This Is Worth Watching

 

Back in April, Democrat Nathan Sage beat everybody to the punch by announcing his candidacy first in what might end up being a crowded Democratic primary to take on veteran Iowa Republican Senator Joni Ernst in '26. I've kinda had a thing for Iowa Democratic candidates on this site for years now. (Don't believe me -- use the search engine, upper left.) Nathan Sage catches my attention for this: "He said his campaign will be about repairing the party’s connection to working-class voters" (Iowa Public Radio). 

Sage's introductory video is both a vindication of working-class as a valuable designator and a sort of bitch-slapping of establishment Democratic attitudes -- a direct challenge to a ruling class that looks down on blue-collar grunts. "We built the damn table," Sage says. "We need a seat at it!"

Sage doesn't talk like an establishment Dem, doesn't look like an establishment Democrat. He projects a smart, bullshit-detecting analytical understanding of exactly how the deck has been stacked against workers.  And Sage's video production reminds us what a little early campaign money can buy (money, which is often the hurdle for any brilliant working-class candidate, like for example Darren Staley who ran as a Democrat for the NC Senate down in Wilkes last fall -- Senate Dist. 36, one of the most heavily Republican districts in the state. If Darren had only had the early money like Nathan Sage clearly does!)

Meet Darren Staley

 

I've been a fan of Darren Staley, a Democrat running a brave race in what's considered an impossible Republican Senate district in Wilkes. Staley is one of those rare working-class voices that Democrats need. I interviewed him here on WataugaWatch back last December.

Staley has released a biographical video that is well worth watching. If you want to support him, here's his ActBlue site.

Darren Staley Is a Democratic Hero

Way back at the beginning of last December, I wrote about Democrat Darren Staley, carrying the torch for working people in NC Senate Dist. 36 (Wilkes, Alexander, Yadkin, and Surry, about as red as it gets), and I praised his common roots and his struggle to overcome a hard life (interview with Darren Staley). He did overcome difficult circumstances with native smarts and determination. Wilkes Community College offered a belated education -- he had dropped out of high school to take factory work -- and now Staley has a master's degree and works full-time for a small business that provides services to people with disabilities. He sits on several committees that advocate for people across the behavioral health spectrum. But he's very much a part of the fabric of his Senate district: "I am literally just a guy in a mobile home typing this from my kitchen table."

Senate District 36 looks hopeless for a Democrat because it's rated R+26, but Staley has proven a doughty contender, raising enough small-dollar donations to make a showing on a stage where Democrats usually don't even show up. Daley points at what recently happened in a special election in a deep-red Ohio Congressional district that was rated R+30. The Democrat in the race, a first-time candidate with no experience, running against a veteran Republican office-holder, came within 10 points of beating the Republican in a race he should have lost by 30 points. Staley commented on Facebook:

Now, a special election in Ohio is not a general election in North Carolina. But I think it says something about where voters are. They may not change their political affiliation or suddenly decide to vote the other side this cycle up and down the ballot, but they are paying attention.

They are realizing that a totally "safe seat" for one party or the other means that the person in that seat doesn't really have to pay attention to their issues. That the person in that seat is best served by only agreeing with the most extreme side of their party so that they don't get a primary challenge.

People are fed up with that.

I think Darren Staley is right: People are fed up with the heavy hand of partisan politics that's used to suppress, to hold down, to silence, to maintain a status quo of one-sided power and control that benefits no one but the powerful.

Last night Staley published a thread on Twitter that's worth quoting at some length:

I'm a unique candidate, but my story is not unique. So many people in my district have been impacted by some part of my story. Single mothers. Single fathers. Factory workers. Laid off factory workers. People who live in starter homes or trailers. People who have no health insurance. People with disabilities. People without access to quality education or quality healthcare. People who pay their power bill two days before the cutoff notice. People with student loan debt. People who depend on Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and SNAP benefits. People who can't afford child care.

I have also, more recently, seen the small business side too. I understand that we need regulation, but it can't be one-size-fits-all. I know about the small business bubble ... when you are successful enough that people like what you are selling, but you can't yet afford additional staff to grow. You can't afford an in-house IT person. You can't afford a good health care plan for your staff. Anytime you give an across the board raise to existing employees, your comp premiums increase because it is based solely on payroll. But your corporate competitors don't have that problem. 

...I spend a lot of time talking to the Republicans in this district. All of them who have been impacted by one aspect of my story or another. A lot of them don't vote often. But in the past two days, I have had a half dozen Republicans in the district reach out to me about my Facebook posts on gerrymandering. They don't like it once they see the facts. It strikes against their basic sense of fairness. Same thing when I talk about vouchers and public education funding....

My whole intention in making this run was to bring people out of their bubble. To show people in this district, regardless of party, you DO have a choice. You CAN change this bullshit. You MUST send a message. NO party owns a district. NO vote should be taken for granted....

