More E-10 Awards

Here's Part I of the E-10 Awards.

The pre-show is over and everyone is glued to his or her seat as the awards are presented.

Best Tweeking of Answer
We've had several candidate forums and debates in the district over the past couple of months. I attended the two we had on this past Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday, the Tenth Dems and WCPT hosted a candidate forum. It was moderated by radio celebrity Dick Kay as part of his Back on the Beat program and the Tenth Dems provided the good old-fashioned Tenth District hospitality. Sunday's event was billed as a debate hosted by the League of Women Voters. I'm not sure it was really a debate, but we'll get to that later.

At both weekend events, the Illinois Tenth District candidates were given the opportunity to discuss Super PAC money. On Saturday, Ilya Sheyman answered with an unequivocal no. He would not take Super-PAC money and he would ask Bob Dold to agree. Schneider, Bavda and Tree were skeptical Dold would agree and said they would take Super-PAC money if Dold did.

I'm not sure it's that simple. Candidate's don't take Super-PAC money as I understand it. The Super-PACs just do what they do with their unlimited uncoordinated expenditures. It's only recently become unclear whether the expenditures are truly uncoordinated in the Republican Presidential Primary.

On Sunday, however, Sheyman made sure we understood. He'd take and has taken PAC money, just not super-PAC money. He said that PAC money,  unlike Super-PAC money, is ok because contributions are limited and contrasted conventional PACS as associations of people interested in a particular issue while Super-PACs are unlimited and often dominated by corporate money. I'm left wondering, if the 550 volunteers came up with the Ilya Super-PAC, what would he do to stop them?

Most Extensive Positive Policy Explanations/Lost in the Weeds
Democratic voters often say they want to hear a positive message, not just appeals to stop the negative things done by Republicans, but positive statements about what Democrats will do. The E-10 award for most positive policy statements goes to Vivek Bavda. Unfortunately, this award goes hand-in-hand with another E-10 for the Most Lost in the Weeds.

Democrats are frequently accused of over-explaining specific policies while voters vote based on identity and emotion. Long policy explanations are a Democratic Party thing and no one does it better in IL-10 than Vivek Bavda.

Bavda has some wonderful ideas about education. He wants to use funds from the estate tax to build mandatory early childhood education and revamp No Child Left Behind. I'm not sure any of it will happen if under-educated and over-entertained people actually have to understand it, so the E-10 goes to Vivek Bavda. He wants and expects voters to know what exactly they are voting for. I hope he gets a policy job at the Department of Education one day.

Most Directly Taking it to the Republicans
Ilya gets some points here because he goes down the progressive wishlist on every question, single payer health care, roll back Bush tax cuts, all the stuff we've been talking about for years while the Republicans roll back the dialog so far that now we're defending contraception.

Brad Schneider talks a good game about some progressive policies he supports, but he worries me on some things. When he wasn't agreeing with Ilya, Brad was talking about running the country like a for-profit company and he seems unwilling to reject the Republican dialogue even when discussing progressive ideas. For example, he said at Sunday's LWV debate that he still agrees with oil exploration and extraction just wants to make sure the oil companies pay their fair share. He thinks we have to proceed slowly on health care reform. He's talking about buying time for underwater homeowners and moving them out to apartments rather than making the bankers take their share of the blame. The bottom line on Brad Schneider is that he's the candidate of the Mark Kirk Democrats, in other words people who say they are Democrats, but continuously vote Republican.

Brad and Ilya are mostly upset by each other. What about the other side?

John Tree talks about being appalled watching John Boehner say his main duty, as Speaker of the House, is to oppose the President, and appalled watching the Republican attack against women to cover for the improving economy. He's not happy with the defunding of education, "like a farmer who eats his own seed corn." Tree is talking plain sense and taking it to the Republicans for their actions. He gets the E-10 in this category.