JK has been holding a series of dial-in blog conference calls with Massachusetts bloggers and others of his online supporters who post about JK and about MA-centric issues on some of the larger group blogs such as Daily Kos, Democratic Underground, etc. He's done this sort of thing on a one-off basis in the past, but is planning to make this a regular online event in the johnkerry.com community in the coming months.

Longtime JK supporter Susan Radovsky wrote about the previous conference call in this series on her personal blog in a post she titled "The Grassroots Senator." This time, Bob Neer of Blue Mass Group live-blogged the call; David Eisenthal of The Eisenthal Report wrote a post about it, as did the intrepid videobloggers Kerstin and Faith over at KerryVision.net (who even went to the extra trouble of transcribing it in text form on their site); and the Marry in Massachusetts blog used this week's call as a springboard for a post comparing JK's stands on their key issues to those of his competitors for his Senate seat in 2008.

Karen Corbman, who is now a guest contributor to the johnkerry.com blog in addition to her other online activities, also wrote up her first impressions of this week's blog conference call with JK in a post that she made to Democratic Underground, which we're happy to repost here as well:

... the more they stay insane.

Five years after George Bush's reckless decision to invade Iraq, that country is still in a state of violent chaos with no end in sight. The Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda is active in many more countries now than it was five years ago. Osama bin Laden has never been found. The situation in Pakistan, already unstable when Bush's disastrous Iraq adventure began, is deteriorating even more rapidly.

And now, as the Bush administration is clearly laying the groundwork for war with Iran as well, those who counsel against it are being made to resign their positions, just as they were made to resign in the runup to the invasion and occupation of Iraq five years ago.

Sanity is a relative concept. But it's hard to argue that the Bush administration's irresponsible actions with regard to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran have made a bad situation any better in the region. It's difficult to defend those failed efforts as having achieved positive change.

Continuing to insist that wrong moves are right moves, wrong wars are right wars, and wrong policies are right policies in the face of all evidence seems to defy rational logic. It may not be insane, but it certainly makes no sense.

Everybody's eyes are on Pennysylvania these days. Thanks to the whipsaw nature of the Democratic presidential primary race this year, Pennsylvania's in the spotlight when it comes to electoral politics on the national stage. People everywhere are talking about Pennsylvania -- what it is, what it's like, what it all means. Pundits are pontificating right and left about Pennsylvania voters -- who they are, who're they're for, what they're going to do on April 22. And, inevitably, most of them are wrong a lot of the time.

Pennsylvania is just like Ohio, the talking heads are telling us. Well, yes and no. Some parts of Pennsylvania are just like parts of Ohio, demographically speaking. Other parts, not so much. Pennsylvania is a very big place. And, like Ohio, it's a very diverse place, with different parts of the state displaying significantly different historical and sociocultural influences.

The Appalachian Mountains run diagonally through Pennsylvania from lower left to upper right, physically as well as demographically dividing it into several dissimilar environments. Fully a third of the state's 12 million residents live in the Philadelphia metropolitan area, which bustles along the Delaware River valley in the southeastern corner of PA and sprawls across the Delaware and New Jersey lines to include another 2 million of their neighbors.

Another 2-1/2 million Pennsylvanians live in the southwestern part of the state, in the greater Pittsburgh area, near the upper edge of some of the most rugged parts of the Appalachians. While the historical and sociocultural roots of PA's two biggest population centers could hardly be more different, they are both large, sophisticated urban centers and day-to-day life for their residents is more similar than not.

This op-ed essay by John Kerry originally appeared on the New Bedford Standard Times' South Coast Today website on March 6, 2008.


Immigration enforcers fail to police themselves
by John Kerry


One year ago today, New Bedford endured an ordeal the city will never forget — an immigration raid at the Michael Bianco factory which separated mothers from their babies, stranded the elderly and infirm overnight in awful conditions while the law-breaker who hired them spent the night in his bed, and sent detainees halfway across the country and denied them access to their families and to their lawyers.

