She thinks rifle magazines are a one-shot device that you toss out when they are empty.
Like those little round containers for birth control pills.
Posted on 03/03/2018 8:26:03 PM PST by nickcarraway
Thrust into the political spotlight after penning a viral Huff Post op ed about how she was severing ties with the Democratic Party's mainstream, Saira Rao now has her eyes set on her first elected position: Diana DeGette's longtime seat as the representative for CO-1, the congressional district that covers all of Denver as well as slivers of Arapahoe and Jefferson counties.
Rao's frustration with mainstream Democrats stems from her belief that her passion and long-term support hasn't been adequately received, and that not enough has been done by some in the party to counter increasing levels of racism in America.
Rao is a 43-year-old mother of two who moved to Denver five years ago, and she owns a media publishing company that focuses on putting kids of color in more children's books.
Unseating DeGette, a 22-year congresswoman who won her Democratic primary by nearly 73 points in 2016, is a monumental task, but Rao says she feels compelled to run to offer a contrarian voice to the Democratic establishment that she has come to disagree with.
Westword: Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into this position.
Saira Rao: I have been super-active in Democratic politics my whole life. My first vote was cast for Bill Clinton in 1996. I've volunteered for everybody. And just like everybody else, I became incredibly active after the disaster of November 2016. I really sort of dug in and started doing fundraisers and was donating to every single campaign, and kind of along the way I realized that centrist Democrats wanted something from me: namely, money and time. They didn't want to hear about my concerns; as our country has become more xenophobic in the last fourteen months, my concerns have largely been racial.
I grew up in Richmond, Virginia, in the 1970s, and the level of racism that my family has experienced since November 2016 has far surpassed anything that I experienced even in the capital of the old Confederacy. It's been scary. My late mother was called the n-word on Facebook (Rao is Indian-American). My husband was chased down the street and told to go back to his country and called an Arab and a terrorist. Good family friends had a twelve-year-old kid assaulted on the metro in D.C. for being Asian. My kids have been very, very scared. I would voice things like this to party folks, and they just didn't seem to care.
Everything kind of came to a head last fall over a whole bunch of things, but it led me to write an article for the Huffington Post about breaking up with the party over the fact that I felt completely like a pawn as a brown woman. And what ended up happening after that was a deluge of emails, a lot of them saying "Bye, Felicia," a lot of them saying "I'm with you, I'm no longer voting for Democrats," which is a very dangerous thing. And then a bunch of people said, "Why don't you run for office?"
Over Christmas, I really couldn't sleep, and I couldn't figure out what was going on. I realized that my issue with Democrats in very safe seats, who are not using their power and their privilege to advocate for the disenfranchised, is what was really bothering me.
Your campaign seems to be centered on race issues. But what sort of policies would you introduce?
I think we're at a real crisis point in this country when it comes to income inequality. Denver is sort of ground zero for that. There used to be affordable housing, [and now] it's crazy. The housing prices in this city have just risen astronomically, and I know a lot of federal officials say they don't have anything to do with that, and that's not true and that's intellectually dishonest. You learn in kindergarten that the hand bone is connected to this bone and that bone. Local, state and federal policy is all interconnected. What would be great is if we had people in Congress who say, "You know what, I don't know how much I can legislate around this issue, but you know what I'd love to do is recognize this is the real pain point among people black, white, brown, gay, straight; everybody in this city is suffering in that way." Let's put people together at the table and talk about how we can all come to some consensus. It can't be that real estate developers call the shots.
How do you plan to get the word out? What's your campaign strategy?
My campaign strategy is really reaching out to a lot of people who've been traditionally disenfranchised and getting my name out in those communities. Raising a lot of money, which we are in the process of doing. We are doing very well on that front, and hiring a huge ground team to actually get my name out.
How exactly do you beat an established incumbent in DeGette, who's been in power since 1996?
I think some interesting things are happening right now, just in terms of the election. Number one, this is the first year there's an open primary, so independents can vote. A lot of them will likely vote Democratic and will be progressives, and once I get my name out, likely vote for me. We've got a huge, highly watched gubernatorial race, so I think voter turnout is going to be a lot higher. And reaching with this huge field game — reaching people who typically have felt disenfranchised and get them registered to vote, and get them out to vote. That's how we win.
Do you fear that by launching this primary you risk dividing the Democratic Party and playing into Republicans' hands?
