Congratulations!

Congratulations to Kathleen Sibelius, now a 60-year-old former two-term Kansas governor, confirmed by a mainly party-line Senate vote and sworn in as U.S. Health and Human Services department secretary Tuesday (instead of former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, whose nominations tax return and lobbying problems derailed). Sibelius’ father is former Ohio Governor John Gilligan, who I was interviewed briefly (and unpleasantly) as part of my dissertation research.

Congratulations also to Scott Murphy, a 39-year-old NYC venture capitalist who beat out a long-time Republican state legislator (Jim Tedisco) whom the upstate NY anti-abortion activists whom I interviewed as part of my dissertation research loved. Recall that the special election – whose vote count at one point had Murphy and Tedisco TIED – was made necessary when NYS’s governor tapped a rather conservative upstate NY Democratic congressperson (Kirsten Gillibrand) for Hillary Clinton’s U.S. Senate seat. I wrote in my dissertation about how the evolution of Gillibrand’s longtime predecessor from Kennedy Democrat to conservative Republican mirrored the change in upstate NY’s political landscape. On his way to be sworn in, Murphy went from Glen Falls, which I visited to do an interview during my dissertation research, to the legendary Halfmoon Diner in the Saratoga County suburb of Albany (Clifton Park), where I also interviewed someone. Murphy and his family apparently moved to Glens Falls, near the farm where his wife grew up, so he could run for Congress. No stranger to politics, Murphy had also served as an aide to two Missouri governors.

Both Sibelius and Murphy have won in areas (Kansas and upstate New York) that are heavily Republican. But Gilibrand had won reelection with 70 percent of the vote, a margin that Murphy obviously didn’t come close to (his margin was apparently a few hundred votes).

-- Perry