Al Wynn Attacks Donna Edwards Because...She Didn't Recieve Child Support

Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left at 10:12 AM on February 8, 2008.

This is getting really ugly. Below is a new robocall on Donna Edwards by Al Wynn, attacking her for not being a member of the DC bar and for having tax liens against her.

This is a pretty standard tactic from a desperate opponent who is using a subtle attack on women to shore up his base. What the robocall doesn't say is that at the time Edwards had financial problems, she was a single mother who wasn't getting child support and did not have health insurance for herself (though she did for her son). A medical problem threw her into debt, which took a long time to pay off. Wynn is also trying to make it appear as if Edwards was thrown out of the DC bar, when what happened is she simply stopped practicing law and so stopped paying dues. The robocall ends by saying if Donna can't take care of her own finances, how is she going to handle the Federal budget.

Most of the accusations are outright misleading or just not true, but there's a deep irony here, and it leads to Wynn's ugly past. It's not just his irresponsible votes against the estate tax repeal, or massive energy subsidies that blow a whole in budget. Wynn has been foreclosed on at least twice, and his divorce in 2000 was so messy that his ex-wife accused him of moving out during Christmas and then arranging to have the house foreclosed on and skipping child support payments. His ex-wife also joined the campaign of his Republican opponent. How Wynn treated his wife and daughter, and his petty financial problems, are not interesting or important, except that he is now misrepresenting Donna's personal life experiences to stay in office.

Politics can get very messy and ugly. Like a lot of progressive reformers, Donna Edwards is a professional who has organized and fought for change pretty much her entire life. At the last NAACP forum, she told a story about arriving at college as an 18 year old, one of only six black women on campus, and organizing to stop an annual campus tradition of one particular fraternity dressing up as Confederate soldiers and marching around campus. She's fought as a public interest attorney, as an organizer, as a Foundation officer, and as a lobbyist who got the Violence Against Women Act through Congress and signed into law. She's genuinely remarkable. Still, in politics, it doesn't matter how amazing you are, this is what happens when you put yourself out in public and the press doesn't do its job. That's fine, and Donna can handle it. It's just worth knowing that this is the kind of stuff that keeps people like Al Wynn in office.

You can volunteer to end this kind of politics by signing up here. The election is on Tuesday, and volunteers are critical. I hope you're proud of endorsing this guy, Speaker Pelosi.

(And incidentally, the pollster and strategist behind this attack is Diane Feldman, who also worked for Third Way. It's a nice little club they have going.)

... And mailers attacking Donna Edwards for links to Halliburton are now out. You can see them here and here. The backstory is that Donna works at a progressive foundation called Arca, and Arca's money managers put the foundation's assets in all sorts of equities, one of which was Halliburton. It's the equivalent of being attacked because the company you work for has some of its capital in mutual funds.

UPDATE:Donna Edwards is leading Al Wynn 40 to 32. Click here for more.

Matt Stoller is a political activist/blogger in DC, and was an editor at MyDD from November 2005 until June 2007. He also consults for the Sunlight Foundation, FreePress.net, and Working Assets as well as proactively networking other progressive bloggers/internet activists and progressive professionals.