I have teamed up with Majority Report Radio to feature a
Fighting Dem every Tuesday. Today's edition features
Tim Walz in Minnesota's 1st Congressional District. The segment will run at around 9:20 p.m. ET, though your local Air America affiliates may have it at different times.
The "Fighting Dem" theme has been taking off, with latest count supposedly at 43 Dem challengers who are veterans of the Armed forces (including at least nine Iraq War vets). Republicans have two. The latest publications to jump on this trend are USA Today and the London Times.
USA Today:
"Since Vietnam, the Democratic Party has been viewed as the weaker on national security issues," University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato says. "Who better to make the case than veterans of the war? It's hard to accuse them of a lack of patriotism." [...]
Massa and Duckworth are among the "Fighting Democrats" party leaders hope will help recapture the House after 12 years of GOP rule. Some have formed a political action committee (www.bandofbrothers2006.org) to support veteran-candidates and fight back against conservative campaigns like the ones that targeted former senator Max Cleland. The Georgia Democrat, who lost three limbs in Vietnam, was defeated in 2002 by Republican Saxby Chambliss, who ran ads picturing Cleland with Osama bin Laden.
Cleland says there is "a disquiet in the gut" of returning veterans. "They want to come back and tell the truth about Iraq," he says.
London Times:
ANDREW HORNE, clear-eyed, clean-cut and ramrod straight, never wanted to be a politician. But then something happened to the Marine Reserves lieutenant colonel who once supported the invasion of Iraq. He was sent to fight there.
It was an experience that turned him vehemently against President Bush and a war he now believes can never be won definitively.
"Iraq is a symptom of what's wrong with this Administration," Mr Horne told The Times over coffee near his Kentucky law office [...]
Mr Horne, 44, is not alone. He is one of a dozen Iraq war veterans running for congressional seats in the November mid-term elections. What makes this new band of political brothers extraordinary is that all but one are running as Democrats, and against a war that only months ago they were fighting in.
"It's unprecedented. It's amazing the Democrats have found this many," said Larry Sabato, a politics professor at the University of Virginia.
The thing is, Democrats didn't find this many Fighting Dems. They came on their own, ready to work on behalf of the nation they served in uniform. And when given the choice between parties, they chose the Democratic Party. And every time they try to swiftboat any vet, like they just did to John Murtha, they won't take it lightly.
As for Walz, who we'll be talking to tonight, he was heavily featured in the recent Atlantic Monthly piece on the Fighting Dems:
Command Sergeant Major Tim Walz is a twenty-four-year veteran of the Army National Guard, now retired but still on active duty when a visit from President George W. Bush shortly before the 2004 election coincided with Walz's homecoming to Mankato, Minnesota. A high school teacher and football coach, he had left to serve overseas in Operation Enduring Freedom. Southern Minnesota is home to a large Guard contingent that includes Walz's unit, the First 125th Field Artillery Battalion, so the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are naturally a pressing local concern--particularly to high school students headed into the armed services.
The president's visit struck Walz as a teachable moment, and he and two students boarded a Bush campaign bus that took them to a quarry where the president was to speak. But after they had passed through a metal detector and their tickets and IDs were checked, they were denied admittance and ordered back onto the bus. One of the boys had a John Kerry sticker on his wallet.
Indignant, Walz refused. "As a soldier, I told them I had a right to see my commander-in-chief," the normally jovial forty-one-year-old recently explained to a Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party dinner in the small town of Albert Lea, Minnesota.
His challenge prompted a KGB-style interrogation that was sadly characteristic of Bush campaign events. Do you support the president? Walz refused to answer. Do you oppose the president? Walz replied that it was no one's business but his own. (He later learned that his wife was informed that the Secret Service might arrest him.) Walz thought for a moment and asked the Bush staffers if they really wanted to arrest a command sergeant major who'd just returned from fighting the war on terrorism.
They did not.
Instead Walz was told to behave himself and permitted to attend the speech, albeit under heavy scrutiny. His students were not: they were sent home. Shortly after this Walz retired from the Guard. Then he did something that until recently was highly unusual for a military man. He announced he was running for Congress--as a Democrat.
Walz personifies two of this year's most interesting political trends, both of which appear to emanate from the country's growing dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq and the party most responsible for it. The midterm elections this fall will be the first in which a sizable number of veterans from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq run for Congress. At least fourteen have declared so far. But in an era when military and national-security issues have long been the province of the Republican Party--indeed, are thought to have strengthened the GOP's grip on the White House and Congress in the past two elections--the bigger surprise is under whose banner these veterans are choosing to run. Like Walz, nearly every one of them is a Democrat.
The Minnesota 1st:
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Previous Featured Fighting Dems:
You can get streams of these segments on Air America's Fighting Dems site. And there's a Fighting Dem ActBlue page, so show your support if you can.
Update: The Band of Brothers website has 53 Fighting Dems and counting. Daaaaamn!