get launched, other bloggers and movement leaders get influenced, DC insiders take notice, and progressives really engage each other in the debate. My winning this contest would really boost OpenLeft's exposure to new readers.

4.I played a role in launching Air America and getting other progressive radio/TV hosts off the ground. A few short years ago, progressives had almost no presence in radio or cable talk. I am proud to have played a role in changing that for the better:

• The 501(c)(4) organization I founded and chaired, American Family Voices, hosted a conference of progressive donors and strategists in the spring of 2002 where the idea of Air America got hatched.

5.I have helped some other cool organizations get started:

• MoveOn.org. Wes Boyd described me as the first insider who understood what MoveOn was trying to do, and who helped them in their early days.

6.I have been attacked by name by Rush Limbaugh at least 3 times. Once when I was working in the Clinton White House, once when AFV held a conference of progressive donors, and once when AFV did phone calls to Republicans about the Foley/page scandal. Pretty cool, huh?

7.I helped save school lunches. In early 1995, Newt Gingrich was on a rampage, getting much of the Contract With America passed through Congress without breaking much of a sweat. Democrats were demoralized and ineffectual in their initial response. The first issue we were able to put them on the defensive with and then beat them on was the school lunch issue. I was the White House point person for getting a coalition organized in opposition to the Republicans on that issue.

8.I got on the air one of the most effective ads against Bush in his first term. After 9-11, Democrats were generally scared for many months afterwards of going directly after Bush. But when he decided to go to Wall Street and give a speech on corporate elites, I couldn't resist. I dug up some of the old records from Harken Energy and Haliburton, and did an AFV produced and paid for ad directly attacking Bush and Cheney for their hypocrisy on that whole corporate elite thing. The White House made the mistake of calling a press conference within 3 hours of our ad going up, and attacked it repeatedly, causing the cable and broadcast network news programs to run it repeatedly on and off for weeks afterward. The ad and the ensuing media flap drove Bush's approval ratings down 15 points over the next 6 weeks, marking the low water mark for him before the 2002 elections, and giving momentum to get the Sarbanes-Oxley financial regulations bill passed.

9.Lord of the Right Wing. On December 17th, 2003, ironically on the 6th anniversary of the day voting ends in the Air America contest (is that fate or what?), a new PAC I founded launched one of the biggest political web videos of all time. (I bet you didn't know that about me, did you?) Called Lord of the Right Wing, and released the same day as the 3rd Lord of the Rings movie, it was a cartoon of George Bush as a Gollum-like character grasping for power. It ended up getting over 8,000,000 views over the next few weeks.

10.I know when to stop. This post has gone on long enough. I hope I convinced you. Vote here.