AOC Supports PA State Senator Daylin Leach In Run for Rep Allyson Schwartz's Congressional Seat

Pennsylvania State Senator Daylin Leach announced his intentions today to run for the Congressional seat currently held by Rep. Allyson Schwartz (D) in Pa’s 13th district. At AOC, I’ve already declared my support for Schwartz, who is seriously considering a run for governor in 2014, against current Republican governor Tom Corbett. In fact, I wrote about her yesterday.

“I don’t think she talks about running for an office as serious as governor frivolously,” Leach told reporters today.  “I think she really means it when she says that.  I am acting as if she does, and I assume that’s what she means.  So I have a lot of work to do.”

I met Daylin Leach last spring when he so generously agreed to speak and play drums at our April 28, 2012 Stop the War on Women event in Harrisburg. I’m looking for the priceless drum footage, but it took me exactly one minute after watching this campaign video to reach out to one of Daylin’s representatives, who is also a good friend of mine. 

“OK, so I can do flip flops, too,” I said. She knows I’m exclusively committed to electing pro-choice, pro-separation of church and state Democratic or Republican women to office, until America’s gender gap improves in elected office. With Pennsylvania occupying about 46th place in the US in electing women, some may say I caved too easily in lending my name to the Daylin Leach campaign. What if a woman is running?

Not so. I am impressed with State Senator Leach’s ability to forge coalitions and alliances in our partisan-politics-ravaged nation. There are many insider Daylin Leach stories that I can’t share publicly, but I assure you that he is a person of deeply-felt principles, high integrity, commitment to middle class people and the American values shared by my readers. 

Leach doesn’t hesitate for a moment to confront fellow Democrats if he feels they are obstructing forward motion for Pennsylvanians. Nor is he caught up in the war of influence between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in this state, reaching out often to Pittsburgh and further west in search of consensus and the best decision for all Pennsylvanians, as he legislates from Harrisburg. 

I would never support any candidate that I believe answers to the Democratic boys club in our state or in Philadelphia. Nor will I support any candidate who wavers for one moment on women’s rights, as our Senator Bob Casey did in supporting the Blunt Amendment. I will not work with a Democratic party that hammers my good friend Kate Michelman for calling out Senator Casey on the Huffington Post for supporting Blunt.

Nor will I work with progressive women candidates who don’t support Allyson Schwartz, because she has a moderate voice — or they are hitching their star to a local guy who can help them more directly in the future. When a state occupies 46th place in America in electing women, these female politicos may be assuming a level of future gender reciprocity support that does not exist in PA politics. 

Enough talk. It’s time for action. Watch the video above and consider just how determined and responsible a person must be to grow up as Daylin did and still become such a great success with a wonderful family. Read more about Daylin Leach on his website. Contribute to this fantastic American’s campaign. Like Daylin’s Facebook page. 

Like so many of my friends, I’m exhausted with partisan politics in America. But then I log on to yet another story of America’s middle class getting the shaft, or social conservatives waging a war on my deeply-held values — those shared by Sister Simone and Nuns on the Bus — and I know that I have the responsibility to forge on, like it or not. 

Conservative columnist David Brooks has a terrific op ed piece Freedom Loses One in today’s New York Times. It focuses on family obligations and civic ones, too. They require us to give up time for personal passions to nurture others, our country and its citizens. I will be promoting both Allyson Schwartz and Daylin Leach online, in person and at our retail locations throughout 2013 and in the 2014 campaign because it is my responsibility as an American citizen, human rights activist with a focus on women’s issues and writer of growing influence. ~ Anne