Stephen Harrison Really Gets It

A great post by mole333 a fellow NYC blogger who is also following the Harrison v. Rep. Vito Fossella race. Add Daily Gotham to your RSS feeds if it isn't already on your radar.

I recently met Steve Harrison, the Democratic candidate running against corrupt Halliburton Republican Vito Fossella. Before meeting him, I mainly supported Harrison because I wanted to see Cheney buddy Fossella get the boot. But now I find I can really get behind Harrison because he is a great candidate.

One of the things I like about him is he understands what is at stake and how to stand up to the Republicans in Congress who have failed us on defense. For example, Steve Harrison put the Iraq war into almost perfect perspective. He gave credit for this perspective to one of his staff members, but it really says it all. Suppose for a moment Bush had not lied about Iraq. Let's suppose that Bush does bring stability and democracy to Iraq and the civil war calms down and we can pull out our troops. Would you, after that, feel safer than you did just after 9/11? No! Why? Because Iraq had nothing to do with the attack on America and whether we win or lose in Iraq has nothing to do with making us safer. Iraq was nothing but a DISTRACTION from the war against those who attacked us.

He went on to point out how we could secure our ports by installing scanners for cargo for a fraction of the cost of the Iraq war and it would have made us FAR safer. As it is less than 5% of what comes into port is checked. 95% of what comes into any American port could be anything including a dirty bomb. It is our main vulnerability and Harrison thinks we need to address that.

Fossella opposed securing our ports because "inspections would be too hard and too expensive." Of course the call is NOT for inspections but for scanners, not so different from the scanners at the airport. Fossella even claimed that the technology didn't exist! Well, the technology does exist (Harrison points out it is a glorified Geiger-Mueller counter) and even if it didn't, funny how that didn't stop Americans from FINDING the technology to defend themselves during other wars. Fossella did a typical Republican tactic of arguing against something that wasn't even proposed.

Another thing that struck me about Steve is that he recognizes this need to avoid using Republican terms for things and instead framing the dialogue to meet our Democratic values. Boy do we need that! Sadly, too many Congressional Democrats, and even aspiring Congressmen like David Yassky, fail to recognize how desperately we need to use our own terminology and take control of the dialogue. Steve gets this!