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What a mangled mouthful of a name ... "Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky". I fondly remember the Rush Limbaugh TV show in 1993. MMM was one of his early targets, and I always wondered whether his exposing of her was significant in her political career crashing and burning less than 2 years later.

As I remember it, she swept into Congress on the coattails of Bimbo Bill, by aping his "New Democrat" mantra - ie that the Republicans were in reality the tax-raisers, while these New Democrats were bonafide tax-reducers. (C'mon, let's show that GHWB Read My Lips snippet for the million and oneth time....)

She ran as a New Dem in a fairly conservative CD near Philly that hadn't had a Dem representing it in just about forever. Her stump speech over & over was "I will NEVER raise your taxes!! I will LOWER them!" And in the Democrat-tide year of 1992, she won the race.

Then a few months into the Klintoonarchy, she came to Rush's attention when the Dem House leadership (Foley et al) forced her to vote for Beelze-Bubba's first major tax increase. She begged & begged to get on the list of "Permission To Vote Against My Party's Leadership Due To Probable Tough Fight In Next Re-election Cycle".

But there were large numbers of other Dems who were desperate to get onto that list, far more than could be allowed without the entire measure going down. Which meant the Dem leadership had to prioritize the list and establish the required cut-line in order to get as many Desperate Dems onto it as possible, without killing the measure.

One big problem for incumbents is that the way these types of massively arm-twisted votes go, is that the party in control wins the vote by the exact margin of one, count 'em, *ONE* vote. This allows their opponent in the next election cycle to trumpet the fact that "YOUR REP IN CONGRESS provided the crucial game-winning(losing) vote that gave us this horrendous bill that is so unpopular in our District! It is fair to claim they are SOLELY responsible for it, because a last-minute conscience-prodded switch of their vote would have saved us from this monstrosity."

Since The Honorable Minnie-Mickey-Mousey-LeMizSkink was a first-termer, the rules of seniority placed her well below the cut line. She was forced to vote for the huge Tax Hike of '93.

So Rush was gleefully playing soundbites of her No-Tax-Pledge-Which-I-Promise-Cross-My-Heart-Hope-To-Die stump speeches - I believe on both his TV & Radio shows. This spotlight he shone under her rock greatly raised her ... "visibility" shall we say.

In the Great Political Tsunami of '94, she sank like a rock.

In fact, the day after the election, she was the number one race outside of my own state that I yearned for news of. That didn't take long to find, as her race was decided early enough to make it into all the papers the next day.