Wordsmiths advancing the Republican cause have made liberal a dirty word. Andy Schmookler, a candidate for the 2012 Sixth District Democratic congressional nomination, has a problem with the characterization.
“Generations of Americans, half the country, have been behind liberalism, and have found in it a spirit, an idea, a concept of us being in this together. Which people are free to disagree with, but to treat it with contempt is to treat with contempt part of the heart of America,” said Schmookler, a Shenandoah County resident and author, blogger and radio talk-show host.
Schmookler will be the featured speaker at a meeting of Greater Augusta-area Democrats at the Augusta County Government Center in Verona at 7 p.m.
To Schmookler, it’s not enough for liberals to respond to the firebombs being thrown about by some conservatives with heavy artillery of their own.”We as a community have to have a constructive, honest dialogue about how to combine these different points of view into a higher wisdom,” Schmookler said.
His message to Sixth District conservatives: “The best way for them to protect their conservative principles and ideals is not to keep on supporting what this Republican Party has become. It is to either abandon that party and vote for someone like me, or if they can’t pull a lever for a Democrat for reasons of habitual animosities or aversions, fine. Just tell the Republicans to clean up their act, to work together to achieve our common goal,” Schmookler said.
“That’s the American ideal. That’s what our founders had in mind for us to do. This business about trying to make the president fail, this business of dividing people against each other, that’s not the American way,” Schmookler said.
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