The 74-year-old Ed Markey is running for reelection to the Senate here in Maskachusetts, The 39-year-old Joe Kennedy III, whose primary qualification is being a Kennedy, is running against him. Whom to vote for?
Ed Markey advertises on Facebook that he is not old. In fact, he is so young that AOC likes him:
Text: “Progressive leadership isn’t about your age. It’s about the age of your ideas and your commitment to fighting for what’s right, even when it isn’t easy. That’s what my partnership with @AOC is all about.”
If we average Markey’s age and AOC’s age (30), we would get the age of a person whom an American business might trust to serve as a manager?
No Republican can win in November, so the real contest is the September 1 primary among Democrats. (Though, in fact, all of the other candidates on my primary ballot are running unopposed. So there will be two successive ballots in which nearly every candidate is unopposed!)
Why doesn’t AOC like Joe Kennedy III? Wikipedia says that he supported the Green New Deal (we can prevent climate change from killing anyone who somehow escapes coronadeath). Kennedy has an elite educational background: BB&N (where students actually got taught this year, unlike in the Massachusetts public schools), Stanford, Harvard Law School. Maybe AOC is worried that Kennedy will follow the old rule: “If you’re not a liberal at twenty you have no heart; if you’re not a conservative at forty you have no brain.” As Kennedy gets older he will begin to listen to his buddies from Stanford and Harvard Law School about how taxes are too high?
Readers: How should I vote in the primary? (Wisdom of crowds: Markey leads Kennedy)
(Among registered Republicans, those who #BelieveScience and #RespectScience have the option to vote for a real scientist (PhD in systems biology), Shiva Ayyadurai (also the inventor of email). A sign among the righteous suburbanites, many of whom have “We Believe… Science is Real” signs in their yards:
Next best thing to voting for Dr. Fauci! The inventor of email’s opponent in the tilting-at-the-windmills exercise in futility (a Republican primary in MA) is a law firm partner, Kevin O’Connor.)
Related:
- “Kennedy allies sweat as Massachusetts Senate race tightens” (Politico, August 12): Single-issue climate groups — including the Environment America Action Fund and another super PAC called United for Massachusetts — have spent nearly $3 million boosting Markey’s campaign.
Surprised you are are registered Dem, Phil. Is that because notwithstanding all your carping you approve of what they do or is it that if you are a citizen of a one party state like Mass and you don’t identify as a Dem you essentially don’t get to vote? Though the later is like identifying as a woman or trans or a minority because they get more free stuff then men. Anyway I would vote for the Kennedy because he is a the lineal heir to The Noble Earl of Hyannis (a/k/a “The Liberal Lion”) and therefore entitled to hereditary privilege in your Faire Commonwealth. And were it not for a twist of Cruel Fate might he not also be able to trace his noble lineage to The House of Kopechne?
Jack: I hope you didn’t think that I was registered Republican, the Official Party of Hate (#Deplorable). I am registered Independent, which allows me to vote for my beloved Libertarian candidates in the general election and request a Democrat ballot for the primary so that I can have some control over politics (the general election vote being irrelevant here in Maskachusetts, but given the number of unopposed candidates this year in the Democrat primary, it turns out that my primary vote is also irrelevant).
(I vote Libertarian in order to be counted as a vote for smaller government, not as an endorsement of a specific candidate. I was pretty unhappy with the last guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Johnson I absolutely hate marijuana as a business and he was CEO of a “cannabis” company. To me this is a total scam given that we’re talking about a weed that anyone can grow. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CBDS?p=CBDS&.tsrc=fin-srch is the company that he was CEO of. The stock was over $10 per share. Now it is 57 cents/share. But I also have been a long-time Tesla skeptic and the market has proved me wrong, wrong, wrong.)
I listened to part of their third debate yesterday as they sniped at each other over who was more Racially Just (Kennedy was in some kind of racist fraternity at Stanford, and of course Markey voted for the 1994 crime bill that put all those Black people in prison), competed over how many trainloads of taxpayer money they could spend, who was more responsible for the negative tone of their campaign, and who would do more in the future to atone for their past sins against progressive ideals. You can tell the race is tightening because they worked so hard to out-Righteous each other.
Kennedy sounded overmatched against Markey, but frankly neither of them sounded very sure of themselves. They were both extremely mindful that a few thousand votes could cost them the election, and so their answers were as evasive as possible. Neither of them wanted to expose any vulnerability to losing even a handful of votes, so the whole thing was a dizzying mess. There was a general consensus that much more money must be spent, an endless river of money, the only question is how many tributaries they need to create and where they should go.
