Great post, I agree 100% with everything. I actually thought one of the best things Udall had going for him was that he has been proven right that the war was a mistake. Same with McNerney. As for Steny Hoyer, he has always sucked and deserves a primary in 2008 (I'll never forget that when he was Whip he refused to do his job on the Bankruptcy Bill -- he has no business in either congress or leadership for that fact alone).

And you are 100% right about the "archetypes" analysis.

... , a refusal to follow up on ignored subpoenas, and no end to the war in Iraq.

I think we need to follow the words of Senator Webb:
"We won this war four years ago. The question is when we end the occupation."

How about

... , a refusal to follow up on ignored subpoenas, and no end to the occupation oin Iraq.

Doesn't that sound so much better?  Saying just "war" is bad.  "Civil war" works sometimes, "occupation" others.

Democrats saying there's a war going on implies that it is winnable.  Calling it what it is, an occupation, makes clear that it is going to end, the only question is when.

So here's the question, Matt.  

Will you support the funding of opponents to Jon Tester or Jim Webb?

They also went against the comparable Senate vote.

I don't think you will - I won't either - as Webb, despite his vote against, has been passionate about the Iraq debacle, and his state of the union response was near-perfect.

So really,we are at, what criteria are given to "go after" those who voted against the comparable iraq out bills in Senate and the House?  Other issues, such as net neutrality?  A populist stance?  Say 80% of the progressive position?

Just thinking out loud here - any criteria needs to be clear, transparent, and universal, is what I'm thinking.  

Jerry needs to counter the "Pelosi-clone" argument against him next year.  This was an opportunity for him to show a little daylight between himself and scary, crazy SF-values-ridden Nancy Pelosi, whose name probably frightens some of his own supporters.  

His '08 opponent (not Pombo!) will claim, "Jerry votes with Nancy Pelosi all the time" and now Jerry can say, "No I don't" and point to this vote.  Where we need him, he's been there.  I don't begrudge him this vote.

Plus I believe his reasoning and his logic. They aren't my reasoning and logic, but the guy's a straight shooter.

I like this strategy a lot. As much as I wanted Webb to vote for cloture, I wasn't surprised by his vote (angry perhaps but not surprised). Plus, he's not up for another 5 years so little leverage there; same with Tester.

In the House, on the other hand, every one of the 79 Dems who voted against the McGovern amendment deserve some hard looks. Are they looking for the promotion like Udall? What is their district like? What kind of real opposition are they facing from the other side? Or, for that matter, from a possibly more progressive Dem challenger?

These are questions they each need to know we're thinking about now because they're already out there fundraising for 2008.  And what better way than to start with one Representative, to help all the others understand that actions do have consequences -- even in politics.

They may not matter so much in his current position, but he can't ignore them in a statewide race.  

He may be right, he may be wrong, but that's why he's hedging.

Udall just has a history of being timid. He had multiple chances to run before.  I wouldn't view it as a conservative thing.  He's just a timid politician.

Gee, Matt.  You're right.  Bob Shaffer will be much more sympathetic to Dems and liberals than Udall.  Good call.  "/<sarcasm>

I'm not a constituent of Rep. Udall's (I'm in Musgrave's district, yeah, you can feel sorry for me now) but I do have a personal stake in his Senate race.

While I can't explain with any certainty precisely why he voted the way he did on this bill (my speculation follows), I think it is important for all of us to consider this:

Why do we approvingly cite AP or any other media outlets -- that we know all too often has great difficulty getting the facts straight -- when they report an item that confirms an opinion or line of reasoning?

Yet, when the same journalist or outlet reports a tidbit that flies in the face of our preconceived notions, we rail on about bias, their obvious lack of intelligence, or their apparent reticence to fall off the cocktail party invite list by reporting the truth.

We really can't have it both ways.

And that's my biggest issue with your post, Matt. It's predicated on whether AP got it right, which you yourself correctly question.

Wouldn't a call to Udall's office have been a better idea than relying on an AP reporter with credibility problems?

As has been stated upthread, Udall doesn't have a reputation for standing out there on the proverbial ledge on issues. Despite the fact that he hails from a safe Dem district.

Running for Senate in Colorado requires a much different approach.  

While Ken Salazar throws many of us into conniption fits, his blandly moderate stances are what won him the seat and will keep him in that seat for as long as he chooses.

On this particular vote, my guess is that Udall is unsuccessfully trying to parse his stance on the war with the reality that Colorado's economy is largely dominated by military bases and defense contractors.

The '08 Senate is likely to be a close one and he can't afford to give his ultra-conservative fundamentalist opponent Bob Schaffer even wider margins of victory in the more conservative parts of the state with one roll call that was going to pass without him.

I don't like it one bit and wish like hell that politicians could take more principled stances. But there's our reality and then there's the average voting public's reality.

Unfortunately, there's far more of them than us. Udall simply appears to be running the numbers, just as Salazar does.

I know the Senate's cloture vote was a different measure in a different body of Congress. But the issue was much the same -- a chance to vote up or down on the war. After the Senators' votes were posted, I worked up a count of my own.

Almost all the Democrats who failed to vote for cloture were either from south of the Mason-Dixon line or from the Plains and Mountain West (not including the Pacific Coast West).

Yes, even West Virginia (both voted Southern) and Delaware (split) and are south of the Mason-Dixon line. They are Border States, like Missouri (McCaskill voted with the Southerners), on the border between the North and the South.

