Sam Adams Alliance

By Rachel Stewart

For Ken Vaughn and virtually any other private citizen not named Romney, Kerry, Roosevelt, Kennedy or Bush, running for Congress is a costly proposition. Of course, it’s costly even if you have pots of money. But for most of us, seeking public office at the national level comes at life-altering financial sacrifice. (Even a Kennedy, as Romney likes to remind us, sometimes has to mortgage one of his houses to remain competitive.)

Vaughn is a traffic engineer and small business-owner, but he is prepared to make such a sacrifice. He wants to unseat Rep. Gerald Connolly, a seemingly well-entrenched two-term Democrat from Virginia’s 11^th congressional district. To that end, Vaughn has spent at least $100,000 of his retirement fund just to get into the race.

CC courtesy of Gage Skidmore

By Alan Pell Crawford

That 100 Tea Party activists have come together to endorse Newt Gingrich for the Republican presidential nomination is good news for Gingrich, who won the South Carolina primary and might well win in Florida.

But this endorsement does not necessarily portend well  for other tea partiers. This assessment, mind you, has little to do with Gingrich himself, his opinions or his character. It has a lot to do, however, with the building of a political insurgency, which, after all, is what tea partiers say they want to achieve.

A few weeks ago, in a New York Magazine report on the Occupy Wall Street protestors, John Heilemann warned against writing them off just because cold weather has driven them back inside.

CC courtesy of Maryland General Assembly

By Rachel Stewart

Howard Gorrell has an admirably low tolerance for foolishness. Born deaf, he rejects the term “hearing-impaired” as too p.c., and does not allow this handicap to limit his activities—or his activism.

Gorrell’s most recent cause: redistricting in his native Maryland. Over six weeks this past fall, he attended not one, not two, but all 12 redistricting hearings across the state, determined to end partisan gerrymandering. In fact, the self-styled “deafie” was the first speaker at the hearings to use the word “gerrymander,” but hardly the first to think it.

Congressional districts, Gorrell testified, should be based on population, natural geographic boundaries and good sense. Counties, for example should be kept intact. Districts should have reasonable shapes.

By Alan Pell Crawford

With the number of “independents” in this country rising, the political class is in a tizzy about how to respond. The President’s advisors, for example, are painfully aware that one in five Democrats have left the party since his election and that his approval rating among independents has plummeted. But Republicans are also worried about independents. This is why party leaders want them to nominate Mitt Romney who they believe will do better with this favored constituency than will more ideological conservatives.

But what makes these party leaders so sure? A Pew Research Center study suggests that the conventional wisdom by which political professionals live and die is flat wrong. The conventional wisdom holds that independents are “moderates” who reject the “extremes” of right and left.  There’s scant evidence at all that independents are, as the Daily Kos puts it, “a sort of walking army of Midwestern Lutheran insurance actuaries.”

By Alan Pell Crawford

Linda Chavez in The New York Times says primary elections aren’t helping the Republicans, who would benefit from “a greater role for elected officials in selecting the [presidential] nominee.”

Both parties, the former Reagan administration official writes, “suffer from primary electorates that differ significantly from the parties’ general election voters. Why should a sliver of the electorate in states like Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina have such a prominent role in picking the party’s standard bearer?”

By Alan Pell Crawford

Florida lawmakers are tearing each other to pieces over the new congressional maps proposed by their Republican-majority legislature. That’s peculiar, since the most immediate and visible casualty of redistricting is likely to be another Republican.

The potential victim is freshman Rep. Allen West, an outspoken Tea Party favorite whose district represents West Palm Beach. (West is also one of only two African-American Republicans in the U.S. House. The other is Tim Scott of South Carolina.)

The new map removes Republican-heavy Palm Beach Gardens from West’s district and grafts it on to a neighboring one represented by another member of the Party of Lincoln, Tom Rooney, a two-termer. It adds to West’s constituency two patches of land whose inhabitants historically elect Democrats.

West, the Huffington Post reports, “is apparently expendable to the new plan’s architects.” In their defense, they insist they are simply doing the best they can to abide by a November 2010 amendment to Florida’s constitution that prohibits them from protecting incumbents or considering party membership, period.

CC Image courtesy of Tom Arthur

By Alan Pell Crawford

The morning after the Iowa caucuses, Kathleen Parker spoke for the whole Beltway intelligentsia in announcing that regardless of which Republican candidate Iowans preferred, “it doesn’t really matter.” Mitt Romney would be their presidential candidate whether Iowans preferred him or not, and all that remains to be decided is who will be his running mate.

Jacob Weisberg in Slate, trying somewhat pathetically to distinguish himself from the rest of the pack, would have us believe he’s the only one to reach precisely the same conclusion as Parker. “The media will desperately try to persuade you there is still a Republican race,” he wrote the same day. “Do not pay attention,” because Romney’s got it sewed up.

by Leo Linbeck III

Early in Waiting for Superman, educator Geoffrey Canada tells the story that was the inspiration for the film’s title. As a young boy, Dr. Canada believed that, one day, Superman would arrive in his neighborhood and “save the good people.” But when Canada was in the fourth grade, his mother gave him the bad news: There was no such thing as Superman.

It is a poignant story, an inflection point in his life when he finally understood that “there was no one coming with the power to save us.” It was up to him. And, years later, this talented teacher worked with his neighbors in Harlem to do precisely that: save his community.

Recently, the Republicans have been acting like the young Dr. Canada. They’re waiting for Superman to save them.

By Rachel Stewart

Mark Grapin and his sons have prevailed in their effort to keep the tree house he built for them this past spring upon returning from Iraq.  In October, we brought you the story of the crusade the northern Virginia dad was on to save the splendid wooden structure from destruction at the hands of the Fairfax County Board of Zoning Appeals.

Back then, the county Zoning Board, acting on the complaint of an anonymous neighbor, was perilously close to condemning the tree house for violation of an obscure ordinance prohibiting “accessory structures.”  But on November 30, the board granted Grapin a “variance” allowing the tree house to remain standing for at least five years.

In a show of appreciation to the community for their support, Grapin planned to hang a “Thanks, Fairfax” sign outside his house.