My name is Richard Lesh.  I'm just an ordinary person who has finally gotten fed up with politics as usual so I've decided to challenge one of the most extreme, rubber-stamp Republicans in the U.S. House, Todd Akin.  He has been in DC for six years now and hasn't done anything good for Missourians or the nation.  Quite the contrary, his votes have been almost perfectly aligned with the disastrous Republican agenda.

Missouri's second district is a gerrymandered district that was designed by Republicans and Democrats alike to be a safe district for Republicans while, the MO-01 and MO-03 districts (both in the St. Louis area as well) remain ridiculously safe Democratic districts.  This collusion between the beltway politicians has led to a 5-4 split in favor of the Republicans in our Missouri delegation.  It has also led to an anemic Democratic party that has allowed not only this seat to go uncontested for almost 16 years but has led to a loss of both houses and the governorship.

I decided to run to give Missourians a real choice between a classic wing-nut Republican and a true progressive Democrat.  Win-or-lose, I am also committed to helping our party rebuild from the ground up.  I have been very upset with not only the Republican agenda but the lack of a real response from the beltway Democrats.  As I have told many of my supporters, the reason that I have chosen to run at this time is because I finally realized that no-one in DC is going to fix our problems for us.  We need to get ordinary people involved and running for office if we want our agenda to be heard.

I just finished reading "Crashing the Gate" and was glad to find out that much of my dissatisfaction with the traditional mechanisms of politics is shared by others.  Our state is a microcosm of our nation and thus a bell-weather.  Missouri voters have correctly determined who the Presidential winner would be in every election since 1900 except 1956, yet Democrats have been loosing ground in this state.  When Kerry pulled out of the state weeks before the 2004 election it de-moralized the grassroots in our party.  We have since come to realize that the national Democratic party is not going to help us and that we must rebuild the state party ourselves.

When I talk with people on the issues of jobs, health care, education and honesty, most people seem to agree with me that much more needs to be done.  It doesn't matter whether they are Democrats, Republicans or just people who think that they are Republicans.  We need to get the message out that Democrats are the problem solvers, that we care about people not corporations and that we will not let them down as so many Republicans and Democrats of the past have done.