It was a nightmare — unfair, inhumane, the worst of our broken immigration system. Immediately, thousands warned that no other community should be put through a similar experience.

So one year later, was it a wake-up call? Has the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — the agency that conducted the Bianco raid — learned from their mistakes?

One question that can be asked, after reading former Senator Bill Bradley’s March 2005 NYT op-ed “A Party Inverted” in the previous JK blog post, is whether or not we have created a more favorable environment for our 2008 Democratic nominee than we had when the op-ed was written.

In “A Party Inverted”, Bill Bradley speaks of how the Republicans can still succeed even with a weak candidate, because the party provides him or her with a message and ideas to run on. Their chosen nominee has the support of a partisan media which communicates the ideas from permanent think tanks with constant funding by big donors and foundations that continually develop and test ideas and messages. All a given Republican Presidential candidate has to do is to personalize the existing message.

The equivalent Democratic candidate in a given election cycle does not start out with this sort of pre-existing infrastructure, making it difficult for him or her to communicate and sell new ideas or messages in the short time available. This leads to Democratic candidates running on charisma and catchy slogans, rather than on ideas and messages.

The Bradley article illustrates why it was much harder for a Democratic candidate to win under those circumstances. However, while little may have changed in terms of infrastructure since 2005, the Democrats running for President this time did not have to start entirely anew. They had the advantage of building upon the ideas and messages that John Kerry put forth during his 2004 campaign.

Former Hall of Fame basketball player, US Senator, and 2000 Democratic presidential candidate Bill Bradley is a renowned political theorist with a distinct vision of the changes that need to be made in our parties, in our politics, and in citizen activism to ensure America’s future. One of the issues he addressed in his must-read book, The New American Story, is that today's powerful Republican party and the pervasive conservative media presence that sustains it didn't just come about by accident — they are the culmination of an artfully excellent long-term plan, and that's part of what is strangling politics in America today.

Bradley summarized the theme of that argument in this classic essay, as originally published in the New York Times in the aftermath of the Bush administration's ascendancy to a second term. In retrospect, it's easy to see how the principles of his theory were played out in the 50-state dynamics of the 2006 mid-term elections that followed. And even three years after they were first published, Bradley's descriptions of what was, what could be, and what should not be, still offer a very illuminating window into the ever higher-stakes dynamics of the 2008 presidential and congressional campaigns — including what is, and isn't, working on both sides of our two-party system this time around



A Party Inverted
by Bill Bradley
March 30, 2005

Five months after the presidential election Democrats are still pointing fingers at one another and trying to figure out why Republicans won. Was the problem the party's position on social issues or taxes or defense or what? Were there tactical errors made in the conduct of the campaign? Were the right advisers heard? Was the candidate flawed?

On Tuesday nearly 30 million more Americans will be able to do one of the most important things they can do for their country:

VOTE.

Residents of four more states, from gigantic Texas to tiny Rhode Island, will have the chance to join nearly 40 million of their fellow citizens who have already cast ballots for their preferred 2008 Presidential candidates in other parts of the country.

Not all of them will, of course. As always, many potential voters will choose to sit this one out instead. And that's a shame — because, as George Jean Nathan so aptly said, "Bad officials are the ones elected by good citizens who do not vote."

The United States was designed from the ground up as a representative democracy for a reason. The founders knew from hard-won experience that the power of the people to select their own leaders is one of the most crucial rights and privileges available to citizens of a free nation — and a duty as well, if that nation's freedom was to endure.

Presidents have always known that their power comes from below, by way of the ballot box, not from the top, by way of executive fiat — though some of them, especially lately, seem to have forgotten that essential fact.

Still, as Andrew Jackson reminded us, "The great constitutional corrective in the hands of the people against usurpation of power, or corruption by their agents is the right of suffrage; and this when used with calmness and deliberation will prove strong enough."