Now, you probably don't know much about the policy views of Angie Craig or Paula Overby. I don't, either. But what little I do know about those two candidates leads me to believe that they are further to the left than your average Democrat.
I will also point out that in the five elections preceding this one, the Democrat had never come within 8 points of winning. I personally invested a ton of volunteer hours for a candidate who lost by 17 points in 2006. So Democrats can be excused for feeling at least a little bit of frustration over the 28,869 votes collected by independent candidate Paula Overby. An argument could be made (and has been) that Overby cost the Democrats their best chance at winning this seat in over a decade.
The reason I'm talking about this is that it just so happens that I was in the same room tonight with both Paula Overby and Angie Craig, and politics was discussed. In fact, politics and plans to defeat Jason Lewis were the whole point of the meeting. So one might expect that there would be some tension between these two women.
But there wasn't. To my knowledge, neither has announced a decision to run again --- or not --- in 2018. But when Angie Craig made what sounded an awful lot like a campaign speech, I saw Paula Overby applaud. And for her part, Angie made a special point of being friendly with Paula.
This is how it's supposed to work. Paula and Angie (and I) all share a common goal: making sure that Jason Lewis is a one-term congressman, and making sure that Donald Trump is a one-term president. It's clear that neither one of them has the time or the inclination to hurl insults at the other, or re-litigate the election outcome.
There are supporters of both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders who would do well to learn from Angie and Paula's example.
No comments:
Post a Comment