Eric Massa is running for congress in NY-29, my home district.
NY-29 is the most conservative in the state, and he’s running on a platform of single-payer healthcare, among other things.
Eric takes no money from corporations. Eric has “the fire in the belly”.
Eric Massa is the candidate that inspired me to become a Democrat.
Can’t you please chip in 5 dollars? He needs it right now. I’m trying to get at least 20 college students to chip in $5 each.
Donate here.
Bonus: Esquire Magazine on Eric Massa:
Massa, forty-eight, served in the Navy for twenty-four years – in Beirut in the 1980s, in the Persian Gulf in the 1990s – and became a commander. In 1998, as an assistant to General Wesley Clark at NATO, he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. It’s a curable cancer, and after two years of surgery, radiation, and chemo, Massa was declared cancer free. (But stress on his immune system could trigger a relapse.) He left the Navy, bought a four-bedroom colonial in Corning, New York, and took a corporate job with a good retirement plan. Then Bush got reelected.
The war, certainly, is a part of his platform, along with health care, veterans’ benefits, and labor rights. The war makes him sick. What really sets him off is politicians using the phrase “This soldier gave his life.” “Here’s a news flash: No soldier gives his life,” he says. “That’s not the way it works. Most soldiers who make a conscious decision to place themselves in harm’s way do it to protect their buddies.They do it because of the bonds of friendship – and it goes so much deeper than friendship.”
Massa is excitable, and everyone worries about his health while he’s out there hustling, staying until the last handshake, eating too late at night. “At my last physical, the doctor said, ‘Doing this again could kill you.’ And I said – and this is true, hand to God – ‘My not running for Congress could result in hundreds of soldiers getting killed. So you tell me where the risk balance is.’ This country is in danger of losing the United States of America in one generation. So it’s not, Will you run again? it’s, How could I not?”