My post today at WHYY (a little more personal than usual) looks at the blessings and burdens of Sen. Barbara Buono’s deep ties to union leaders and the failure of her education plan to gain traction with other Big D’s.

I read Blue Jersey every day. Unabashedly liberal and progressive, the politically-oriented, Jersey-centric news site offers a daily rundown of articles and editorials with smart and snarky commentary. Examples: a link to a N.J. Spotlight article on new health exchanges is annotated, “Chris Christie, hewing to the GOP, did everything to oppose the Affordable Care Act.” A Star-Ledger piece is introduced by the heading, “The GOP Plan to Gut Food Stamps.”

The site offers a slice of left-wing zeitgeist, a quick glimpse of the mood of Garden State Democrats-with-big-D’s. (Full disclosure: I’m a Democrat too, although not as robust as the Blue Jersey folk; on certain issues my big D slumps lower-case.) That glimpse reveals a rising level of frustration at, among other things, the failure of the public and the mainstream media to look seriously at Buono’s education platform, even as polls show a (slightly) tightening race.

Read the rest here.