Peace, Justice, Principle
Rick Green: A Lot At Stake In 1st District:
With extinction of the middle class, another Great Depression and the rule of law on the line, you would think we’d be hearing just a little bit more about the race in the First Congressional District.
I participated in a candidate forum on Sunday at St. Bridget’s Church in Manchester. It’s the only opportunity I’ve had so far in this election to discuss issues in public with the incumbent Democrat John Larson and his Republican challenger Joseph Visconti. With the commercial media focused so completely on the presidential election, there’s precious little to help voters decide which congressional candidate to support, especially those who might be disposed to vote for a non-Democrat/non-Republican.
The Connecticut League of Women Voters is sponsoring a candidate forum in my district, but I’m not invited to participate because, according to the decision-makers at the League, I’m not a serious candidate. The League didn’t tell me exactly what the criteria for seriousness are, but they were clear on this: I haven’t raised enough money. I made a complaint, but I don’t expect to get anywhere with it.
There’s some irony in the League’s decision. The League was kind enough to invite me to submit answers to questions for its on-line voters’ guide. I put some work into the answers, exhausting the word-count limit, and I tried to cram as much information and detail as I could into each response. I visited the site to see what the other two candidates had submitted. John Larson’s responses refer voters to his web site for answers (there are no answers on his web site), and Joe Visconti gives brief, general responses with little detail and no commitments. Anyone consulting the League’s guide would conclude from the three sets of responses that I’m the only serious candidate and would be surprised to hear that I was disqualified from the League’s candidate forum.
Channel 3 also seems determined to keep me out of the public eye. Dennis House interviewed me for eight minutes in June on “Face the State,” but the station didn’t archive the segment for over two months, impeding my petition drive. Interviews with Democrats and Republicans were featured prominently on the show’s web site, but I had to press hard for a couple of months to get my interview posted. This past Sunday “Face the State” featured Larson and Visconti, but Dennis didn’t call me.
The lesson of all this is not that I’m unelectable. If ever there was a year to vote against Democrats and Republicans, this is the year. The lesson is that voters will have to discuss the issues in this congressional election among themselves. The commercial media aren’t going to cover it, and they especially aren’t going to give a dissident candidate a soapbox. So when you talk to people who vote in the First District, ask which candidate they’re supporting for Congress and why. Send them to my website. Send them to CT-N, which taped the forum on Sunday at St. Bridget’s and will soon have the event available on-demand on the CT-N website. If you don’t discuss this election with people you know, it probably won’t get discussed at all.
On June 22, WFSB broadcast an interview with me by Dennis House on “Face the State.” Over the next several weeks, I visited the program’s website every so often, where interviews are archived and linked. Mine didn’t appear, and so, around the end of July, I dropped an email to Dennis:“Dennis, I notice that interviews with Republican Joe Visconti and Democrats Jim Himes and Joe Courtney are archived and linked from the Face the State website, but the interview with me (Green Party) isn’t. What criteria are applied to decide which interviews get archived there? Steve”
I didn’t get a reply, and so I figured somebody was going to archive my interview. Didn’t happen, but I kept returning to the site. Felt a little like a sucker at a slot machine, pulling a mouse instead of a lever and coming up a loser every time. On August 18, almost two months after my appearance on TV, I wrote to WFSB’s news director, Dana Neves:
“After my interview several weeks ago for ‘Face the State,’ Dennis House told me the clip would be linked from the program’s web page. Interviews with other candidates for Congress are linked from the site, but my interview never appeared. I emailed Dennis to find out more about the omission, but he hasn’t answered. Please let me know what criteria are applied to decide which interviews are excluded from the web site.”
She never answered, but yesterday I received an e-mail from Dennis House: “It should be on there. I’ll look into it.”
I’m skeptical, but I’ll keep on looking.
Editor’s note: Happy ending to this story. Interview is at http://www.wfsb.com/video/17497866/index.html
Green Party congressional hopeful Steve Fournier, of Hartford, offers a strikingly different agenda than those put forward by major party candidates. “I think our country is in the toilet and I’m willing to go in there and pull it out,” Fournier said. “Cleaning up Congress is a dirty job … and somebody has to do it.” Full text of article
