![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Niki Tsongas (widow of former US Senator Paul Tsongas) opened up her campaign to replace the retiring Marty Meehan in the Massachusetts 5th Congressional District seat in Congress. Her kickoff was in one of the courtyards of my condo building[1]. There were probably 150-200 people there standing in the rain[2].
Her speech was fairly short, and covered five main points (beyond the usual "rah, rah, I have roots here!"):
* End the war in Iraq.
* Health care system is broken.
* Education is important.
* Improve border security and defense (citing 9/11 and the Hurricane Katrina debacle as two major failures).
* Global warming is bad. Alternative energy is good.
She did not cover these points in any particular detail -- then again, her total speech time was no longer than 15 minutes. Of them, I am most worried about her push for border security: as currently implemented, "border security" includes that idiot fence along the US/Mexico border as well as a ludicrous lack of inspection of imported cargo.
Tsongas' website is unfortunately short on detail on these positions as well; perhaps she will expand the one-paragraph blurbs into more detailed position papers in the future.
Tsongas is a good speaker, though not one of the best. She may improve with practice, who knows.
I don't know who I'm going to volunteer for in this race. Other candidates include Lowell city council member Eileen Donoghue, State Representative (37th Middlesex) Jamie Eldridge (a clean elections candidate! Kudos there.), State Representative (17th Essex) Barry Finegold, and State Representative (19th Middlesex) James Miceli.
[1] I saw people setting up the stage for this last night and asked what was going on. One of the people involved told me, and I figured I could make an 8 AM speech if I only had to walk a couple hundred feet.
[2] I heard one of the people there, I think one of her campaign workers, saying that the crowd looked like 500-750 people. I looked around, did a sample count of about 35, and figured he'd be lucky to have 200.
Her speech was fairly short, and covered five main points (beyond the usual "rah, rah, I have roots here!"):
* End the war in Iraq.
* Health care system is broken.
* Education is important.
* Improve border security and defense (citing 9/11 and the Hurricane Katrina debacle as two major failures).
* Global warming is bad. Alternative energy is good.
She did not cover these points in any particular detail -- then again, her total speech time was no longer than 15 minutes. Of them, I am most worried about her push for border security: as currently implemented, "border security" includes that idiot fence along the US/Mexico border as well as a ludicrous lack of inspection of imported cargo.
Tsongas' website is unfortunately short on detail on these positions as well; perhaps she will expand the one-paragraph blurbs into more detailed position papers in the future.
Tsongas is a good speaker, though not one of the best. She may improve with practice, who knows.
I don't know who I'm going to volunteer for in this race. Other candidates include Lowell city council member Eileen Donoghue, State Representative (37th Middlesex) Jamie Eldridge (a clean elections candidate! Kudos there.), State Representative (17th Essex) Barry Finegold, and State Representative (19th Middlesex) James Miceli.
[1] I saw people setting up the stage for this last night and asked what was going on. One of the people involved told me, and I figured I could make an 8 AM speech if I only had to walk a couple hundred feet.
[2] I heard one of the people there, I think one of her campaign workers, saying that the crowd looked like 500-750 people. I looked around, did a sample count of about 35, and figured he'd be lucky to have 200.
