Eyewitness: On the Ground With the Tim Burns Campaign in Pennsylvania

The conservative, grassroots movement has successfully shown that gerrymandered congressional districts and state boundaries no longer limit citizen involvement in any campaign regardless of where you live. In 2010, all politics are still local, but every campaign in the country is now local, as well. This has never been more evident than in the Pennsylvania 12^th Congressional District this weekend.

My business partner and I received a call on Friday May 14, 2010 providing us an opportunity to spend the weekend in Pennsylvania as part of the ground team of the Tim Burns campaign. We both have extensive military backgrounds, so the trip could only have been made better if we had been allowed to parachute into PA12, unfortunately Southwest Airlines wouldn’t play along.

We arrived in Washington, PA around 2:00 AM Saturday morning and after a few hours of much needed sleep we made our way to the Burns Campaign headquarters. Within moments of arriving we had our instructions and began loading the GPS with polling places in Fayette County, PA, some of which were fact and some fiction. We spent the majority of the day searching out these obscure, out of the way polling places and reporting the results back to the Burn’s headquarters. It would seem someone didn’t want us to know where to go to vote.

It is important to note that we were joined by people from New Jersey, Illinois, Montana, Indiana, and Massachusetts. Does this happen often? We don’t think so.

With our first mission behind us we decided to visit the local Mark Critz Campaign Headquarters and found very little in the way of political activity, so we turned our attention to Tim Burns Republican opponent in the Pennsylvania primary. We gained a tremendous amount of information about this historical race for the seat of the late Rep. John Murtha. This coming Tuesday will bring a Special Election to fill the seat of John Murtha until the November election and the primary to determine the permanent replacement. For those who like to vote for the same candidate twice this would be a once in a lifetime opportunity to do this legally!

Mark Critz is the unopposed Democrat nominee for the November Election, while Tim Burn’s has been selected by the Republican Party to run in the Special Election and is simultaneously running against Bill Russell for the Republican position in the General Election in November. Russell is not involved in the special election.

What makes all of this extremely interesting is that Bill Russell has been quoted at PA2010.com as follows: “”I still think I am the best candidate to take over in the 12th,” Russell said. “So I’m going to vote for myself as a write-in.”

It has been conveyed to us by constituents in his district that Mr. Russell is pushing the write-in concept with his supporters. This approach is contrary to the views of all conservatives, and displays a divide-and-conquer mentality. Our best advice to Mr. Russell is “Don’t Tread on Us”, as the grassroots conservatives that support his campaign are not going to respond well to his campaign when he trips up his a fellow Republican in a time when the larger goal is to put our government back on course. The best advice we could offer Mr. Russell would be to drop his personal agenda where the special election is concerned and run a conservative campaign in the Primary. The write-in approach looks very similar to an Alinsky tactic aimed at a fellow Republican.

So here is an idea. Let’s concentrate all of our efforts on winning PA-12, which has been in Democrat hands for as long as I have been alive. Tim Burns won’t work with Nancy Pelosi and his opponent, Mark Critz will work with Nancy Pelosi. Surely, we can agree that Tim Burns should win this election. If we can’t our country is in great peril and may God have mercy on our Republic!