By Steven T. Jones
Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan got a respectable 44,804 votes (16.2 percent of the total) against Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. But Sheehan honestly thought she could win the race and blamed her loss on the media, writing to supporters last month that she going to run again in 2010 with the help of a new radio show on Green 960 AM, “right after Corporate Democrat Gavin Newsom,” who has a Saturday morning show.
“The reason we are undertaking this show in that the corporate media (locally and nationally) wrote me off and put a blockade on coverage even before we began our campaign,” Sheehan wrote Nov. 14 in an e-mail entitled “The Revolution Will not be Reported!”
Now, I love to bash the corporate media as much as the next alt-weekly editor; we endorsed Sheehan; and I personally voted for her and thought her supporters gave Pelosi a good challenge. But Sheehan’s rhetoric has gotten ridiculous. For one thing, Sheehan simply wasn’t going to dethrone the Speaker of the House, no matter what the media said or how out-of-touch with San Francisco values Pelosi may be. For another, the station on which Sheehan is going to launch her revolution is owned by Clear Channel, the biggest corporate media villain on the dial. And honestly, if it weren’t for the corporate media promoting Sheehan’s Camp Casey a couple years ago, would we have any idea who she is?
I wrote Cindy back to ask about the contradiction and got no response. But today, I got another mass e-mail from her asking for money to fund her new show (which she said begins Jan. 4 and for which she says she needs $1200 per week). For a donation of $500 or more, Sheehan will even do a 30-second PSA plugging “any event you are doing” or organization you wish. So much for integrity.
Rather than selflessly pushing for progressive revolution, it often seems that Sheehan just loves the spotlight.