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Dianne Wilkerson appears to forget what a primary is for
By adamg on Tue, 09/23/2008 - 10:54pm
PolitickerMA reports that should the state Senator lose her recount, she'll run a sticker campaign in November:
"If it not successful," Wilkerson said referring to the recount, "I am prepared to run as a Democrat in a sticker write in campaign on the ballot in November."
If the convicted tax evader does lose the recount, she can't run as a Democrat, of course. Just ask Joe Lieberman.
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Comments
Diane is not a felon and has an excellent chance of winning
If she gets the stickers out now and keeps working, with the massive turnout expected, Wilkerson has an excellent chance of winning in November. The bien-pensant white South End/JP crowd won't be the only ones voting.
Also, I do not believe Wilkerson is a "convicted felon." I think the failure to file tax returns charge she pled to in 1997 was a misdemeanor. Please check your facts, you could be exposing yourself to a defamation lawsuit by calling Diane a "felon."
And, Lieberman won, didn't he?
you forgot about the other stuff
...like the lying she did to a grand jury investigating murder/manslaughter charges against her nephew, or the TWO cases, yes, TWO, of campaign finance fraud...both of which were settled by her paying hefty fines.
That said, you might be right- I'm not sure any of it was a felony, or she was actually convicted in court. Could be wrong. The woman does have a talent for walking on water.
No felony convictions
Wilkerson had convictions in the U.S. District Court here on four counts of income-tax evasion. Those were misdemeanors. She got 24-months probation, a $2,000 fine and six months of home confinement (house arrest in common parlance). She violated her curfew to go out to a night meeting without permission, which resulted in an additional 30 days in a half-way house.
She came close to being charged with perjury for her testimony in defense of a nephew in a stabbing. There wasn't clear enough evidence for the charge, much less a conviction.
Two years ago, a judge ordered her to pay over $13,000 to her condo association in overdue fees. She also had to make good on $5,000 in bounced checks to them. Again, these were not felonies.The judge ruled on a lawsuit by the condo association to get its money from her.
This year, she cut a deal with the state AG on repeated campaign-finance law violations. There are also not felonies. As far as I know, she has never been convicted of a felony.
Those are all very sordid, but if the hurdle is felony, she is below it.
She Never Apologized
For me, the issue for Senator Wilkerson related to her past is that she never apologized. Indeed, at a recent Ward debate with Sonia Chang-Diaz, she simply said "I will try to do my best," and shrugged, when asked what she would do in office to uphold campaign finance. The question was an excellent opportunity for her to level with her constituents and say what she did was wrong and won't happen again. That's all a lot of voters need, and we haven't gotten.
Also
Lieberman won, but he's really no longer a Democrat. Just look at the convention he went to. Then again, the way he won was by relying on quite a few Republicans who voted for him. I don't think many Republicans will vote for Senator Wilkerson.
Republicans? In Wilkerson's district?
They could likely all fit into that phone booth at Doyle's.
Fair point!
Though I was at one precinct last Tuesday and realized the entire group of volunteers *running* the polls were republicans!
Since there is no word for a misdemeanorer
I've changed "felon" to "tax evader."
How about "thief" as well?
The whole campaign contribution fiasco is a roundabout way of saying she stole money.
Semantics aside....
I'm no DW fan and live nowhere close to her district, but she's fully entitled to run her sticker campaign. Wonder if she can get Buddy Cianci to stump for her? ;-)
The word you want
might be "malefactor", though that is better applied to the people on Wall Street.
Femalefactor?
Personfactor?
Let's stop being sexist here :-).
She Still Won't Be a Democrat
The Democratic Party has decided, through the systems it has established for this election (the primary ballot) that Chang-Diaz is their Democratic candidate for that seat (barring recounts).
Wilkerson can run a sticker campaign, but she will get ZERO party support and be essentially useless as a legislator as a result. Not that she wouldn't make herself useless every time she faces the consequences of running a sore loserman sticker campaign as an independent out of spite ... and then expecting to return to the senate as if nothing happened.
Perhaps somebody should hand out earplugs at the state house if she gets elected. These could be used whenever she makes a federal case about getting the kind of sub-basement office space that anybody pulling a Full Lieberman Double 180 would get.
