From Politico’s Massachusetts Playbook:
The Boston chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America] received a letter from a group of former Leckey campaign staffers that alleged the candidate mistreated her staff. The document also raised concerns about Leckey’s choice to pour $850,000 of her own money into the campaign, and suggested some staff were underpaid. Among the staffers speaking out is Leckey’s former finance director, Rachel Craig, who has previously been critical of the candidate’s self-funding.
“The [Coordinating Committee] believes these allegations are concerning enough to warrant serious deliberation by the membership about continuing to endorse Ihssane Leckey for Congress,” the Boston DSA told its members in an email last week.
Leckey took issue with the allegations, the way the chapter handled the letter, and the debate process around rescinding the endorsement. The Boston chapter of the socialist group did not respond to a request for comment, and the endorsement was removed from Leckey’s campaign website.
Yuck, she sounds like a pretty rotten employer, but who knows what dirty tricks are going on behind the scenes.
On paper Leckey is the candidate whose political positions are closest to mine, but I could never bring myself to support her because whenever I listened to her, I always came away with the feeling that she wasn’t quite ready for prime time.
If Auchincloss wins this election (which he’s certain to do if Leckey, Mermell, and Grossman all stay in), then maybe Leckey can give it another shot in the ranked-voting midterm (2022).
For now it looks like Mermell is the only hope for a genuine Democrat to win the primary, but she’ll have to pray for some dirt on Grossman and Khazei, since all of the candidates are evidently being fed their own delusional push-polling results and are unwilling to drop out.
I wonder which MA-4 candidate the Democratic Socialists will endorse now.
The letter from her staff was posted on Twitter:
@Chuck, thank you for posting this letter.
I found it disturbing, but not in the way I expected.
I can’t imagine what it’s like having a boss who raises her voice sometimes, critiques my writing, arrives late for meetings, asks me to do work outside my job description, asks me to work overtime, or generally thinks that she should make the decisions instead of me. It must also be very hard to discover that your employer is paying you exactly the amount you agreed to when you took the job. And if that boss also lent her own money to the enterprise so that she could keep on paying me, that would be the worst! These 20-somethings have it very hard.
It’s nice to see a negative story focused on someone other than Auchincloss for once although let’s be honest: Leckey wasn’t going to win anyway and does any other candidate really want this endorsement? But it’d be nice to see more pointed coverage of other candidates. For instance, why has there been so little coverage of Mermell apologizing to a Brookline firefighter over the way his racial discrimination case was handled during her tenure as Selectwoman? And why has no reporter delved into Grossman’s record of accomplishment or lack thereof as a Councilor given that her only qualification for office according to her campaign messaging seems to be that she’s a mom. If coverage is going to be negative given that all candidates agree on most all issues then let’s at least apply that standard to all major candidates.
@Gerry Chervinsky: It sounds like you have the makings of a Village14 Guest Post. I would be very interested to read it.
From The Intercept:
“Leckey has been able to bring in four veterans of Bernie Sanders’s operations, including Josh Miller-Lewis, doing communications; Jeremy Meadow, working on the data side; Malea Stenzel Gilligan, doing fundraising; and Brooke Adams, running field operations. The former Sanders aides, who are no strangers to a gruff boss, say that the characterization of Leckey as cruel by the disaffected former aides is utterly foreign to their experience.”
In my opinion Natalia Linos is the most qualified candidate. Her campaign is all grassroots, no large donors or superPACs. She arrives to generally liberal positions from thoughtful reasoning and from her background in science – not to cater to ideological groups or slogans. I volunteered to help in her campaign and I’m impressed by the commitment, idealism and ability of her mostly young volunteers.
Do yourself, the district, and the nation a favor, and check out her platform and proposals.