The highlight was listening to each of them try to dance around the issue of school reopenings. The moderator tried gamely to put each of them on the spot in the Teacher’s Union (STAY CLOSED!) vs. Charlie Baker (up to each town to decide) debate. Kennedy was conflicted, Markey wants to make sure every child has internet access and a computer. Neither of them would make the binary choice of agreeing with Baker or the Teacher’s Union. They just would not do it.
The other big question was whether Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (Boston Marathon Bomber) should now be eligible for parole. Kennedy thinks he should be “but the victims need to be heard loud and clear” because being eligible for parole doesn’t mean he’ll get it, and Markey says he generally supports parole, “except for terrorists.”
The moderator asked each of them: “When was the last time you cried?” Kennedy said: “Yesterday.” and Markey cried last Sunday, according to him. I thought that was the most important question they answered.
I know I cried when I saw my last tax bill. Nobody asked them: “Do either of you have a plan for ways to save taxpayers money by making our government more efficient and smaller?”
By the way, for such an important debate in a tightening race, you cannot find it *anywhere* online. Once the livestream ended, apparently nobody has posted a full video of the last debate anywhere on the web. If anyone can find a video of the entire third debate, please post it. I’ve looked everywhere.
I would vote for neither. I think Massachusetts should open the primaries and the Senatorial debates, in particular, should be bipartisan, with all the candidates on stage together. We know that no Republican can ever win in Massachusetts but it would be good theater to see them all on stage together.
My prediction is that Markey will prevail. He started slow, but he’s got big money behind him now. The debates are over and going into the final days of the race, I think Markey is going to run the ground game better. I think more people in the media are behind him, even if that support is subtle. He has more support among the Warren and AOC acolytes, his record of moving trainloads of money to Massachusetts over more than four decades is beyond compare, and he’s not an invalid yet. Kennedy is going to have to wait until he quits. Plus, he’s a friend of Liu Zhijun, the Chinese Minister of Railways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Markey#/media/File:Beijing-Tianjin_High_Speed_Train.jpg
By the way, I’ve seen more ads for Ed Markey on YouTube in the past two weeks than any other advertisement, period. The one I keep seeing highlights his endorsement by the Boston Globe. The next four (or six) years are going to be all about moving tremendous amounts of money around and restructuring America as a Socialist-with-a-capital-S country, and Ed Markey has been preparing for this day for more than 40 years. He has a shunt in every artery of federal money in Washington. He is ready. He’s going to feel like he’s thirty years younger.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/07/28/opinion/send-ed-markey-back-senate/
Addendum: I thought I should remind people that Markey indicated he usually supports parole, “except for terrorists.” Markey, of course, hates the NRA and all gun owners equally. San Francisco designated the NRA a Terrorist Organization, and I think Markey would support that designation if he ever had to vote on it in the Senate. I also have the feeling that in the next Congress, anyone who violates the coming Assault Weapons Ban and other firearm restrictions will be prosecuted as a domestic terrorist, and Markey won’t want them to have parole, either.
I am also registered Democratic but more often vote GOP. I probably lean red, but I’ve lived in deep blue cities all my life where you would want to vote in the primary, and I’ve never been impressed enough with the GOP to be partisan about it, my outlook is more populist. This year I voted against both Donk incumbents in the primary, often I have participated in one candidate primary and even general elections so its rare for incumbents to get primary challengers, and one challenger actually won, and the other came close. That is really rare in my experience.
I would be happy to vote for Dr. Shiva in the general, who has been one of the few semi high profile people to contradict the plague narrative. Also of note that a Kennedy is one of the leading critics of the medical establishment, but unfortunately its not the one running in this primary.
We need term limits for all elected office holders all across the country. The limit can be based on the position, the length of the position and / or some other variations but a simple one. After when the term has expired, the office holder can run again but must first take 1 term break. For example, a senator may have up to 3 terms in a row (I think 2 is better but that will make it much, much harder to pass such a law). Once that’s up, s/he must stay away for 1 term before s/he can run again. And, I’m OK if during their absent, they run for another office before coming back to their original one.
The media (I will keep calling on them because they have become political) and the public make a joke of how countries in the Middle East, Africa and Russia to name some, have dictators that stay in power for life but yet they fail to see that we have it worse here in the States.
Holding an office should not be viewed as permanent job. Term limits is the only way to drain the swamp.