I've had a hard life, some by circumstance and some of my own making. I want to make the struggles we all have a little bit easier. That message is resonating, because it is true. It is the only reason I am doing it. And if ya'll didn't know that you wouldn't even be reading this....

I have donated to the Darren Staley campaign, and so can you, here. We need him, and we need more Democratic candidates like him.

Eddie Settle vs. Darren Staley, NCS 36

 

Eddie Settle

I knew naught of Sen. Eddie Settle, who represents Wilkes, Alexander, Surry, and Yadkin counties (Dist. 36) in Raleigh, except that the energizing Democratic candidate for that seat, Darren Staley, mocks the R+26 nightmare that district has become and is not averse to pointing out Settle's tiresome conservative smugness. Staley lives in a trailer, is as hardscrabble tested as Settle is privileged, and he knows which end is up (as they say in my part of the country). Staley's Twitter feed keeps me plugged in to what a Democratic campaign for democratic values ought to look like and rarely does, an uprising of working-class common sense, determination, and vision.

Democrat Staley tweeted a link to a piece of remarkable Eddie Settle prose (liberally stolen from the Wall Street Journal, as it turns out), headlining it this way: "I've spent a lot of time talking about why you should support my campaign. THIS is who I am running against. Let that sink in..." Settle's little essay, "A Biblical Look at Capitalism," was published in the Valentine's Day edition of The Wilkes Record. 

I took the bait, wondering what make of man that my man Darren Staley is running against.

Settle's profit-motive Christianity left a bad taste in my mouth, an offensive brandishing of the Bible to promote the gospel of plutocracy: "The Bible is clear on many things. It teaches about the morality of personal responsibility. It’s through this avenue that man learns to develop good citizenship that leads to happiness. The welfare state undermines this goal of personal responsibility. Proverbs teaches that man is to be productive and that he is not entitled to well-being." Let them eat wallpaper?

"The morality of personal responsibility." Really, Dude? Has Trump, past master of evading consequences, taught us nothing? "Not entitled to well-being?" Has the history of wolfish, buck-passing corporations taught you absolutely nothing, Sir? Yours is a "Bible philosophy" made to order for the already comfortable who intend to entertain no doubt nor guilt, so it's little surprise that Eddie Settle's big consuming issue is taxes on people like him.

By all appearances, Eddie Settle is a well respected Southern Baptist glad-hander in Wilkes, a former 3-term county commissioner now serving in his first term in the NC Senate. He essentially went straight out of high school (and one year studying business at Wilkes Community College) into working at and learning his father's business, Nu-Line Printing Inc. (good for t-shirt screen printing & embroidery, banners, signs & picture framing services) -- the company that Settle now owns outright and still runs today. In 1990, he got into a sideline of raising cattle and is often photographed wearing a big cowboy hat at social gatherings to prove it. He told Colin Campbell that his personal hero was Ronald Reagan, specifically "his Christian conservative leadership."

He's big on pro-life politics, organizing a vote on the Wilkes Commission to pass a resolution to designate the county "a haven for the unborn" (Whoa! Wilkes filled with very pregnant women? looking to escape the pro-abortionists?). What would a haven for the unborn entail? He also mentions Critical Race Theory on his website, calling it "pure poison." 

He's always going to vote the party line, but I wonder if he stood up to Berger over the casino gambling push. He certainly doesn't mention that Berger's failure to get more casinos into poor counties held up the budget for months. Settle sez not one word about Berger's determination to get legalized commercial gambling well situated in NC on his otherwise braggadocious wrap-up of his first year in the Senate. He can certainly brag about the $70 million in pork he got to hand out in his four counties. Pork is always a thoughtful gift.

Let's Have More Democrats Like Darren Staley

 

Darren Staley, carrying a working-class torch for a seat in the NCSenate in a district so red it oozes, might inspire other Democrats to stand up against impossible odds and speak the truth about the workers' world that conservative policies have produced: "...born and raised in Wilkes County .... I’ve seen the manufacturing industry collapse and I saw it from the factory floor. I have seen and experienced the devastation and despair and hopelessness it leaves behind .... sick without health coverage, without medicine, paying last month’s power bill this month to keep the lights on. Without education. The humiliation of going hat in hand to family and friends."

In the days after Darren Staley dropped out of school, a smart but bored high school kid could walk into a well paid manufacturing job in Wilkes and turn it into a career and a middle-class existence. Staley did that, left school and got a good job at Golden Needles, a textile company, which was not unlike other textile companies in following cheap labor to Asia or Mexico. Out of a job, sick with a recurring debilitative illness, the social safety net, SSI and food stamps, literally saved Staley's life. What's wrong with people who mock the safety net and want to end it? Staley asks.