A few exceptions almost prove the rule: Casey from the state described as having Philadelphia at one end and Pittsburgh at the other, with Alabama in between. And Bayh from a state famous for anti-war, Southern-sympathizing Democrats during the Civil War and heart of the revived Klan during the 1920s.

(About Levin in Michigan and Reed in Rhode Island I can't say.)

But every Southerner, including anti-war Webb, and every non-Coastal Westerner, including anti-war Tester, voted the same way. All the Pac Coast Democrats, and all the Northerners from east of the Mississippi (except Bayh, Casey, Levin, and Reed) voted the other way.

Of course, this issue was not about race. But there was a strong regional divide in this anti-war vote.

How or why Udall's vote fit into this regional pattern, I'm not sure, but he ended up on the same side as Tester in Montana, Nelson in Nebraska, Bingaman in N.M., and other Westerners.

There are a lot of Dems who still believe in the importance of national security.

disconnected everyday. Mark Udall is a liberal Democrat. Do we have to become like the wingnuts here?

This is another ridiculous litmus test that no Democrat should take seriously. Soon there will be no acceptable Dems to Stoller and his loyaltists.

I know Mark's position in the past has been that he voted against the starting the war but that how to get out is a difficult problem.  He uses the parable of the person lost in the country who asks a farmer how to get to his destination and the farmer replies "I wouldn't go there from here."  

I know that it is difficult and arguable but I suspect he feels that some of the uncertainties about the situation in Iraq and the region after we leave, the real hazards of a withdrawal under fire, etc. determined his vote.   This is my opinion only.

He is a disciplined thoughtful politician and I respect his judgment even when I disagree with him.
 

I don't have the time right now to look up his floor speech on this vote but I did find his statement on the Iraq Supp, which he voted for:

UDALL SUPPORTS IRAQ-AFGHANISTAN SPENDING BILL TO TAKE AMERICA IN A NEW DIRECTION

"I voted for the Iraq supplemental spending bill because it will make sure that America's soldiers get the equipment and resources they need and the top-quality health care they may require when they come home.  This bill holds the president and the Iraqi government accountable to the benchmarks they have set for themselves and it is an important step toward what I think must be our goal - a responsible end to the war in Iraq, based on a strategy of phased withdrawal of troops, accelerated diplomacy and redeployment that is based on Iraqi stability.

"The bill includes a goal of March 2008 for completing the redeployment of U.S. combat troops, and allows enough troops to remain to protect U.S. military and civilians in Iraq, conduct counterterrorism operations, and train Iraqi soldiers.

"I remain convinced that we should steer clear of arbitrary public deadlines for military actions and focus instead on realistic diplomatic and political goals. Our military needs flexibility to be able to link movements of U.S. troops to the realities of the situation on the ground, and successful diplomacy requires this flexibility as well.

"We are four years into a war the president told us would be short and decisive. The administration's misjudgments, lack of planning and poor leadership have made a bad situation worse - and the "surge" is no substitute for what is needed, which is a strategy for containing civil war and a wider regional war.  

"I opposed giving the president the authority to wage war against Iraq, and whatever may be said about the wisdom of invading Iraq, the fact is that we are still deeply engaged there. So long as our troops are in the field, we must provide them what they need. And we must extricate them from this emerging civil war.

"We need to be scaling back our military mission in Iraq. We need to make the U.S. military footprint lighter to salvage a critical measure of security and stability in a region of the world that we can ill afford to abandon.

"The president's decision to take the nation to war has made our country less safe.  We need to change course and chart a path that enhances our national security and sets the right priorities for the war on terrorism and struggle against extremists."

I'm pretty strongly against the war, too, but isn't there something that's a little arrogant about saying that the netroots -- or the anti-war vote -- is "the base"?  

The political, practical definition of "the base"
is those people of whom it can be said that most of them will support you virtually all of the time.  (The pros have particular percentages in mind, but I don't.)  Are the netroots folks here "the base"?  Or are we going to prove as fickle and as egocentric as the folks on the left who have occasionally deserted the Democratic Party for the Greens because some Democrat or another is insufficiently pure?  If you want to think of yourselves as "the base," then act like "a base."

And while you're at it, show some tactical awareness.  

To be the 172nd vote for a resolution that is going to lose anyway does nothing for anyone.  If it costs some votes to do a politically futile act (as it will in Colorado), why do you insist that Udall do it?  Do you seriously challenge Udall's basic good faith?  Or does he have to prove it to you over and over on the latest liberal cause?

Get over yourselves.  This bill may not be the best answer, and reasonable people can disagree about it without "selling out" to The Man.

Booman put it pretty well in his post about the foreign policy establishment:

We have to look at current affairs through the prism of a foreign policy establishment that doesn't want the fallout from Iraq to damage our arrangements with other regional allies. And this could happen either because our regional allies lose confidence in us or because the American people insist that we cancel existing arrangements and re-orient our forward leaning basing policies. The circumstances require careful diplomacy and reassurance of our allies (including demonstrations of resolve and the ability to keep committments) and they require a careful manipulation of domestic opinion (mainly through the maintenance of a prism of a pervasive threat of terrorism). The last part involves the 'we must fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here' mantra, which doesn't even make a facial amount of sense.

It's not just the foreign policy establishment. Many ordinary Democrats feel this way. They are wrong, but that is how they feel.