Hi,
Some of you may remember me. I've posted on dKos for a while, though I haven't been posting for a week or two.
For the past few weeks I've been working for the congressional campaign of Jane Mitakides. Jane is running in Dayton which is one of the most competitive cities in Ohio against freshman Mike Turner who was kicked out of the mayor's office after mismanaging the city. Turner managed to get himself elected to Tony Hall's old seat after Karl Rove lured Hall away only two months before the 2002 general election. Because of Turner's victory people haven't seen the district as competitive. In fact, the district is very competitive. Its dpi is 47.4 and the counties that make it up have changed party hands four times since 1992 during which period the only other district that changed hands was Kucinich's. Democrats actually have a lead in party registration and Bush only beat Gore by a few points in the district. We are supported by the Democratic Action Team of New York, who raised almost $300K for Clark and who then chose our race as the only one they were going to focus their fundraising on, committing to raising 100K for us before the election. We have some of the best consultants working for us and the full support of the Ohio congressional delegation.
Jane has been involved in Democratic politics for decades and opened her campaign with an endorsement from Ann Richards. Just last week she met with the Ohio congressional delegation in Washington and sat in on a meeting of the Democratic Caucus. She's smart, hard working and tough and I could easily see her moving to a leadership position in Congress when she is elected.
This is going to be the first in a series of diaries. I'm an intern with the campaign. I'm between high school and college (UChicago) and I wanted to intern on a congressional campaign to get some practical experience in politics to go along with the theoretical experience I've gotten from dKos and other blogs. I decided to intern on a congressional campaign because I wanted to be close to the center of the action and have an opportunity to experience all the facets of a political campaign. I did a bit of research and chose the Mitakides campaign because I think Jane will take one of the sleeper victories of the 2004 election year. She is a strong candidate running against a bland colorless conservative who is unpopular and unknown in the district and who votes with Tom Delay 98% of the time. She is a smart and hard working and with the national climate being what it is she is poised to give us one of the 11 seats we need to retake the house and install speaker Pelosi (it is so easy to slip into the pitch because the pitch is so so true).
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