At DemocracyFest on Saturday, I got into a brief discussion with Karen Liot Hill about the U.S Senate race in New Hampshire. I’ve known Karen from DFA days and I have a lot of respect for her. She told me she was running Jay Buckey’s campaign. Well, this will be difficult. I’m also a good friend of JP Boyle, whom I met on the DeStefano campaign, and who is now working for Steve Marchand’s campaign.

Katrina Swett had a table up at DemocracyFest and I’ve been speaking with JP about making sure that Steve makes an appearance. I first spoke with JP about Steve when he was trying to get Steve and Ned Lamont to speak. Opponents of Swett are quick to point out that she was national co-chairwoman of Lieberman's 2004 presidential bid. Her supporters say that it is not fair to paint her with a broad brush as a Liebercrat.

In digging around, I found an article by Eric Moskowitz in the Concord Sunday Monitor on August 13, 2006, after Ned Lamont defeated Joe Lieberman in the primary. The article said she “supports Lieberman's decision to stay in the race”. It went on to say,

Swett believes Lieberman lost because of three perceived Democratic "sins": the sin of supporting the Iraq war and being tough on defense, the sin of being bipartisan and the sin of displaying religious faith. Swett said those traits might make Lieberman undesirable to many Democrats but they could be key for Democrats in winning future national elections.

Swett may be trying to present herself as being other than a Liebercrat, but as a strong Democrat, I feel that I must work hard to oppose anyone that supported Lieberman after the primary. The question for me is should I work for Steve? Should I work for Jay? Can I work for both?

So far, I’ve offered what I hope were helpful suggestions to both campaigns and I hope that the fact that I’m currently willing to help both of them doesn’t alienate either of them.

With that, let me run through some of my thoughts and views about the candidates. Both of them come across as charismatic good people. Both of them have hired some good people. Steve gets points in my book for reaching out to Ned. He gets points for having a nice palm card that he handed out at DemocracyFest. He loses a couple points for not having the URL to his website on his palm card.

As a fiscally conservative social liberal, Steve hit some of the right notes on his palm card, ending the war in Iraq as his top priority, defending a woman’s right to choose, working to make health care more affordable and accessible, protecting the environment, improving the quality of education. It notes that he is the former Northeast Regional Director for the Concord Coalition.

In 1992, I was a Paul Tsongas supporter. I liked the Concord Coalition as a fiscally conservative group that welcomed social liberals. Swett might laud bipartisanship, but I find Lieberman’s version of bipartisanship abhorrent. The Concord Coalition is a much better model for bipartisanship.

Steve’s website looks nice. They are using NGP for their donation processing, but they are also taking donations via ActBlue. So far it is just a few donations, but they are ahead of Swett.

Jay’s website isn’t quite as attractive yet. He isn’t up on ActBlue yet. Some of that is because he just moved from having an exploratory committee to having a full campaign. The website still claims to be an exploratory committee. The issues section is a little anemic. He does get major points for providing a link to an image of an email that Jay sent to Sen. Gregg opposing the Iraq resolution back in October, 2002. Yet it talks about there being no easy solution and could go further in calling for bringing the troops home.

What I find surprising is that there isn’t a reference to health care on the issues page. Jay is a professor of medicine at Dartmouth, and I would love to hear his thoughts on addressing the health care crisis in America.

All three candidates ended up at DemocracyFest Sunday evening. Buckey and Marchand stuck around to hear Gov. Dean, who spoke about the importance of getting rid of Sen. Sununu. on first glance, it looks like there are two interesting and exciting candidates running for U.S. Senate in New Hampshire. It will be great to see this race develop.

(Cross-posted at BlueHampshire)