AP: Pro-war votes may haunt Democrats

[sabra]

http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/mld/ledgerenquirer/news/politics/12925493.htm

Pro-war votes may haunt Democrats

LIZ SIDOTI

Associated Press


WASHINGTON - Potential Democratic presidential candidates who voted to give President Bush the authority to use force in Iraq could face a political problem - they supported a war that their party's rank-and-file now strongly view as a mistake.

Their pro-war votes - cast three years ago - could haunt them as they seek early support among die-hard Democrats and gauge whether to launch formal candidacies for the party's 2008 presidential nomination.

"For a lot of activists, this could be a threshold issue. They may be looking for somebody without any taint for prior support for the war," said John J. Pitney, a political science professor at Claremont McKenna College in California.

Sens. Evan Bayh of Indiana, Joseph Biden of Delaware, Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, John Kerry of Massachusetts and former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina are mulling over running for the Democratic nomination. All voted in October 2002 for a resolution authorizing the president to use force in Iraq.

[stopbush]

1. "We were LIED to, just like everyone else."

Sorry, but that may be the best line for the Dems to use in countering this charge.

[LittleClarkie]

5. It would be, but I don't think folks are listening. Kerry has said it

and people here don't even know that. Look up "The Trial of John Kerry" by our own Will Pitt over at www.truthout.com

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

13. A pretty pathetic line to try to save their pathetic asses.

23 other senators and most of the rest of the world knew Bush was lying.
Anyone dumb enough to (allegedly) buy the lie certainly isn't fit to hold office, let alone be president.

[stopbush]

16. I agree, but consider who they'd be trying to convince.

Saying "we were lied to just like you, the American public" builds on a growing perception that bushco is a bunch of liars who have been lying since Day One.

What the Ds don't need to do is create some excuse out of whole cloth that would be way too nuanced for Joe SixPak.

Yes, it was a horribly misguided - some would say falsely opportunistic - vote by those Ds, but the deed is done. One can't always take the high road during damage control, let alone when trying to score points with the damage control.

[WI_DEM]

2. our best bet for '08 (and also would have in '04) is an anti-war dem

meaning that they didn't support W on the Iraqi Resolution, no matter how they try to justify it.

[bryant69]

3. Well that's why we need a governer

The few congressional Democrats who voted against the Iraqi War Resolution would have a hard time getting elected for other reasons.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[WI_DEM]

6. there are some others such as

Wes Clark and Russ Feingold who are toying with running.

[bryant69]

11. Wes Clark is as good as a governer as far as that goes

Was Fiengold in congress at the time?

[Freddie Stubbs]

17. Yes, Feingold was in Congress then

[tgnyc]

4. mistake in that passage:

they supported a war that their party's rank-and-file now strongly view as a mistake.

The party's rank-and-file thought it was a mistake back then also.

[SteppingRazor]

8. Very true...

That "But we were all LIED to as well" thing doesn't fly when you consider that we all knew less than them (assuming, since they are crongresspeople), and yet WE STILL KNEW IT WAS A FUCKING CON.

It was a slick. A lie. A put-on. A game. A dupe.
Call it what you will, but when I saw Colin Powell speak to the U.N. I saw bullshit and lies and manipulation, when Congress and most of the press saw a "convincing" speech.

Sweet jabbering Christ, Sept-Mar. of 2003 was like living in some Bizarro World. Sure, it stil seems like that sometimes, but that feeling has never been as strong as it was then. The idea that, when presented with the same facts, every damned idiot in Washington could somehow reach a completely different conclusion than those of us on the outside, looking in.

[G_j]

9. and didn't buy the BS

put out by known liars and criminals

fooled by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and gang? Those meanies lied?
No kidding!

[Pithy Cherub]

7. Those cowardly dems who voted *aye* are in need of admitting

they were lied to, they were wrong, and they apologize. trying to parse this atrocity is just not going to cut it. The DLC isn't going to bail them out with enough corporate cash on this. The *aye* voting Dems need votes & volunteers and we against the Iraq war know that!

[Warren DeMontague]

10. No proplem if Al Gore is the nominee. nt

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

12. And, the collaborationists still support the occupation.

They're still looking for "victory" in Iraq to justify the blood on their pathetic hands.

[annabanana]

14. At this late date.. the problem is not so much what they did then...

It's what they're NOT DOING NOW!!
The silence of the prominent Dems about this illegal immoral and il-advised fiasco is deafening.

[Greyhound]

15. They'll never get my vote.

I knew it was all a pack of lies at the time, mainly because they were such bad lies. Nobody I knew believed any of their BS, and I don't believe the dems believed it either, they were just trying to feather their own nests and screw the constituents.

[wuushew]

18. This is actually good news

if the Democratic primary system is functioning and free of DLC rigging it will mean that the base of the Democratic party will reject Hillary Clinton as the Presidential nominee.

Thanks to Bush the country is 100% polarized. No swing vote exists, the choice is binary between pro-war rethuglicans and a sane Democratic choice .

Anti-war is a moral and just litmus test for voting. .

[Threedifferentones]

19. HAHA

serves them right.

[1932]

20. I think history doesn't support this argument. RFK was pro-Vietnam War

and voters had no problem supporting him in CA in '68 and I suspect he would have won that election (despite protestors being very active and the war being a mess that year).

Also, every single Democrat that ran in '68 and '72 who was a senator at the time of the Gulf of Tonkin vote voted for the resolution, and some of them ran as anti-war candidates in '68 and '72. In '68 Humphrey didn't even really crticize the war until the general election campaign, and it was still enough for anti-war voters to support him. Eugene McCarthy was the anti-war candidate and he voted for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.

I think there are two things at play here which this article glides over:

(1) Voters understand that there is more to a candidate than a yes or no vote on a piece of legislation. Senators have different motivations for the same votes and voters will listen to how they justify their vote.

(2) Voters are open to the idea that politician's positions evolve. RFK is a great example of that. (So is Regan -- hew as an FDR/New Deal supporter before he turned sharply to the right, as is former KKK member Robert Byrd.) If you evolve into something that is very sincere and very appropriate for the times, voters won't care what you did before.

[wuushew]

21. So who are you voting for?

n/t

[1932]

22. The best candidate with the best solutions to the problems

America faces.

I think everyone can agree that a yes or no vote on one piece of legislation -- even if it is the IWR -- doesnt' tell you everything you need to know about a politician.

I certainly wouldn't have voted against RFK because of who he was before 1964 just as I wouldn't neccesarily vote for a candidate who voted against the IWR or any other single piece of legislation if, say, the only reason they voted against it was because it didn't go far enough.

In fact, didn't Graham vote against the IWR because he said that he think it didn't give Bush enough flexibility? And a year later he was running for President as an anti-war candidate!!!!