So much goodness, so little time!
For the leadership positions, the key man is, of course, Rahmbo. He needs one, and there's no room - unless he bumps someone.
As I mentioned yesterday, prime candidate for bumpee is Clyburn for the Whip spot.
(Rahm has apparently decided not to contest the Leader spot - with Hoyer and Murtha, perhaps it's too crowded. Or perhaps he likes the idea of blowing Clyburn out of the water. Who knows?)
Hotline has Hoyer throwing down for Leader.
Lofgren says
there's a lot of pent-up ambition
Ain't
that the truth!
Of course, Emanuel/Clyburn comes alongside Harman/Hastings, plus the general feeling on the part of the mods (Blue Dogs/NDC/unaffiliated) that lefties - and CBC-ers in particular - are getting more than their fair share of spoils out of the victory.
If Rahmbo doesn't go for Whip, what does he go for? Does Pelosi offer an alternative whereby someone - a CBC-er? - gets bounced from a committee chair?
Why should Rahmbo - who, let's face it, is not his own severest critic - accept getting zero spoils from 'his' victory?
Update [2006-11-9 10:29:16 by skeptic06]:
The Hill has further particulars.
Murtha, it seems, is being spurned by (how many?) supporters of his anti-war stance on account of his mod-to-conservative stance on most other things:"
"A lot of us who are more to the left are not going to go with him," said one liberal Democrat who is secretly backing Hoyer. "Look at his voting record on guns, choice, the environment, immigration, his support for military infrastructure building. He's not with us."
Obviously, any blind quote like that comes with a handful of salt. Even so...
Meanwhile, Hoyer seems to have the righties taped.
As I suggested, Emanuel/Clyburn for Whip is the really interesting race.
There's a procedural point of extreme importance that I hadn't appreciated - as I've said before, the rules of the Dem caucus aren't made available to the likes of you and me:
Clyburn's whip bid is an all-or-nothing gamble. If Clyburn loses, he will likely be out of leadership altogether because the Democratic rules require that members elect a caucus chairman before any other leadership positions. Thus, Clyburn could not run for a second term as chairman after having lost the whip race.
That sounds pretty good from Rahmbo's viewpoint.
There are milquetoasts around:
A more likely scenario, some observers say, would be for Emanuel to move one rung farther down the leadership ladder to caucus chairman and insert himself into leadership between Clyburn and caucus vice-chair Larson.
One rank up from Caucus vice-chair? After you've just won a historic election for your party?
No way!
I could be wrong now. But I don't think so.