Lefty Dem tipped as next House-incumbent slayer has rap sheet with drunken ER fight, car crash

A drunken fight in an emergency room and a car crash sound like the résumé of someone trying to avoid public office, not launch a campaign for one. But here we are: the latest "movement" candidate hoping to primary Richard Neal out of his seat is being sold to progressive donors nationwide as the next big scalp, rap sheet and all. Nobody's hiding it. It's practically a footnote in the coverage, buried under the bigger story of insurgents taking down entrenched incumbents.

That tells you something about where the energy on the left actually is right now. It's not really about policy differences with Neal, who has been in Congress since the Clinton administration and is about as establishment as it gets. It's about vibes, momentum, and beating anyone with a "D" next to their name long enough in office to have accumulated seniority. The candidate's personal conduct becomes a shrug because the target is the incumbent, not the fitness of the challenger.

We've watched this movie before. A wave candidate gets hyped as the future, the base falls in love with the insurgency narrative, and basic questions about judgment and temperament get waved off as distractions cooked up by the old guard. Voters in western Massachusetts deserve better than a binary choice between a fifty-plus-year fixture and someone whose vetting seems to have stopped at "beats an incumbent." If this is what the leading edge of the left's bench looks like, Neal's biggest problem might not be his challenger. It might be what his party is willing to overlook to topple him.