Reply #4: Peter Welch is a good guy [View All]

[cali]

He's been around forever, and he's very liberal. He served in the Vermont Senate in the eighties, and has run for Congress before, and lost the primary. I think he also ran for guv. He's been serving in the Senate again for the past 5 years. He's running against a pretty formidable candidate, Marths Raineville, who's running as hard as she can against the repukes even though she is one. She's staunchly pro-choice and has called for Rumsfeld to resign. Virtually all of her ads stress how she's fought the repukes. Passing strange, but this is Vermont. She resigned as Adjutant General of the Vermont National Guard in order to run. In a small state like Vermont during a war, that's a very high profile poisition. Nevertheless, I think Peter will win. He's not the most exciting guy, that's for sure, and his ads are pretty tepid, but Vermonters are wary of sending any repuke to Washington. He's slightly ahead in the polls, and I expecy him to increase his margin over the next few weeks. It's been my experience, passing out campaign literature in the most conservative part of the state, that even here, Peter's not far behind Rainville.

This is really a straight head to head race. None of the other candidates are worth mentioning. Fortunately, the putative Progressive party candidate, David Zuckerman, an organic farmer serving in the legislature, decided not to run. He's quite young and he'll have plenty of time to run for statewide office. He would havew siphoned off votes from Welch, so that was a relief.

Welch isn't Bernie, but he'll be a solid liberal vote in the House, on every issue.