The Nation released their article about the top ten candidates running for both local and federal races in the 2018 midterm elections. For the most part, it’s a great list. Four of these candidates I was already backing and a few of them just made my list. There are two that are questionable. The four candidates I have been backing in my diaries listed in this article are:
Stacey Abrams (D. GA) running for Governor
Ben Jealous (D. MD) running for Governor
Beto O’Rourke (D. TX) running for U.S. Senate
Scott Wallace (D. PA-01) running for Congress
Now here are the ones listed that have drawn my attention:
Mandela Barnes, Wisconsin lieutenant governor candidate: A former state representative who was a fierce foe of Governor Scott Walker’s assaults on labor rights, Barnes is campaigning for the state’s No. 2 job in a year when Democrats believe they can finally defeat the anti-labor governor. Barnes’s appeal to people of color, young voters, and union activists marks the veteran grassroots organizer as a contender who can energize and expand the base with unapologetic responses to economic inequality (“Company profits belong in workers’ paychecks, not CEO bonuses”), a tough line on environmental abuses that calls for reining in corporate exemptions, and a stance on gun violence so bold that the gun-safety group Moms Demand Action named him a “Gunsense Candidate of Distinction.”
Jocelyn Benson, Michigan secretary of state candidate: A former dean of Wayne State University Law School and current Southern Poverty Law Center board member, Benson has for more than a decade advocated election protection, campaign-finance reform, and redistricting reform while outlining a vision for how secretaries of state can promote voting rights. Now she’s running for the job, promising to make Michigan a national model for election integrity where “the voting rights of every citizen are protected.”
January Contreras, Arizona attorney general candidate: Democratic state attorneys general are fast becoming key players in national policy fights, on issues ranging from Trump’s travel bans to net neutrality. Arizona’s Contreras is one of a number of super-qualified contenders who have stepped up to wrestle the mantle of justice away from red-state Republican AGs. A former assistant attorney general and policy adviser to the state’s most recent Democratic governor, Janet Napolitano, Contreras is running a campaign that speaks to Arizona’s rising electorate, promising to fight corruption, defend civil liberties, and put Arizona on the side of DACA youth. “With the liberty of 28,000 of our state’s inspiring young people at risk,” Contreras says, “this is a legal fight that Arizona should be a part of.” If she’s elected, it will be.
Liz Watson, Indiana US House candidate: “Our laws have yet to acknowledge the reality of people’s lives—parents working two jobs who need affordable child care, daughters and sons caring for aging parents who need paid family leave, women who need equal pay, people who made mistakes in their lives who need a second chance, and working people who need stronger protections for organizing so that we can restore unions’ strength,” says Watson, former executive director of the Georgetown Poverty Center and labor-policy director for congressional Democrats. Running in a region that used to send Democrats to DC, she’s up against Trey Hollingsworth, a first-term Republican known more for his deep pockets than his legislative skills. Watson’s got strong Indiana roots and solid support from unions that know she’d hit the ground running in Congress—where, as a policy aide, she helped develop the $15 minimum-wage bill introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders.
The two candidates that I'm not sold listed in this article are Dennis Kucinich (D. OH) running for Governor of Ohio and Cynthia Nixon (D. NY) funning for Governor of New York. I’m skeptical of Nixon’s chances of unseating Governor Andrew Cuomo (D. NY) in the primary. As for Kucinich, I think The Nation still views him as the Kucinich we knew back in 2004 and 2008. They mention his strong support for banning fracking and assault weapons and hype him up as this progressive savior compared to real populist, former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau chairman, Richard Cordray (D. OH). For example, Kucinich is not a sincere candidate on issues like gun control and has been very Russian-friendly:
Cordray’s campaign fired back against Kucinich, accusing him of playing politics with the issue.
“Democrats should come together to find workable solutions to a problem as important as this — not turn it into a political football. It’s telling that Kucinich spent five years as a paid contributor on Fox News and didn’t once call for an assault weapons ban, and at one point even told Bill O’Reilly that gun control measures wouldn’t reduce violence,” Cordray campaign spokesman Mike Gwin said in a statement.
Kucinich told O’Reilly after the Sandy Hook massacre that Obama should put forth gun control proposals and Congress should “consider” them, but said that “All the gun laws you pass may not really reduce significantly the level of violence in our society.”
But those comments aren’t likely to be nearly as damning as some of his other remarks made on Fox and elsewhere over the past few years praising President Trump and dismissing any possibility of collusion between Trump and Russia during the 2016 election.
Kucinich called Trump’s inauguration speech “great” and a “message of unity,” and has been much less critical of Trump than most other Democrats – or than he’d been of President Obama, who he accused of committing a potentially “impeachable offense” for bombing Libya without congressional approval in 2011. He later called for a primary challenger against Obama in 2012.
He’s also repeatedly dismissed the Russia investigation.
“Enough of the BS about #Russia stealing the election. This is CIA & State Dept propaganda trying to legitimatize their increased hostilities towards Russia,” he wrote in a December 2016 Facebook post.
Kucinich hasn’t backed away from that view, accusing the “military-industrial intel axis” of unfairly targeting then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to damage the U.S.-Russia relationship, claiming the “deep state” is after the president, and calling Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian-American diplomat a “bunch of nothing.”