Yes there will be a massive
Yes there will be a massive turnout, which is bad for a sticker campaign. Many of the voters will vote before election day via absentee ballots, and those would by a large margin normally be Wilkerson people (older people tend to go with the machine, just the way it is) with no wilkerson on the ballot they will draw a line for the person on the ballot, Chang Diaz. Massive turnout also means you need to get stickers in the hands of more people to win the campaign. Chang Diaz is on the ballot so she already has that going for her, many people will just draw the line for her. She can also go out and campaign adding even more people to her tally. Wilkerson is not on the ballot so every person she gets has to know she is running, and she has to get those stickers in their hands. Wilkerson also has to compete with the media market because it will be covering the prez race, and a good chunk of the institutional volunteers she may have been able to pull from may very well be phone banking and in NH campaigning for Obama. Also dont expect her friends to stick by her against a Democrat on the ticket, they may not campaign against her but they will not come running to her side now.
Felon comment...
She may have been convicted of a crime at some point in her past, however this does not and SHOULD not exclude her from holding public office. May people have made mistakes in the past and have atoned for those mistakes. There are literally millions of people in this country for whom this is true. Should a 40 year old who was convicted of marijuana possession when he was 18 be forever excluded from becoming an elected official?
Diane Wilkerson lost in the primary, but she has every right to run as an independent. I'd rather she didn't because I don't think we need another Lieberman, but to use that slur as if it should somehow disqualify her is an insult to those who have paid their debt to society and just want to move on with their lives.
Why not attack her on the issues like we are supposed to do in public discourse?
In the past?
She's not a 40-year old convicted of holding a dime bag when she was in high school. She's a public official who has a long history of playing cat and mouse with the law - while in office. Starts to fall under the "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice ..." rule, I'd think.
By that logic ...
why is Teddy Kennedy still in office?
I never liked him until
I never liked him until recently, but I think the answer is because he got stuff done between drunken blasts and the occasional drowning. He has an impressive list of accomplishments, and it would be a hard argument to prove that he has not been representing the whole state ever since he got into office. I think its kind of crazy how he got away with all the stuff he did, but I think he got the free pass card because he did a good job otherwise.
Really?
You don't think there were some other things involved, like wealth or connections perhaps ... that and it was a different time.
I'm glad that the days of the blanket "important person" excuse for all sorts of nonsense are gone. BushCo has been trying to reinstate that "free pass for life" for certain priviged people who think they can live above and beyond the law, but it doesn't appear to be taking.
Oh Im sure with his name and
Oh Im sure with his name and connections and money came an ability to do things other people couldnt get away with, but I think he still did a good job overall, even back then. Keep in mind though that their are other people with fame and money and connections in Massachusetts who couldnt beat him either.
Well he is Catholic and seeing as some people feel that the Catholic Church in connection with the mob and the tri lateral commission run this state that of course could explain why he is still in office.
Black Helicopters
You forgot the black helicopters.
Free Pass
And yet he's still president.
You were saying?
I was saying ...
Would he even be a senator if he pulled that Chappy move now? Not likely.
Would he have been put in jail? Quite possibly.
He likely wouldn't have been president anyway - the 1970 Census and 1980 Census would have seen to that. Power shifted west and south.
Not getting a job that you probably wouldn't have gotten is a minor consequence for DUI with collateral damage anyway.
i wonder
would lieberman be insulted to be slurred as a wilkerson? what did he do wrong other than changing political affiliations? is that worse than not paying his taxes? skimming from the campaign funds? lying about death threats from southie?
I think the Lieberman switch
I think the Lieberman switch made sense because he was becoming less connected with the Democrats. They were moving left and he was moving right, to top it off his good friend was running for President as well on the republican side. Lieberman, in my opinion, was also justified in his swap as the people who he had worked with for years and supported turned their backs on him in the primary and supported the other guy (or just didnt support Lieberman.) So he was pretty much alienated from the party anyway. Wilkerson on the other hand had the support of members of the party in her primary, and her only great asset was the fact that she knew so many people and could presumably pick up the phone and fix a problem if needed. As a non democrat she wouldnt even have that for her.
