In this corner, weighing in at 155 pounds, the challenger, Andy Schmookler.
Cue up the theme from “Rocky” here, right?
“I’m going up against a guy who’s been sitting in that seat for 20 years. So I’m the challenger in the ‘Rocky’ sense. But I’m also going to be the challenger in another sense,” said Schmookler, who is challenging incumbent Republican Congressman Bob Goodlatte in the race for the Sixth District seat.
Not only is he challenging Goodlatte, but also voters in the Sixth. For liberals in the district, the challenge is to take action.
“If you see what I see, what are you going to do about it?” Schmookler said. “If you see that we’ve got so much at stake that the stakes could hardly be higher, that we’re losing the country that was our birthright, can you just say, Oh, yeah, I’ll vote for you? I want people’s votes, but if that were enough, we’d be living in a different country.”
For conservative voters in the district, the challenge from Schmookler is “to put me through my paces.”
“This is the challenge that I want to give to the conservative voters of this district, people who, my sense is, are good people, who care about being on the side of honor and honesty and principle and caring about creating a better world, and have aligned themselves with a force which is not about any of those things. Because there have been such skilled propagandists working to create this little bubble of information. Don’t listen to anybody but us, don’t trust those liberals, they’re hardly Americans. In fact, they’re not Americans, they’re what communists used to be. Don’t listen to the academics, they’re just a bunch of elitists. Don’t listen to people from other countries. They don’t know anything. They’re not Americans. Don’t listen to journalists. They’re all liberal-biased.”
“So who are you left with? You’re left with Fox News and the leaders of the Republican Party. And the problem is, they have not been honest. They have been consistently distorting, pretending … it has been one fraud after another. And if you don’t believe me, I challenge you to put me through my paces,” Schmookler said.
Schmookler’s final challenge is to lay down the stakes to the 2012 election cycle as he sees them.
“We’ve got a country right now where the money power is so powerful, and we’re losing it step by step,” Schmookler said. “Citizens United was the last, most recent big step, but we’re losing it. And if we’re going to have a democracy, the people are going to have to rise up and say, This is our government, the government of the people, for the people, and by the people. This is what I feel is at stake – that our children and grandchildren are going to lose what I used to take for granted and can’t take for granted anymore.”
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