President (To Win Colorado)
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(D) Kamala Harris
(R) Donald Trump
80%↑
20%
CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
(R) V. Archuleta
98%
2%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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(D) Joe Neguse*
(R) Marshall Dawson
95%
5%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
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(R) Jeff Hurd
(D) Adam Frisch
52%↑
48%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
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(R) Lauren Boebert
(D) Trisha Calvarese
90%
10%
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
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(R) Jeff Crank
(D) River Gassen
80%
20%
CO-06 (Aurora)
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(D) Jason Crow*
(R) John Fabbricatore
90%
10%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
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(D) B. Pettersen
(R) Sergei Matveyuk
90%
10%
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
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(D) Yadira Caraveo
(R) Gabe Evans
50%
50%
State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
May 30, 2007 04:31 PM UTC
32 Comments
What left wing blogs are attacking Udall? Did Karen make this up?
http://www.mydd.com/…
http://www.squaresta…
Went a little overboard in the latter–there’s no need to call Colorado Pols “you freaking Nazis” for mildly defending Udall’s position. That does not make me want to join their discussion.
I want this war to end and so does Mark Udall. Even Howard Dean says we cannot simply evacuate tomorrow. What’s the self-righteous alternative, ye who toss around “Nazi” at the slightest disagreement? Will Bob Schaffer offer it to you?
But neither is “wanting to end the war”. I can want to end the war all I want – if I don’t take action on it, I’m not actually trying to end the war.
Howard Dean is a realist, as are most of the Dems and anti-war Republicans. You can’t just pull the plug, wave a wand, and wish the troops home on U.S. soil tomorrow. There are complicated logistics involved in re-deploying 160,000 soldiers, and more complications from the umpteen tens of thousands of private contractors the Bush Administration is over-paying to avoid unpleasant news at home. Then there’s the thought that maybe the lack of 160,000 troops might create a power vacuum in the area. You can’t just pull the funding, and very few people are suggesting that.
Wanting the troops home doesn’t imply black-and-white thinking that if you don’t want to keep the troops there, then you’re for an immediate funds stoppage.
They gave GWB a blank check and that doesn’t get us one inch closer to out of there. And meanwhile May is the deadliest month ever over there…
Damn! Col Pols slammed by the “Moveon.org” left. I’ve had an epiphany! This blog IS centrist when compared with square state et al! (Cue the epiphany music)
“I’m not going to play chicken when it comes to the needs of soldiers on the ground.”
This is a false choice for which Bush primed the pump for months. Dems fell for it; then they lost the debate and the vote. I hope both our CO senators are sharp enough to see that. Otherwise we’ll be here next may having the same debate.
I hope he keeps his head about him as the campaign intensifies. And I hope he doesn’t draw some Mike Miles-insired primary challenge. Of course, if the challenger is a weak as Miles was, Udall could simply ignore him/her (as KS did in ’04).
Udall is a smart campaigner, a great congressman and will make an excellent senator and this vote demonstrates his ability for clear and reasoned deliberation.
As Pols points out, the liberal left here in Colorado and across the country seem to think they delivered the election of 2006 and both houses of Congress to the Democrats and are now owed payback. The voting stats show Democrats don’t win in Colorado without a significant percentage of Republicans and a majority of unaffiliateds.
The contention around Udall’s vote and the withdrawal debate generally is another demonstration that the extremists of the party are willing to throw away their long-term self interest for the passions of the short-term.
Most polls show independents are just as unhappy with the war as democrats. People are sick of this “on the one hand this on the other hand that” kinda politics. Having said all that I don’t think this vote will decide the senate race at all.
Can you say “U-turn Udall?”
are you sure this isn’t your essay?
http://www.dailycame…
Some day you’ll grow up, GB. You are engaging in exactly what you claim to hate about the Republicans. He disagrees with you so let’s post a racist letter and suggest that he wrote it. Good discourse.