He repeatedly refused to tell TPM whether he thought the Russian government meddled in the 2016 election.
“The people I’ve talked to across Ohio, they’re more worried about Moscow, Ohio than Moscow, Russia,” he said dismissively.
Kucinich dodged one follow-up question: “We shouldn’t be meddling in any country’s elections and no country should be meddling in ours.”
When pressed further, he said he thought Russian citizens may have meddled, but refused to accept the widely held view of the U.S. intelligence community that the Russian government was behind attacks on the Democratic Party and American democracy.
“Um, did Russians, Russians, people of Russian nationality, attempt to meddle? That appears to be the case. Beyond that, the investigation is continuing. If I was working on this on a daily basis in Washington I’d probably be able to give you a better assessment. But I will say it’s not an issue in this election, and the Cordray campaign’s attempt to make this an issue just shows how stupidly out of touch they are,” he said.
That fits in with Kucinich’s overarching views for the past decade. A co-founder of the Congressional Russia Caucus, which sought closer relations with the country, Kucinich forcefully defended Russia’s 2013 invasion of Crimea and meddling in eastern Ukraine in a series of interviews with Fox News and Russian state media outlet Sputnik, while blaming American and NATO meddling in the country for the situation. He’s also repeatedly met with and defended Russia-backed Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad.
Cordray’s allies made it clear that he’ll go after Kucinich’s strange defense of Russia and Trump — with paid media, if necessary.
While I agree with the majority of names on the list, The Nation has drunk the Kool-Aid when it comes to Kucinich, propping up a fake populist, who praises another fake populist:
The populist, pugnacious approach has won him admirers throughout his career, which includes Congress, a brief stint in the state legislature and a couple of quixotic presidential campaigns.
But he also has struggled to explain statements and associations that many Democrats might find troubling.
They include his defenses of President Donald Trump, his unwillingness to condemn Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad, and his presence on the board of a foundation started by a former Texas congressman who published a racist newsletter.
In Cincinnati in late March, Kucinich was asked about his past statements questioning the need for a federal investigation into possible ties between the Russian government and the Trump campaign. Kucinich tried to deflect.
“The only thing I’m worried about is Moscow, Ohio,” he said, referring to a nearby village. But he insisted that he is not talking about foreign policy during the campaign.
It’s far from the first time his statements about Trump and Russia and his five-year tenure as a Fox News commentator have come up this year.
On Fox, Kucinich was a consistent critic of the Russia investigation, which has yielded 19 indictments and four guilty pleas. Those pleas include one by Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, whom Kucinich had earlier called the victim of anintelligence-community conspiracy.
Last year, Kucinich went on Fox and dismissed a story about the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower in which Trump’s son and campaign chairman hoped to get damaging information about Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton from a Russian lawyer. It was “a bunch of nothing,” Kucinich said.
In a Dispatch interview in January, Kucinich was asked what evidence he had to support his 2017 statement on Fox’s “The Sean Hannity Show” that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation was evidence of a “deep state” conspiracy against Trump. Kucinich offered only conjecture that didn’t relate directly to the investigation.
“It appeared that Donald Trump was going to take a new direction,” Kucinich said. “That’s what he promised. But what happened is that these same interest groups intervened and, at one point, they intervened to try to force policy changes. And if you follow these events carefully, they had a certain amount of success moving people around. What the American people care about is getting us out of wars, and that’s what Donald Trump, during his campaign, said he was going to do. Well, he hasn’t done that because the same apparatus has basically taken control.”
Kucinich also has demonstrated a reluctance to criticize Trump that he didn’t display toward fellow Democrat Barack Obama when he was president.
Pressed to comment on Trump statements that many have called racist and on the president’s relentless disparagement of the press, Kucinich said: “In this campaign, it’s very important for myself as a Democrat to have the capacity to bring back to the party those people who voted for Donald Trump because they thought the Democratic Party abandoned them. Those who want to make this primary simply about Donald Trump seem dedicated to losing the general election because, once again, Democrats are neglecting to address the concerns of the people: jobs, health care, education, retirement security.”
By contrast, when Obama in 2011 ordered the bombing of Libya, Kucinich, then a congressman, called that an “impeachable offense.”He called for someone to challenge the president in the 2012 Democratic primaries. And in 2013, he joined many Republicans in criticizing the Obama administration over the deadly 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
While The Nation didn’t endorse Kucinich, it’s disappointing they are giving him serious attention while completely ignoring these facts. They admit that some of these races are long shots, but giving Kucinich, who performs worst against Attorney General and GOP frontrunner, Mike DeWine (R. OH), is misleading. It’s offering false hope to its readers when they should be focusing on Cordray’s campaign. But I digress. I won’t ask you to donate or get involved with Kucinich’s campaign. While I do believe that Cynthia Nixon is putting pressure on Cuomo to take the progressive base seriously, I feel she’s only there to push Cuomo more to the left and to raise awareness to issues. Until I see polling showing her competitive, I’ll decline from backing her. But if you want to get involved with her campaign to light a fire under Cuomo’s ass, I fully support that. The rest of the candidates, I strongly urge you to donate and get behind Cordray’s campaign and the other candidates mentioned in this article: