"Progressive Bloggers" Respond to Marty Chavez Reachout

I haven't written about my participation in a Tuesday "progressive bloggers" conference call with Marty Chavez, who's running for the Dem Senate nomination in New Mexico. There are two reasons:

1) I didn't think there was much that was newsworthy in the conversation other than the fact that Chavez, who had recently labeled Rep. Tom Udall "too far to the left" when he thought it might be politically helpful, couldn't manage to come up with any political differences between himself and Udall now that he was talking to a total of two "progressive bloggers" on the phone. I did add what I learned about the recent polling data leaked by the Chavez campaign to an earlier post.

2) My partner is going through health care hoops right now and I've been right there with her and not really concentrating much on mundane political matters.

Who Did Write About the Call?
In finally catching up some with the local scene, I noticed that Heath Haussamen and Steve Terrell -- neither of whom characterizes themselves as "progressive bloggers" -- both wrote about the call. Funny how that works. I had no idea the call may have been silently "monitored" by members of the local "neutral journalist" contingent. I surmised that Heath was on the call only because he said this in his post:

There was clearly some awkwardness about the conversation, but the bloggers also sounded genuinely happy to have such access to Chavez. Since he's currently the only big-name Democrat in the Senate race, progressives have no choice but to give Chavez a serious look.

Well, we do have another choice in the form of Don Wiviott, who's been reaching out to the grassroots in ways much more personal and sincere than an "official" blogger conference call. But that's a story for another day.

I don't know if Terrell was on the call or not, but he wrote an article for the New Mexican that characterized the call with Marjorie and I as a kind of stealth operation to snooker progressives, and he congratulated Chavez's paid web consultant for a "score."

Even though people on the call were asked to introduce themselves, only Marjorie from m-pyre and I did so, in addition to the Mayor and his web consultant. Therefore I'm not sure if Heath and Steve were just fed the angles on the stories they wrote or if they were actually on the call secretly or what. I know the world of "journalism" is in another, more exalted realm than that inhabited by naive, easily fooled "progressive bloggers" so it's hard to know for sure.

Wasn't Fooled Again
At any rate, I'll just say that I, for one, wasn't really "genuinely happy to have such access" to Chavez. I mean, it was OK, but I certainly wasn't unaware of why Chavez was suddenly "reaching out" to progressives. He needs the support of progressives and core Democrats to win. When he figured he didn't -- in his mayoral runs -- he never expressed one iota of interest in reaching out to us. As anyone following politics here knows, Chavez is a politician through and through. He does and says what he thinks he has to do or say to win. Period. Of course that's true of most politicos, which is why we need a an activist progressive movement in the first place. It's hard to find truth on the campaign trail or the halls of the "leaders."

And surely it's well known that Chavez hasn't exactly been popular with many progressives and party regulars, for a multitude of reasons. Mostly because of rather disturbing incidents we've witnessed or been a part of, as well as some of the decidedly Republican-lite or expedient positions he's taken over the years. A phone call isn't going to fix that, despite what hired web guns may think, whether they're "macaca" incident vets or not.

I'll have more to say soon about all this, but I have to go now and take care of some other things in my life. In the meantime, go read what Marjorie at m-pyre posted today about the call with Chavez. She IS a progressive blogger and she WAS on the call and she DID ask a number of pointed questions of Chavez after introducing herself on the call.

PS: Contrary to what the Blackstone guy said about the call in Terrell's article, there was no way that "about a dozen" progressive bloggers participated. I count two.

For our previous posts about the 2008 U.S. Senate race in New Mexico, visit our archive.