Saturday, February 11, 2006

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Fog

Getting the support of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee seems to be the goal of every Democratic primary candidate. The DCCC is supposed to track Democratic candidacies for Congress across America and assess which candidates have a realistic chance of winning office. It is not reassuring, therefore, that the DCCC appears to sometimes have trouble telling the difference between 2004 and 2006.

For the 24th District's Democratic candidates, the DCCC no longer lists Jeff Miller, who was the 2004 Democratic nominee against incumbent Republican Sherwood Boehlert. That's good. However, the DCCC still lists Brian Goodell as an active candidate, and that's bad. Brian Goodell challenged Jeff Miller for the Democratic nomination in 2004, but dropped out of the race before the primary, when Jeff Miller secured most of the County Committee endorsements.

Brian Goodell was not the candidate in 2004, and he is not a candidate in 2006. Apparently, two years later the DCCC has still not received word of that fact.

It wouldn't take much work for the DCCC to discover Goodell's inactive status. The web site that the DCCC lists as Goodell's active campaign site is no longer on line. In fact, the domain name GoodellForCongress.com is no longer registered. If you, reader, wanted to go claim it for your own, you could.

On the other hand, the DCCC does not list the only active Democratic campaign web site in the district so far this year: The site of Les Roberts. The DCCC does not list Leon Koziol as an active candidate at all, although Koziol made an official announcement last week and claims to have raised $22,000. Is that $22,000 imaginary, or is it the DCCC that's fake?

On a local level, the ignorance of the DCCC is annoying. On a national level, it is more profoundly disturbing. How can the Democratic Party hope to retake either house of Congress when it doesn't even know who its potential candidates are?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sometimes it's the candidates who are in the fog. Koziol has not registered with the FEC and Tytler has but in the 29th District instead of the 24th.

http://query.nictusa.com/cgi-bin/can_detail/H6NY29176/

Arcuri and Roberts are correctly and properly registered in the 24th and have filed financing statements.

You can look it all up at www.fec.gov along with all the rules.

24thIndependent said...

What are we to say about the Brian Goodell listing? Surely, we can't blame him for being listed two years after dropping out from the race.

If Koziol is truly not registered, and has been raising money, that's serious. Let's wait a bit longer and see if it's not the FEC that's been late in getting its records updated - it's happened before.

As for Bruce Tytler, I'd want to take a look at the records themselves, to see who made the mistake. I just may give that a shot right now...

Anonymous said...

I just saw Tytler listed in the 29th also, and it seems a little bizzare, but I think it is just a typo, because the DCCC has him correctly identified as Serry's challanger.