You may remember Marisa DeFranco, the plain-talking, no-nonsense, old-fashioned working class liberal Massachusetts Democrat who filed more than enough ballot petition signatures to challenge Elizabeth Warren in the 2012 Democratic Primary — and then was kept off the ballot at the Democratic State Convention, which wanted a clear field for Warren.
The Democratic Party machine doesn’t seem to like DeFranco.
Maybe it was her comments about Elizabeth Warren’s Cherokee-gate:
“I’m not going to go into her mind and what goes on there. All I can speak to is what everyone else sees.”“The question also is with Harvard. If Harvard were better at having a diverse professorship, it would not have to put someone who appears as white as I am out there as minority.”“Even if she is 1/32 [Cherokee], diversity is about people being discriminated against based on what we see. You can’t say someone is a diversity hire if everyone in the general public would not identify the person that way.”
Or maybe they don’t like that she would have voted against Obamacare, and still doesn’t like the law, viewing it as a sell out to insurance companies. She also lambasts the misleading sales pitch:
“I would never have gone along with the party line that ‘if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor under Obamacare’ because, unlike Congressman Tierney, I would have read the bill and told you what was in it before it was voted on,” DeFranco said in announcing her candidacy this week. “Courage and leadership mean standing up to your own party sometimes.”
Whatever the reason, the powers in the Democratic Party are at it again, this time trying to damage DeFranco’s bid to unseat Democrat John Tierney in the MA-06 primary race.
Tierney barely squeaked through in 2012 against Republican Richard Tisei, even though Obama trounced Romney in the state.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recently ran a primary poll, which it touted to the press, showing Tierney in a commanding lead — but it left DeFranco out of the poll. As if she didn’t exist. Even though she is the only one who already has filed the requisite papers to make the ballot (and there’s no convention this time to knock DeFranco out).
According to the Lowell Sun, the DCCC is unapologetic about leaving DeFranco out of the poll:
Marc Brumer, a spokesman for the committee, said “the poll speaks for itself,” when asked why DeFranco was not included.
DeFranco is crying foul. She has issued a press release accusing Democrats of a War on Women against her:
War On Women In Massachusetts’ Sixth District
The Democratic Party holds itself out as the champion of women, but in a blatantly sexist move, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee commissioned a poll in our race and omitted Marisa’s name from the poll. Yes, the party that has howled about the “War on Women” left Marisa out of the poll even though she is the only candidate to date who has qualified for the ballot in the 6th District of Massachusetts. Keeping a candidate out of a poll effectively mutes her voice and keeps voters in the dark as to their choices in a race….This sexist double standard is unacceptable. Who needs Mitt Romney’s etch-a-sketch when the Democratic machine can just as easily write a woman off with an eraser? If only 18% of Congress is women, and there is only 1 Democratic woman governor in the whole country, whose fault is that?
I spoke with DeFranco tonight.
DeFranco stated to me that the “Democratic machine has lost all credibility on the so-called War on Women” considering how it has acted in MA-06.
DeFranco said she’s not “part of the club” and that the Democratic machine acts in MA-06 as if “it’s our tree house, girls stay out, we’ll take care of defending it.”
I questioned DeFranco as to whether she thought the DCCC was “putting its thumb on the scale” in favor of Tierney, and she agreed.
I also questioned how she could accuse the Democratic machine of a War on Women when it ran people like Elizabeth Warren. DeFranco stated that the big difference was that unlike Warren she’s not an “upper echelon” woman who has “access to money and rich friends to raise money for them.” She added, “only wealthy women need apply.”
“The Democratic Party can’t crow over the select list of women they’ve elected,” DeFranco said, since the Congress is nowhere near 50% women.
I don’t think DeFranco has made any more friends in the Democratic machine, with these comments.
But she’ll be on the ballot, so she doesn’t need to impress the machine.
(Featured image source: YouTube)
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