[don’t forget congress]

There’s a lot of attention already being paid to the 2008 presidential election, but let’s not forget about Congress!

In 2006, I campaigned in New York’s 13th Congressional District to support Steve Harrison’s scrappy but unsuccessful bid to unseat Conservative Republican Vito Fossella.

Now that I actually live in the district, I’m even more anxious to see Fossella taken down. Steve Harrison has announced he’ll run again, but the New York Times mentions three other potential candidates: City Council members Michael E. McMahon of Staten Island and Domenic M. Recchia Jr. of Brooklyn, and Assemblyman Michael Cusick of Staten Island.

I know next to nothing about any of these guys, but in the coming weeks and months, maybe one or more of them will declare, and it’ll be time to do some research.

Meanwhile, a friend of mine is backing a friend of his, one Tom Perriello, in a campaign to unseat Virgil Goode in Virginia’s 5th CD.

Goode is a former Democrat who voted for three out of four articles of impeachment against Clinton, then became a Republican in 2002, becoming the first Republican to serve in the district since Reconstruction. He came to national prominence by loudly criticizing Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison’s to be sworn into Congress over a Koran rather than a Bible. (In a delicious irony, the Korean Ellison used was once owned by Thomas Jefferson, whose Monticello home is in Goode’s district.)

I don’t know much about Perriello yet, but I’m going to a fundraising party tomorrow to find out more. What I do know comes from his Res Publica profile:

Before co-founding Res Publica, Tom served as Special Advisor to the Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, a United Nations tribunal, and as a Yale Law School/OSI Teaching Fellow in West Africa. He has worked for the US State Department, the International Centre for Transitional Justice and others on human rights and legal reform efforts in Afghanistan, Sudan, Kosovo, Argentina, Chile, India, and the United States. Prior to law school, he worked as Assistant Director of the Center for a Sustainable Economy (now part of Redefining Progress) and as a consultant on youth and environemental campaigns … Tom is also a founder of the Catholic Alliance for the Common Good. He holds a BA in Humanities from Yale College and a J.D. from Yale Law School and is a member of the New York State Bar.

It’s all good stuff, but not exactly the kind of good stuff that’s going to wow Virginia voters. Hopefully there’s another side to his story. I’ll keep you posted.