I would hope that Udall would stick to his guns if it made a difference. But this funding bill was going through regardless of what he did. And even if it hadn’t, this war isn’t ending until Bush leaves office. Few politicians are going to make dramatic last stands on things that aren’t going to change anything – unless the dramatic last stand will help them politically. You won’t have many candidates to vote for if you expect that kind of purity.
Remember how Pres. Clinton scored big points by taking on Sister Souljah in 1992? Udall is doing the same with his vote on war funding. It probably wouldn’t hurt him if Mike Miles or someone on the left ran a primary campaign against Udall because he could present himself as a centrist standing next to a hard leftist.
Wonder whether Condom Bob will try the same thing in the GOP. I tend to doubt he can distance himself from the right wing nuts because, well, he happens to be one of the right wing nuts.
“if Mike Miles or someone on the left ran a primary campaign against Udall because he could present himself as a centrist standing next to a hard leftist.”
By that logic, it would be a lovely thing for Schaffer to be primaried by Tom Tancredo or Marilyn Musgrave so he can look like a centrist (though being a conservative in Colorado is hardly a liability, IMHO).
My guess is that a Udall/Miles primary would look like a Move-On.Org convocation more than a serious primary battle to represent the Democratic Party in Colorado. At least having no primary will give Udall the chance to paint himself in whatever shade of blue he wants.
If Udall feels his ideas are mainstream and that he is an ideal candidate for Senate in Colorado, he should let his votes and statements of the recent past stand on its own. But I think Udall is starting to see the light: a liberal just won’t cut in in Colorado–you have to hop aboard the bandwagon on the right side of the tracks to get elected. I just don’t think the voters of Colorado will buy it.
Standing between Musty and Tancredo, Schaffer actually DOES look better. He’s just as conservative as those nuts but he presents himself better, and he’s more principled than those two are combined.
Now if you are fortunate enough to get Musty, Tancredo and Doug Bruce to run in a primary against Condom Bob, Schaffer will look like a stateman!
Regardless of whether it was a good strategic move for his senate bid, Udall is a Congressional representative NOW.
He was elected by CD2 voters to represent them. He cannot just stop doing that at the end of his tenure so that he can move up his personal career ladder.
If I lived in CD2 and opposed the war, I wouldn’t vote for him for senate.
This is why people say Democrats are spineless and self-serving. As an uber-liberal (although not a Democrat), I can’t say I disagree.
I am confident that CD 2 voters want this war to end – most areas do. But I am not so sure they are ready to cut off funding. I personally don’t think any form of pressure is going to make a dent on Bush, but I can see why people want to try other routes first, before cutting funding.
I doubt that the majority of the constituents in CD 2 want an open ended occupation without any benchmarks or timelines for the Iraqi government. Udall’s consistent support for an open ended occupation is definitely at odds with his core base of support and the wider set of constituents who live in CD 2 with the possible exception of Grand County. His conviction that Iraq will get better in 1 or 2 Friedman units is at odds with the perceptions of the majority of his constituents that the US shouldn’t be held hostage to the dictates of a foreign government.
He also is going to have a credibility problem pushing to have the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group enacted as policy. The report is now over six months old and the situation in Iraq hasn’t remained static. How does Udall know that the recommendations are now still plausible? Wouldn’t he need to have another study done to make sure that the ISG recommendations can achieve a strong enough Iraqi government to start a draw down of troops?
Udall presents himself with a false choice. A responsible action would have been to stand on the position Democrats had already staked out before the President vetoed the bill.
The Congress isn’t a lapdog to the President – it’s a co-equal branch of government, and the one responsible for passing laws and the budget. If Democrats in power weren’t so used to playing abused spouse, they’d have realized that and let the President take the responsibility for vetoing a funding bill that was popular with a majority of the country – including Republican voters.
Newly-elected Representatives and Senators in the reddest districts voted their conscience against this wimpy “compromise” (read: cave-in) of a bill. The argument that Udall has to appease moderates here doesn’t cut it.
are you saying it would have been smarter for Democrats – who didn’t have the votes to override a veto of any bill that included timetables, benchmarks, etc… – to not pass any funding and allow the president to easily paint them as defeatists who abandon the troops? Democrats were screwed no matter what they did, they just sided with political expediency.
did you just fit in one post?