Plus for a candidate running in rural America, Staley toughed it out. He began to get a new, belated education, first at Wilkes Community College and then eventually at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, where he earned a Master's in legal studies. He's currently the Director of Operations for a small business that provides services to people with disabilities, and he sits on several committees that advocate for people across the behavioral health spectrum. Nevertheless, "I am literally just a guy in a mobile home typing this from my kitchen table."

His web presence is still birthing, so at the moment he has no photographs and certainly no videos on his website, though he's written a very compelling biography of American hard work and upward motion against terrible odds created by other people. His Twitter feed is lively. Disclosure: I've contributed to his campaign. 

I interviewed Staley via email:

Can you fill in a little detail about your political journey.

It’s not any kind of new awakening. I got interested in politics when I got laid off from the factory. We were all looking for people to blame. It was the government. It was the Mexicans. The whole “they took our jobs” thinking that was later parodied in a South Park episode.

My thinking started to change when I went to Mexico to be a part of the training team, training the people there on how to run the [textile] machines. In a maquiladora, which is basically a town where a US company sends manufacturing just barely across the border.

So that really opened my mind as far as realizing, you know, we’re all the same. And I’ll probably get tagged with “open borders” here, but I realized that things are universal. People want good jobs. They want to raise their kids and hope they do better. All racial and cultural differences melted away from me during that trip.

Of course this was during the layoff. After, when I was utilizing NAFTA Transition Assistance to go to school, and this is a much longer story, the assistance was linked to unemployment benefits. So if the state cut UI benefits, it also screwed over people on TAA.

My friends and I who went to school after the closure started following politics heavily. We would watch C-SPAN to see the votes, because that $300 a week -- I think it was -- it was crucial. For people who were previously making $35,000 plus a year.

And I saw every Republican walk on the floor of the House and Senate and call me a moocher, a loser, that I should just get off my ass and go get a job. I was like, I HAD A JOB. Legislation took this job away from me, and provided this assistance, and now you want to pass legislation that takes the assistance away?

I saw every Democrat stand up and say, if you cut off these benefits it will hurt a lot of people. Vulnerable people. Who lost their job through no fault of their own. I knew right then, I see who is on my side.

When I became disabled a couple years after that it was amplified. And I did get engaged in politics, at a limited level. I was unable to leave the house a lot. But I could get online. That’s how I got my degree. I got active in politics online.

So, yeah it’s a long story. But the reason I decided to do this right now is because I don’t think the Republican party cares about active legislation anymore. It’s one thing to be on the other side of an issue. It is a whole other thing to not even care about the issues. They gerrymander themselves into a district where they can’t lose, and so they can pass legislation about participation trophies and trans people.

This has so skewed our public discourse. You pick your side, and the other side is not the opposition but the enemy. I think there is a balance, between individual rights and the societal good, between management and labor. The people elect representatives to help find that balance, not to feed into the shit that divides us.

Always a Democrat?

Growing up, it’s a little complicated, because my Mom and Dad divorced when I was very young. My maternal family was and remains evangelical Christian Republican, for the most part. My paternal side were Democrats, again, for the most part. Neither side came up easy.

What distinctions will you draw between Darren Staley and Eddie Settle, the first-term Republican incumbent in Senate District 36?

Sen. Eddie Settle

When I got into this thing, I said to people that I had no intention of doing some ugly campaign that attacks my opponent. I don’t know Eddie Settle and have never met him. I have met people who say good things about him and people who say bad things about him, and I am sure he has heard the same about me.

Highlighting specific votes, you know it’s more about what he didn’t do than what he did. I mean, banning participation trophies and the gender stuff and safe havens for guns and the unborn. I’m just not sure how any of this helps the laid off factory worker, or the disabled person, or the person with no health care.

He seems like a decent person to me. I just disagree with him on most if not all policy issues. I have no doubt he is a very good speaker, a better politician, but I’m just not sure he gives a lot of nuanced thoughts on the issues. His website talks about how he will NEVER raise taxes. Now I’m not looking to raise taxes on people willy nilly, but “NEVER” is just, it’s all about context. We don’t live in a one size fits all world.

In my day job, I try to be proactive and not reactive. I try to consider all possibilities and come up with the best solutions, knowing that sometimes I get it wrong. Being able to admit, yeah, I got this one wrong. But talking points and slogans and bold statements of certainty without nuance shouldn’t cut it for a legislator.

It’s a big district. It’s a big state. Everyone has their own unique experience, and I’ve experienced a lot. Good times, bad times, and hard times. I want to make the hard times easier on the people of the district.

You made a joke on your Twitter feed, about the comedian Corey Forrester's being your campaign manager. How do you know him?

I think what Corey and the WellRed comedy group, which includes Trae Crowder (aka The Liberal Redneck) and Drew Morgan have done to show that there is a progressive south is so very important. I’ve met them all but I feel like I have a special kinship with Corey.