Outsider candidate? Hardly.

Novick came to Washington, D.C. to host the annual Robert F. Kennedy birthday celebration in the Great Hall of the U.S. Department of Justice. It's just a small gathering, but it's something he started doing back in the early 90s and he has come back to D.C. to do every year. He should be praised for that, not mocked.

Further, Novick has family in the D.C. area and he he lived here for many years, as do I. To say that everyone who lives inside the Beltway is an "insider" is, frankly, ignorant. We have a whole metropolitan area of 4 million people. All insiders? Please.

But the real point is that Novick is the kind of guy whom the establishment can't necessarily trust to toe the line. He just might tell you what he really thinks if he becomes Senator, and that might include taking on the Democratic establishment as well as simply bashing the GOP. At a time when the Democratic Party has become GOP Lite, and when our leading Democratic Senators and Congressman come across as spectators in the War on Iraq, I would think you would welcome the prospects of having a Senator like Novick -- someone who might fire back at his own party's sheepishness.

So go ahead and score your debater's points against my response. But please don't question Novick's status as a potential muckraker and threat to the establishment. If not for people like him, progressives in this country wouldn't have any champions at all.

i love how this post is all about "how dare steve novick call himself an outsider blah blah mock-outrage cakes".

what a great way to deflect attention away from the central issue - which is that the news is out about the DSCC's financial support of merkley. all along his campaign staff has been issuing vague denials that the DSCC was involving itself in the oregon primary - couched with disclaimers like "to the best of my knowledge" and so forth, so as to not actually be taking a stand.

the gig is up. DSCC is giving merkley a significant chunk of change to defeat merkley in the primary.

it's about time for the merkley campaign, and his supporters, to own that.

ps: i think it's a great compliment to steve novick that the DSCC has so far given more money to merkley than any other democratic primary candidate in the country. they must see novick as being the biggest threat, as the strongest candidate to rock their little boat. kudos to steve for that!

i think it's a great compliment to steve novick that the DSCC has so far given more money to merkley than any other democratic primary candidate in the country. they must see novick as being the biggest threat, as the strongest candidate to rock their little boat.

You ain't gonna see me defending Chuck Schumer, Rahm Emmanuel, and that crowd Trishka, but there are at least a couple of other reasons that the Money Guys might be in for Jeff early that you seem not to have considered.

1) They may have judged, based on his record, that he's the best man for the job or;

2) They may have concluded that he's the best one to beat Smith in the general.

Or both.

Occam's Razor dictates that when faced with multiple explanations for a given situation, the simplest explanation is most likely to be correct.

Obviously I'm not inside Schumer's festering skull, but still.........

Until we get to publicly financed elections, we have to play the game as it is, not as we wish it to be

Justin,

I usually highlight a line or two that stand out as especially outrageous, but you've got me this time.

Your entire comment, full as it is, of innuendo, character assasination, unsubstantiated attacks, and unwarranted praise of your guy (the "perfectly fine Democrat") offers another, more probable expanation of Jeff's early reluctance.

He rightly suspected that with guys like you and your intellectually dishonest cohorts out there, he'd be slogging through an open cesspool from the time he declared.

No sane person would lightly set themselves up for this kind of daily abuse unless they really, really believed that they could effect progressive change in spite of your worst efforts.

Just guessing here, as I'm not privy to how anybody thinks, just what they write or say.

Novick has friends in DC. He worked there. To compare them and their individual donations to the weight, influence and resources of the DSCC doesn't seem like an apt comparison.

Torrid tries to do a switcheroo and change the issue.

If we want to compare the relative influence of non-Oregonian money/influence in this race then that can be done. But's it's a fundamentally different issue from whether Novick is as guilty of accepting money and influence from non-Oregonians as Merkley.

The supreme irony here is that Novick supporters have been crowing for months now about how Novick wouldn't play the usual political games and would instead be more forthright. Yet here he's clearly spinning an issue exactly as one would expect a veteran political insider like him to do.

All were asking for is a little consistency. Whats good for the goose is good for the gander. Novick would accept the big bad DSCC's help if he was offered it, he even says so. This kind of sour grapes from Novick is starting to sound like a three year old without his bottle.

Again I have to say that it's not acceptable that people don't care about their body health. FDA tells all the facts.