Bill and Beverly Young, tireless advocates for veteransRepublicans and their Hate Talk Radio echo chamber have worked for years and years to demonize Nancy Pelosi, the first woman Speaker of the House of Representatives, an accomplished political leader and icon every American should be proud of, regardless of disagreeing with her on some issues (as I do-- and as I am). But a story that broke last night in the Tampa Bay area (good ole FL-13) should make even the most hard-hearted Republican partisans sit up and take notice.We've been covering FL-13 over the last year or so because long-time incumbent, Bill Young died. He was the longest-serving Republican in Congress. He was first elected in 1970 and was generally well-regarded, as a genial and cooperative guy across partisan lines. His district has gradually turned bluer and bluer and it looked like he was very vulnerable to defeat and that the district would surely elect a Democrat were he to step down. When he died, FL-13 became the #1 priority for the DCCC. Steve Israel, the least competent person to ever run the DCCC in its whole storied history, managed to lose the Special Election and then, worse, guarantee that the Democrats would have no candidate in November. In her compassion-- and probably aware that the magnitude of the Steve Israel-engineered DCCC disaster in November guarantees that she will never be Speaker again-- Pelosi is letting him stay in his leadership post. But that isn't the tale of compassion I want to focus on today.With no candidate for this November, the Democrats are looking for a candidate for 2016, when Hillary's coattails acre likely to sweep someone into the seat (unless Israel is still running the DCCC). Young's widow, Beverly Young, has offered herself as their candidate. The fact that she's a Republican, of course, doesn't stop either the DCCC or the Florida Democratic Party. Both enfeebled organizations prefer Republicans disguised as Democrats to actual Democrats. But the Beverly Young story isn't just another story of Steve Israel and Debbie Wasserman Schultz finding another Republican to run as a Democrat. Beverly campaigned for the sleazy GOP lobbyist, David Jolly, who Israel gave a political career. But she wants to run against him now-- or, at least, in 2016. I think she'd rather run against John Boehner though.
“I am absolutely going to run against David in 2016. I’d do it now if I could. If I’d known that the Democrats wouldn’t put anyone up on that ballot, I’d have been there myself this time. I thought they had a candidate. I wouldn’t have been ready. But I would have run anyway," Mrs. Young said Tuesday night in an interview. She is angry about the way Jolly fired her late husband's congressional staffers and feels he has turned one of her sons, Patrick, against her."This county just can’t fall to lobbyists and their deceit and manipulation. I’m not going to just sit back and have all Bill’s had work just trashed to inside the Beltway politics. Ugh.”Jolly, a former senior adviser to Rep. Young who was viewed almost as a member of the Youngs' family, is no longer speaking to Mrs. Young after she publicly criticized him for treating her husband's former staffers poorly. [She claims Jolly promised her husband-- on his deathbed-- that he would keep his staff at least through a reasonable transition period.]“I’m not a politician. I’m not going to put on high heels and a dress and try to convince people that I’m what they want," said Mrs. Young, who has long been a fierce-- and unpolished and undiplomatic-- advocate for veterans. “I just think that the person in there now is doing a terrible job.”She said she was broke by late last year, after her husband's expensive funeral and a delay in receiving the benefits he accrued after more than four decades in Congress. She wrote to 10 congressmen for help, only two responded.“I told them I really needed that money. I was getting panicky. I told them, 'I’m not okay.' Bill had been in office for 43 years, it wasn’t like they didn’t know who I was. I called the speaker of the House four times. He never returned my calls. So I called Nancy Pelosi and told her, 'I’m in trouble.' By the end of the day, she had all the agencies calling me. She’s the only one that made that happen.”
John Boehner wouldn't help. Bill Young had been serving in Congress for 20 years when a typical Republican sex scandal allowed Boehner to slip into Congress in 1990.