Guest Blog by Bill McCamley: All You Need is Rove?

This is a guest blog by Bill McCamley, who's a Democrat running for Congress in NM-02. Bill is one of the candidates the NM netroots is supporting in our True Blue New Mexico effort. Please donate if you can.

What Martin Heinrich wrote yesterday about Karl Rove and George Bush is absolutely true.  Rove is “the epitome of everything that’s wrong with Washington,” and I encourage you to read Martin's comments about how Rove and company have poisoned the political atmosphere in Washington.  However, I want to focus on one particular reason why Rove, President Bush, and the Bush Administration have been so destructive: They put politics and greed over competent governance.

From the string of unqualified and incompetent officials they chose to put in Bush’s Cabinet—for example, Michael Brown and Alberto Gonzalez, to name just two—to the billions of dollars lost in unmonitored no-bid contracts in Iraq, to letting industries completely decide their own regulatory policies, this Administration has been one long nightmare of incompetence.

As 2008 kicks off, the evidence of this incompetence just gets stronger.  The economic divide between “haves” and “have-nots” continues to grow wider.  With a recession either looming or already underway, families throughout New Mexico—and especially the many poor counties in the 2nd Congressional District— will find it harder to make ends meet.  The Bush Administration still has no plan to end the War in Iraq.  And almost fifty million Americans—including one in five New Mexicans—still have no health insurance.  These facts will be the legacy of Bush and Rove.

Instead of this failure and the politics of fear, there is another way. 

We Can Work It Out
Since I got into this race last April against Steve Pearce, I have been talking about the need for change in Washington—and not just change as some broad, generic concept.  I have been talking about a very specific kind of change: A change to focus on results. 

In Doña Ana County, we have shown what results we can achieve when we work together to get things done for the people we represent.  As County Commissioner, I worked to reform the County’s healthcare system, to establish the first paid County Fire Department, to strengthen the County’s ethics policies, and to bring new jobs and opportunity through negotiating policies that assist border development and high-tech job creation. It’s this record and this focus on results that I want to take to Washington.

What will it take to achieve this in DC?  It’s going to take commitment.  It will take a commitment to stand up a fight for what is right, not what is politically easy.  It will take a commitment to work extremely hard from the moment the election is decided.  And it will take a commitment to work together with people from all parties who are fed up with partisan bickering (and that includes many Republicans and independents).  I promise you that those are all commitments I will keep when I get to Washington. 

Of course, we’re going to have to ask for some commitments from you, if we want to make this a reality.

With A Little Help from Our Friends
This True Blue New Mexico effort is a great step toward uniting New Mexico Democrats and the netroots to bring real change to Washington.  Both FBIHOP and Democracy for New Mexico deserve credit and thanks for organizing this drive.  Now we need your help.  Can you support our campaign and the TrueBlue effort?  We thank you for your support.

For more information on our campaign, please check out our website: www.billmccamley.com.

This is a guest blog by Bill McCamley of Las Cruces, a Democrat who's running Congress our Second Distict in Southern New Mexico.

To donate online to one or more of the True Blue New Mexico candidates, click here. If we want excellent candidates to be successful in their campaigns, we need to support them now with donations and volunteer time. Please give what you can afford to support these Democrats -- no donation is too small, no number of hours of volunteering is too few.

To read our previous posts on this effort, visit our archive.