Peter Schiff is busy gathering petitions to get himself on the Republican ballot. He’s the true tea party candidate. Assuming that he gets on, and is willing to spend some of his own money, he could make the Republican primary interesting. He probably can’t win, but if he wants to have any chance to do so, he’s going to have to run an entirely negative campaign. He can be quite useful so far as the Democrats are concerned. He can test market the various approaches to driving McMahon’s negatives, and the Democrats, at least for the moment, can leave the driving to him.
It is a constant source of amazement to me that these tea party folks are willing to fall in line behind people who are so obviously uninterested in actually doing anything for the useful idiots they choose to exploit. As Ted Mann reports, Schiff attended on of the tea party weekly rallies in Stamford a few days ago, and had this to say about his alleged difficulty in hiring people to gather signatures:
Asked how the signature-gathering is going, he remarks that the campaign is “bringing in some professionals” from out of state to finish the job by the deadline.
“It’s hard to even hire people,” Schiff says. “Figured it’d be easy with all these unemployed people. They’d just as soon collect unemployment benefits, I guess.”
Yes, of course they would. Perhaps Schiff should ask those tea partiers how they manage to find the time to demonstrate weekly, on working days, during the day. I’ve often asked myself that question as I leave work in Norwich and see the mostly working age demonstrators toting their signs outside of Joe Courtney’s office. How many of those folks are on disability, worker’s comp, or unemployment? I don’t begrudge them the benefits, but I do wonder how they can fail to see the gap between their professed beliefs and the “socialistic” government programs on which many of them depend, and most of the rest cherish. You don’t, after all, see them toting signs denouncing Social Security, the most socialistic program of them all, though Schiff is eager to cut both it and the Medicare that his followers insist should be freed from governmental interference.
But there is nothing new under the sun. Schiff, a wealthy man who opposes Medicare and Social Security because he doesn’t need them, is just one of many politicians who has made a living out of mis-directing people’s resentments. For the moment, he’s useful, and here’s wishing him well for the next few months.
3 Comments
Very interesting quote. It may not be obvious, but only bona-fide residents of the state (who must also be registered Republicans) may circulate his petitions. If what he said is true, there may be an epic legal fight on the way to his qualification for the ballot.
That’s absolutely true.
In 2006 when I wanted to collect signatures for Ned Lamont, I learned that not only must you be a registered Connecticut Democrat to gather them, but you ALSO have to have been a Democrat for 90 days (if changing from the Republican party, like I did…don’t ask, it was simply a youthful indiscretion that I never got around to correcting until then).
I think we may want people to photograph the individuals collecting the signatures, for later use in a challenge. If the person collecting them ISN’T a CT GOPer, then every single signature they get is thrown out.
Wait a minute…doesn’t Linda McMahon have the resources to do this? What, do I have to do EVERYTHING around here?!? Get with it, Linda!
I was thinking the same thing when I read the article, based on my experience gathering signatures for Ned in 2006. We had to adhere to fairly strict procedures. One notable experience occurred when a friend from Ledyard, who had thought he was a registered Democrat, and I spent a grueling Saturday afternoon in the backwoods of Ledyard gathering signatures. He later discovered that he had actually registered unaffiliated when he and his wife moved to the town a number of years earlier so that day’s effort turned out to be all for naught.
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