Number one, this is 100 percent a safe seat for Democrats. I wouldn't have done this otherwise. Number two, I think I want to re-frame that a little bit. It's not the right way to look at it. It's very obvious that the Republicans are our enemy, if you're going to look at it in this partisan way. But cleaning the Democratic Party and getting in new leadership and putting an A-team into the Democratic Party is equally as important as getting rid of the Republicans, because you can't beat the Republicans without your A-team. I'm not breaking up with the Democratic party; I'm breaking up with the Democratic establishment. They don't speak for me, and they don't speak for a whole lot of people who feel disenfranchised. As a matter of just logistics and practicality, I think Democrats assuming that all Democrats are going to show up for them in the midterms is not going to happen. We saw that black women largely won the election for Democrat Doug Jones (in Alabama's senatorial run-off in December). Let's see how that works out. Let's see how in-tune he is to their needs. I can tell you right now, a lot of progressive people don't feel like the Democratic Party is their party; they really don't. I think we need to have new leadership in there to really galvanize those folks, and really give it to the Republicans.
It's very problematic to have an institution that doesn't have term limits, Congress, and not have open and robust primaries. That's the only way you have choice. The party being wedded to incumbents hasn't worked. It has not worked. So let's try something different, like having open and robust primaries so that people have genuine choice and we can have a discussion of ideas, and people can choose who they feel represents them best instead of just giving them one option year after year, decade after decade. It doesn't make any sense.
The Republicans have used that to make everybody afraid of other brown people and terrorists, and that's why you see south Asian men gunned down.
I was actually in India (during the December 2000 Red Fort terrorist attack in Delhi). My cousin and I had just left, we'd been at the Red Fort, and we just left. We were at dinner that night, and the amount of Islamophobia that was being floated around the room was just shocking to me and my American sensibility. And he said to me, wait until Al Qaeda bombs America, and you'll see this there. And I said no way, America's above that.
I was actually at the World Trade Center on September 11. I was at the bottom of it; I was one of the people running up the street. I was doing a law school clinic at the U.S. Attorney's Office on Tuesday mornings that fall. A massively traumatizing experience, but I'm very grateful to have lived through it. I firmly believed that we wouldn't go down that road that I saw in India, and that hasn't happened. Look, we've always had xenophobia and racism and misogyny and etcetera. The Republicans have used that to make everybody afraid of other brown people and terrorists, and that's why you see south Asian men gunned down. That's why I get strip-searched every time I go to the airport, which is not great for me, and it's terrible for my kids to see that. Every single time.
I think what's happened, though, is the Republicans have framed everything by way of fear against others. I think what's happened with Democrats, though, is they've framed everything, by way of fear, against Republicans. And everything is about resistance and resisting Trump. Let's stop talking about Donald Trump. Let's stop reacting to every asinine, hateful thing he says and start talk about solutions about putting an alternate reality rather than fear. It feels very much to me right now [that] we're in this moment where culturally, all we're doing is succumbing to fear on both sides. Progressives like me are actually like, "Let's not do that. Let's stop doing that."
Should we be focusing on Republicans? No, we should be focusing on Americans. We should be focusing on us, and coming up with a positive path forward that works for everyone that is not fear-based.
A new Public Policy Polling poll shows Democratic challenger Jason Crow with a five-point lead on Republican incumbent Mike Coffman in Colorado's 6th District, previewing what's likely to be a competitive election once again this fall.
The poll was conducted by Public Policy Polling, a Democratic pollster, and it was done for End Citizens United, a Democratic Political Action Committee.
"It's clear that folks of the 6th District are tired of career politicians like Mike Coffman who say one thing at home and then go to Washington to do the bidding of their donors and vote with Donald Trump 95 percent of the time," Crow said in a statement to Westword. "From day one, this campaign has been about servant leadership and putting Coloradans first. We won't solve the same problems by electing the same people who got us here. Colorado is ready for a change this November, and I’m fighting to bring a new generation of leadership to Washington to get results.”
Meanwhile, Coffman spokesman Tyler Sandberg didn't appear impressed with the poll's findings, tweeting on Monday: "Dems have used this same tired playbook for the last three cycles — and where has that gotten them?"
History would agree with Sandberg. In 2014, polls showed Coffman and then-challenger Andrew Romanoff in a neck-and-neck race before Coffman pulled away in the final two months of the campaign, leading the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to pull money for ads supporting Romanoff in the final weeks before that election.