Not to go too much off
Not to go too much off topic, but Lieberman is always a sore spot for me. The party didn't turn on him during the primary; the state party chair was suspected of still supporting Lieberman even after he'd lost the primary. Only two standing Democrat Congress people and no Senators endorsed Lamont in the primary, while Lieberman had the Clintons and many senators (including Obama) campaigning for him.
He was only able to run as an Independent in the general election due to a loophole in the election registration dates. That was the first year that the state primaries were held in August, but they hadn't changed the general election registration date to correspond. So rather than having to register as an independent before the primary, he had a few days afterwards. Otherwise he'd have to run a write-in campaign, which would have been interesting to say the least.
She's a habitual offender
Just look at some of the previous comments for her record.
But yes, she has the right to her sticker campaign.
and, in doing so....
sink the other democratic candidate in all possibility. I know the concept of all the republicans fitting into a phone booth at doyle's may be true... but who is Chang-Diaz running against?
i live outside the city, but i hope all y'all don't mind me reading along and watching this little political trainwreck from a distance.
No Republican is running for this seat
or for most of the other state legislative seats, for that matter.
It's going to be either Chang-Diaz, Wilkerson, or the Socialist Workers Party candidate (fat chance)
The Socialist Worker candidate
William Leonard, who's run in the past for governor and Chelsea city councilor at large and who is now an expert on South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Report from the Wilkerson rally
Chris Faraone was there: Wilkerson: On A Mission From God.
Among the fun feisty speakers: Chuck Turner, who basically told Chang-Diaz to get out of the 'hood and who warned her that even if she did win, she'd lose in 2010. Also on the speaker's list: Somebody who compared Chang-Diaz's win to Bush's election in 2000:
Since when is Sonia Chang-Diaz a colorless person?
Just sayin' ...
Also, some of the speakers at that rally are acting as if Sonia is some sort of stealth right-wing Republican. WTF?
Chang Diaz is a white male
Chang Diaz is a white male CEO of Lehman Markus who sits on the board of AIG and plays golf with Dick Cheney and George Bush. She was responsible for Al Gores loss in Florida and was the person who created ads against John Kerrys service in Vietnam. She was an advisor to Richard Nixon when she decided to bomb Cambodia. She made sure Massachusetts voted against Barack Obama in the primaries and has a love child with John McCain who later went on to cause hurricane Katrina.
Chang Diaz eats babies and spits on kittens in her spare time. When she is not worshipping the devil she is using transfats to bake poison cupcakes for orphans.
A vote for Chang Diaz is a vote for Satan himself.
that is
one of the funniest things i've ever read.
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name. But what's puzzling you is the nature of my game. I stuck around St. Petersburg, when I saw it was a time for a change. Killed the czar and his ministers, Anastasia screamed in vain.
I shouted out..."Who killed the Kennedys?"
Not to mention the Raymond's, the Woolworth's, the Kresge's, the Mickey Finn's, the Grant's, Jordan Marsh...
Suldog
http://jimsuldog.blogspot.com
And where is Patrick's office?
In the state house? No?
Probably meant the state Senate
Unless they somehow think Marie St. Fleur and Willie Mae Allen aren't really of color.
by the way ... what an insult
to every WHITE politician in the state house who supports Obama, and is working to get him elected. What, he's only going to listen to the the black one(s)? What kind of statement is THAT to make as an argument to support getting her back in.
Wow.
that there kind of makes me ill.
Why did she run for senate?
If she only wanted to represent one neighborhood? She could have just run for the house seat she had and stayed there if her goal was to speak for "her" place.
You want to be a senator? You have to reach out to other places because the districts are few and the constituents are many.
I think that little show
I think that little show they put on over there is why the people who were not from that neighberhood declined to vote for her. They are making it painfully obvious that only one type of person in that district should be represented. Her focus on one area above all others seems to have backfired on her, too bad for her huh.
maybe she can learn from Sam Hoon...
and have a rally in California, and fundraise, and get people behind her from all across the country.
Transparency in Politics
I support transparency in politics, and am therefore ready to cast my vote for the first candidate without any color whatsoever.
He's bold, he's bald
And he's a jackass.
Hey, got any more fake rape pictures to slander servicemen with, Chuckie?