Abandon the troops–that’s like saying Saddam was connected to 9-11: it’s just plain false.
The congress has many times before defunded a stupid presidents war while working with the defense dept. to make sure the redeployment works successfully.
The question maybe you should ask yourself is why are you so giddy about 100s more GIs dying, 1000s more Iraqis dying, and we’re still policing a civil war, occupying a country that never was a threat to us.
John McCain voted to “abandon the troops”, as did most Republicans during Kosovo and Somalia.
My post on SquareState about being upset with how Udall and Democrats don’t even bother countering the bullshit “defeatists” nonsense people like you spew.
How can you “lose” a civil war when we’re not even one of the sides? How do you “win” an occupation? Why can’t we just “settle” and bring our men and women home?
Saddam is gone. No WMDs. Mission Accomplished. Bring ’em home.
And in case you didn’t notice, people hate Bush and hate this occupation. It’s not to dangerous to take our embarrassment of a President.
What I’m saying is that Democrats should have passed the same bill they passed the first time. If the President doesn’t like the terms of the funding, he’s free to veto it, but he’s the one denying funding for the troops…
I heard Udall on Jay Marvin’s show yesterday defending his vote, and it’s clear he (or perhaps some other Democrats, and Udall just didn’t want to look “bad”…) doesn’t get it. If the Democrats pass funding that includes a withdraw timetable and enough money to actually supply the troops, how is that abandoning the troops?
Udall was afraid because, as he stated, “it’s not right to play chicken with troop funding”. Well, if you’re driving down the road and someone crosses over into your lane to play chicken, and it happens over and over again and all you ever do is wreck your car trying to get out of the way, then you’re not helping anything.
The President is playing chicken and using troop funding as the bogeyman to do it. He’s betting that no-one’s willing to stand in his way and say “the troops deserve better than this”. And rather than stand up and say so, Democrats flinched and crashed their car along the side of the road.
I think they should have kept sending up bills with different benchmarks, criteria, etc. Sending the exact same bill would have been bad. But they could have kept rearranging pieces and sold it as Bush refusing to accept funding for the troops.
This has been driving me nuts for months. A) Congress passes a bill funding the troops. B)The president vetoes it. C)Repugs and Liebocrats vote to uphold the veto. Who is supporting the troops by consistently voting FOR the funding? It seems so clear.
. . . and the problem with most of these posts is that they have little or nothing to do with a STRATEGY in Iraq. Instead it has mostly to do with political posturing. Now, someone please explain to me how political posturing helps support our troops, and explain to me how political posturing helps move the Iraqi government along in what it needs to do.
I don’t.
Posturing? No. We want our men and women out of a civil war and not be an occupying force.
But, as Bush said today, he wants to be in Iraq for 50 more years.
Boy, Bush is just the AWESOME!
We need to get out and let them have their Civil War. They are determined to have it and nothing can stop that. They need to go through what Lebanon went through to realize that that talking is better than fighting.
It sucks that we can’t help them avoid it. But Bush screwed the pooch on this and it’s the only alternative left.
She couldn’t even be bothered to show up to vote against this.
She ducked the issue on purpose, because she was taking her marching orders from Hoyer (who voted for the bill as well) and would have been forced to vote with her boss or with her district. She did what she always does, she ducked the issue and hid behind the lie about needing to be at home. She claimed she could not vote on this (or the minimum wage increase) because of her daughter’s graduation, when in reality the graduation was the day before the vote.
DeGette did not “duck” anything. She made clear she would have voted “no” if she had been in Washington. If she had been trying to “duck” the issue, she would not have publicly stated her position.
Plus, DeGette stuck her neck out to vote against the initial war resolution and for the recent McGovern Amendment — which Hoyer voted against. She took courageous positions on both votes. So much for the specious “ducking” argument or the claim she takes marching orders from Hoyer — or anyone else.