The way we were: July 2006
Looking back to the early days of RochesterTurning, I realize that things have changed a lot for progressives over the past 18 months. In mid-2006, the Republicans still had control of both houses of Congress, the press had yet to receive the memo saying that Bush was wildly unpopular out here in flyover country, and the entire progressive movement was in a deeper funk than George Clinton doing an encore of “Atomic Dog”….
But the liberal blogosphere was already making great strides. One thing I’m struck by is how much we here at RT depended on other local bloggers, like DFE, NYCO, The Rural Patriot (and the rest of the 29th Blogging Irregulars), and Rottenchester. Then, as now, we get by with a little help from our friends.
It’s also been a lot of fun reading about what Dan Maffei and Eric Massa were up to before they became household names among upstate progressives. BTP had a terrific post about the make-up of NY-29. Among the first real news reported was that Paloma Capanna had dropped out of the Democratic primary in NY-25, ensuring that there would be no primary. These local races got a real shot in the arm as outside observers, like Charlie Cook, began to write that NY-29 and NY-25 were poised to become among the most competitive races in the country. And the Q2 fundraising numbers, which we, along with other upstate bloggers, spent a lot of energy publicizing underscored just how competitive these races were going to be — for example, Massa out raised Kuhl for the third consecutive quarter. Predictably, the D&C ignored nearly all of this.
The biggest splash of 2006 was old friend OptimusPrime’s one man protest of the Kuhl vote against stem cell research! MyDD picked up the story — our first hit with a national blog. The footage of the protest is gone from the WROC site but DFE did find footage of Kuhl babbling on about why he opposes stem cell research.
As the month wound down, Kuhl took a trip to Iraq Massa and Kuhl agreed to a series of debates.
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