Candidate discusses campaign for Democratic Party nomination in the Sixth

Award-winning author and blogger Andy Schmookler has thrown his hat into the ring for the Sixth District Democratic Party congressional nomination.

Schmookler, 64, said he wouldn’t be running for Congress “if these were normal political times,” but the Harvard and Cal-Berkeley grad and NPR and PBS commentator sees in the recent policy drift in Washington a disturbing trend that he feels he needs to bring attention to.

Increasing income inequality and the increasingly hollowed-out American middle class “aren’t a function of how the 21st century economy works,” Schmookler said. Rather, the trends toward the rich getting richer and the poor and middle class struggling more and more are due to the “nature of the policies that are getting implemented” in Washington.

Draconian djustments to Medicare and Social Security being contemplated now on Capitol Hill are “frauds” to Schmookler. “Back when Reagan was president, we already knew that people who were born the year I was born were going to turn 65 this year. There’s nothing surprising about that,” Schmookler said.

The focus of leaders in Washington should be on creating jobs and building on the country’s economic base, Schmookler said, not on budget cutting.

“What we need to close the budget isn’t cutting off programs like Head Start or heating help for the elderly that Republicans are going after. We need to get the economy out of the hole,” Schmookler said.

But “we don’t talk about that.”

“We talk about cutting the budget. We talk about cutting Social Security. Now there are proposals that are essentially designed to eliminate Medicare as we know it. We as an American society are moving toward taking away the protections for average people, the opportunities for average people, and hollowing out America,” Schmookler said.

Both major parties – Republican and Democrat – are part and parcel to the problem. The GOP, to Schmookler, is a “destructive force,” while “Democrats have let us down because they have been wimps in terms of standing up and defending.”

“My message is simply to try to tell the truth,” said Schmookler, who concedes that the 2012 race will be an uphill battle, but says it’s “not impossible” for a Democrat to win in the Sixth District.

“The only way that today’s Republican Party can get any power at all is by deceiving people about the nature of what it is,” said Schmookler, who hopes his campaign can play a role in “awakening the American people” to those realities.
 

Interview: Andy Schmookler talks with AFP editor Chris Graham

Story by Chris Graham. Chris can be reached at [email protected].