Working Mom, Meet Call Time
I just finished my first week as a candidate since announcing I would move forward in the primary for the 5th Congressional District seat in Connecticut. As a working mom running for Congress, it has been a bit of a juggling act but it has also energized me. It has reaffirmed why working people like me need to be in Congress and it has also shown me why people like me rarely get to Congress.
Political veterans will understand, and find it amusing, that this past week I had my first experience with ‘call time’. Call time is a term used by candidates, their staff, and Members of Congress for the time spent dialing for high dollar donations to support and run their campaigns. In all honesty, I would rather be meeting people and listening to ideas on how we can work together to make lives better for the people of the 5th District. Do not get me wrong, I do a lot of that too but the truth is too much time and energy is spent on raising money.
To make matters worse, the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC opened up the floodgates and allowed vast sums of outside money to flow into our elections. The decision allows wealthy donors and corporations to spend unlimited sums of money, creating a class of lawmakers who are more accountable to special interests rather than to the people they were elected to serve.
In this system, the need to raise extraordinary sums of money to compete with special interests has limited the ability of average Americans to mount successful campaigns. I cannot afford to quit my job while running to represent the citizens of central and northwest Connecticut. In order to effectively represent working people, it is critical to be a working person. I am running a grass roots campaign that is focusing on gathering many small-dollar donor contributions and engaging all the different communities in Connecticut’s 5th Congressional District.
As your representative, I will push for significant change to our campaign finance system, and will support a constitutional amendment that would overturn the Citizens United decision. In addition, my voice and vote will be used to support legislative initiatives such as the DISCLOSE Act and the Government by the People Act.
Fundraising is a reality I knew existed before making this decision to run. Many actually mentioned this obstacle as a reason for me not to become a candidate. This barrier keeps so many people from taking part in our Democratic process and I think it is about time we show the system that we should have a say in who participates and who doesn’t — not have a system that tells us who should be allowed to participate and who should not. Together we can level the playing field for the American people, and elect representatives that truly reflect our diverse country. Money should not be the reason I or anyone else cannot serve their country. Congress needs more working people like me and you.
