Do you support the actions of the Red State Dems?
Red State Dems Go Into Combat Mode
By Matthew Spieler | 1:15 PM; May. 14, 2007 |
Freshman senators are supposed to be retiring types, by custom if not in modern practice, especially as they learn the deferential protocols of the clubbier chamber of Congress.
But this year’s class of “Red State Democrats” — Jim Webb of Virginia, Jon Tester of Montana, Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Sherrod Brown of Ohio — is shaping up as something of an exception to the rule. (Brown is actually an exception within the exception. Although his state, like the others’, backed President Bush’s re-election, it has moved emphatically toward Democratic “blue” ever since. And Brown is the only one of the four with House service, so he got used to speaking his mind long ago.)
What’s surprising is how forcefully the others, who helped their party win the Senate by defeating GOP incumbents in swing states with big blocs of GOP votes, have spoken out from the start against Bush and particularly his prosecution of the Iraq War.
Tester hailed the initial version of the midyear war funding bill — the one vetoed because it set a timetable for a troop withdrawal — as “a plan to get our troops out of the middle of the civil war and back to fighting terrorism.”
Webb tore into the veto from the Senate floor. “This administration must be confronted,” he said. “It must understand the American people have grown tired of this disastrous, one-dimensional approach to a crisis.”
McCaskill has been a bit less prominent on the supplemental, but she hasn’t shied away from the war debate. In February, when GOP senators blocked consideration of a non-binding resolution against the troop surge and she’d been in office seven weeks, McCaskill branded the move “a strategy designed to support the president and his failed policy in Iraq.”
Such sentiments supply a dramatic contrast to the rhetorical style of the Red State Three’s most immediate predecessor, Colorado’s Ken Salazar , the only Democrat who picked up a Senate seat for the party in 2004 in a state that Bush carried. And Salazar was running in very different political times. For one thing, he was stumping in the shadow of his party’s loss of the Senate in 2002, when Max Cleland of Georgia and Jean Carnahan of Missouri were both defeated in part by a vigorous GOP effort to portray them as indifferent to the new realities of the post-Sept. 11 war against terrorism.
In part as a consequence, Salazar has so far been far less combative in his statements about the war spending bill and the efforts to attach language hastening the war’s end. “I believe that we must continue to seek a new course in Iraq,” he said in April. “I believe we can and should do that by achieving a bipartisan consensus.”
Larry J. Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, says the new Red State Democrats are largely picking up where their campaigns left off. “The Democrats of 2006 won without having to trim their sails,” he says. “The full sails, liberal views attached, may have helped because a strong electoral wind was blowing their boat across the finish line.” |
