Dr. Andrew Bard Schmookler, 65, is vying for the 6th District Democratic nomination in May to run against Republican Congressman Bob Goodlatte in 2012.
Dr. Schmookler is a writer living in Shenandoah County ,two miles from West Virginia near Orkney Springs. He spends time writing a blog at nonsoblind.org. He is married with three children.
“I feel that what I’m fighting for is the soul of America. …It is a grave crisis this country now faces,” says Dr. Schmookler.
He is using friends for his campaign staff and admits that “There’s no way I’m going to match [the funds] that the incumbent can raise.” He’ll get his message out hoping to level the playing field and making “David’s slingshot a match for his [Goodlatte] Goliath’s sword.”
He said his campaign is “deeply committed to truthfulness” something he believes is lacking in politics today. He says he is not a generic Democrat. He has an “unusual and powerful message.”
“The country is acting like it is normal politics when forces that we’re not confronting actually are degrading it.” His campaign theme reflects his message – “Let’s talk about the elephant in the room – It is a crisis, an emergency.” Schmookler said he feels “duty bound to do everything that’s in my power to protect the country from going down the tubes.”
He plans to bring out Goodlatte’s untruths about telling constituents he’s on their side when he is not. Schmookler called Goodlatte “a loyal foot soldier of the Republican army.”
Schmookler is running as a Democrat because he believes that the “Democratic Party is the only thing that can possibly protect us from the destructive force that the Republican Party has become.”
When it comes to voter apathy there are two kinds said Schmookler. One just doesn’t care and the other feels that anything they do won’t matter. His job will be to make them understand that the current state of politics is robbing them and their children of a future. Others feel “a form of despair.” They need to rise up and demand a government with integrity. “We’ve seen that on the streets of Cairo [Egypt] and Madison [Wisconsin],” said Schmookler.
Dr. Schmookler has conducted radio conversations, authored many books and makes regular speaking appearances.
He studied as an undergraduate at Harvard University, where he graduated summa cum laude in Social Relations in 1967. Schmookler went on to earn his doctorate in 1977 at the University of California at Berkeley and The Graduate Theological Union, in a program specially created to accommodate his comprehensive theory of human history.
In 1984, Dr. Schmookler was awarded the Erik H. Erikson Prize by the International Society for Political Psychology. And in 1985, he was selected by Esquire Magazine as “one of the men and women under forty who are changing the nation.” The International Biographical Centre (of Cambridge, England) selected him, in 1999, as one the “Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century”.