In 2016, Democrat Morgan Carroll appeared to be in a close race with Coffman through much of the campaign before the Aurora Republican clinched his fourth straight victory by a relatively comfortable eight-point margin.
But there are subtle signs of worry for Coffman, whose appeal to moderates on both sides of the aisle has helped him win three straight elections since the 6th was redistricted to his disadvantage in 2011. Coffman's 39 percent number in the poll is identical to Donald Trump's approval figure, perhaps an indication that some Democrats who may have voted for Hillary Clinton and Coffman aren't as willing to cross party lines. In a district that voted for Clinton by nine points, Coffman will likely need to woo at least some Clinton voters to his camp.
After pollsters told respondents about Crow's pledge to not accept corporate dollars, Crow's advantage in the poll jumped to ten points — potentially a sign that focused messaging could tap into some moderate voters. Sixty-one percent of poll respondents said they found special-interest money to be a major problem in politics.
Crow will have to be especially wary of the relatively high number of undecideds (16 percent), a figure that could favor an entrenched incumbent with higher name recognition, like Coffman. The survey's demographics, political party split (a one-point Democratic edge) and 2016 presidential vote figures closely mirror the district as a whole. The mid-February survey polled 751 voters with a margin of error of 3.6 percent.
Both Crow and Coffman are facing primary challengers; Crow is facing Levi Tillemann and Coffman is taking on Roger Edwards. Primary elections are in June, and the general election is on November 6.
So the Rats are not leftist enough for her...
Around 10 years ago I was robbed at gunpoint in the late night/early morning hours a block from home by two hispanic youths who repeatedly called me the n-word (I'm not black or brown).
The first officer got the hell out of the area (criminals with guns!). The second one I talked to (several cars were doing a DWI task force) took my statement, gave me a case number. Never got a call back. Never got asked to look at faces, etc. Never turned up in the registry of violent crime incidents in my neighborhood.
So tell me again how racism "is on the rise" since Trump took office???
Unfortunately, DeGette will probably be around as long, or longer, than Pat Schroeder. I think DeGette got ~70% of the Denver vote last election.
That’s okay, there is NO position too far Left to be called “an extremist”. Just what is “achievable” or what voters will elect (you can then do whatever you want once in power).
Someone should question her, especially since she’s a Muzzie sympathizer.
She thinks rifle magazines are a one-shot device that you toss out when they are empty.
Like those little round containers for birth control pills.
also read here
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/brown-women-democratic-party_us_5a31a32de4b07ff75b001456
I have a sister in law who writes children’s comic books and stories for the EU in Brussels. Early childhood mind programming kind of stuff to be on message with the goals of the governments. Little Klaus and little Heidi need to be primed for the future.
One better. Just make catching a bullet illegal. Problem solved.
Yup. She doesn’t like hardcore Marxists like DeGette, so she’d rather elect ultra-Stalinists like herself.
Where do you go when the democrats are not liberal enough?
If kids would start eating magazines instead of Tide Pods, gun crime would be over.
Re Where do you go when the democrats are not liberal enough?
Try San Francisco, LA, Oakland, Chicago, (once it was Detroit that was run by the Communist Party - Coleman Young, Maryanne Mahaffey and Erma Henderson), NY City, New Haven, Ct. and Austin, TX among other Democrat political/educational shitholes.
“Democratic” what happened to proper english? It’s “democrat”.
“two hispanic youths who repeatedly called me the n-word (I’m not black or brown).”
One of the problems with modern culture is people don’t know the language and don’t know how to speak. They use words to mean what they mean them to mean and not what they actually mean. If they pronounced it “nigga” with an “a” at the end, they probably didn’t mean it to designate race. I have heard it used with an “a” to seemingly mean, “you” or “hey” or as a term of endearment or just as verbal punctuation like an exclamation mark.
Also, talking like a black thug probably seems more intimidating than speaking normal, understandable English. That would be a type of “display” behavior, like a cat puffing up to look more intimidating.
I wasn’t aware that south Asian men were being gunned down..........Does she mean by other thugs or LEOs?
There was no endearment meant when he was pointing a gun at me demanding that I get on the ground and throw my wallet. He said and meant NIGGER.
This left wing buying hates Trump? Hey, *itch, why not reach across the aisle and help America and Americans?
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