Husband Takes Schiavo Fight Back to Politicians

[cal04]

The curtains are still drawn tight at Michael Schiavo’s home on a quiet cul-de-sac here, and in some ways he remains as private and unknowable as when his wife Terri was the focus of a fervent national debate last year about life and death.

Yet Mr. Schiavo, who won a scorching legal battle to remove his brain-damaged wife’s feeding tube, also remains furious at lawmakers in Tallahassee and Washington who intervened in the case. Hence the creation last winter of TerriPAC, a federal political action committee aimed against politicians who tried to stop Ms. Schiavo’s death, and the debut of Mr. Schiavo, a newly remarried, self-described normal guy, as a political weapon in this year’s midterm elections.

He is an unpolished speaker, sometimes abandoning sentences midstream or grasping for the right words. He did not vote or follow the news until recently, he says, and had never heard of a PAC until strangers suggested he start one late last year.

Still, Mr. Schiavo flew to Connecticut last month to help Ned Lamont, who defeated Senator Joseph I. Lieberman in the Democratic primary. Mr. Schiavo reminded voters that Mr. Lieberman had supported an emergency bill asking a federal court to consider reinserting Ms. Schiavo’s feeding tube days before she died in March 2005. Ms. Schiavo’s parents, who adamantly opposed her death and rejected Mr. Schiavo’s claim that she would have wished it, had pleaded with Congress and President Bush to intervene.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/16/washington/16schiavo.html?hp&ex=1155700800&en=59283573916d8d9a&ei=5094&partner=homepage

[Freedom_from_Chains]

1. To bad Mike had to learn the hard way as to why we have to vote

and be involved in politics.

[eleny]

2. To me, his actions are more than pay back, too

He's taking his situation and trying to make it so others won't have to go through such a circus. It can't be easy for an ordinary American, unschooled in the ways of politics, to embark on such a path. This seems to me like the times that are making the man. He must have been heartened and emboldened by Lamont's winning the CT primary.