Not All Turkeys are Thanksgiving Turkeys

Not a Political Turkey. A real one.

I was very taken by the “Top Ten Political Turkeys” posting today at the Chron’s Texas on the Potomac blog. Taken because it summarized so well the races we all watched with wide-eyed incredulity as these turkeys made one blunder after another. I can't even say "Sharron Angle" without laughing.

However, I don’t agree with some of the picks because I think some of them are simply in a class of their own, and I am partisan by nature.

But I will concede that Martha Coakley, who lost her Senate race to Republican Scott Brown, a moderate conservative in an otherwise liberal state, did so with an unbelievably weak-kneed campaign against a guy who makes women’s hearts go pit-a-pat.

And Alan Grayson, who made those of us on the left grin with his bi-polar antics in Congress was just too polar for his Florida constituents, especially with his over-the-top “Taliban Dan” label that didn’t quite sit with them very well.

But that’s it. Russ Feingold was targeted by conservative PACs. His fate was sealed when Citizens United became the law of the land. And Bob Bennett can be as conservative as you want but when he did the right thing in voting for Bush’s TARP bill, he was done for in ultra-red Utah.

And putting Alvin Greene at the bottom of the list, behind Feingold, clearly shows a sense of misplaced priorities. Greene was a disaster. And while I doubt that Vic Rawls could have won in a race against Neoteabagger Jim DeMint, Greene’s candidacy clearly showed voter ignorance/apathy in that primary.

And I have to give a sigh of relief that one turkey never made the list, and never even captured national attention because this turkey was an embarrassment of cosmic proportions. The turkey to which I refer is none other than Kesha Rogers, the recent Democratic candidate seeking to oust Pete Olson from Tom DeLay’s old seat here in TX-22.

Kesha Rogers, with her cadre of LaRouchies mounted a laughable campaign against a well-funded DC Beltway insider. In this anti-Obama year, Rogers thought she had an edge on her opponent as she was the only one calling for the impeachment of Barack Obama, I guess for cutting back on the manned space program at NASA.

Or maybe because he is a puppet of the British monarchy. She believes that, too.

Kesha Rogers was such a nutcase that the SDEC, the executive committee that manages things between elections among other things, passed a special ruling that allowed Democratic Party members and party chairs to ignore her candidacy.

The fact that she garnered 28,783 votes in the General Election sickens me to no end. Admittedly these were ultimately straight ticket votes, but I also find it noteworthy that the under votes in that particular race were on the high side.

In Fort Bend County, 3,467 voters or nearly 4% of those who voted chose “none of the above” in the CD-22 race. This is even more significant if you look at the county-wide races where under votes for the down ballot races were on par with those in CD-22 which is but 1 of 3 congressional districts in Fort Bend. And the CD-22 race was at the very top of the ballot.

The inevitable conclusion is that there were more than just a few of us straight ticket voters who deselected the Democratic candidate on a ballot with the CD-22 race on it.

So while we can be thankful that this turkey never made it in the news in any significant way, not coming even close to how the media has covered the guilty verdict in the trial of our Tom Turkey, former congressman Tom DeLay, we can also be thankful in the small victory that so many voters were turned off by the LaRouchite. A “Democratic” candidate who was so far from being a Democrat that Ron Paul looks like a flaming liberal in comparison.