I know many are excited about what Feingold did in the Senate well this week. He does have priciples no one is condeming that. I think you need to decide what your goal is right now though. Is it to win back the Senate Majority (Harry Reids Job) or is it to shake up the party and lose seats in the process?
What Feingold did he should do campaigning. He didn't have to go to the well of the senate and put fellow Democrats in a difficult situation. If he wanted to shake up the party then he should have lobbied his caucus, or went to the media, but to "Get them on record" is absolutely the wrong thing to do. These other senators may be playing it safe because that is what the need to do to WIN or retain their seats.
Here is an intelligent article on the subect from New Republic. NRO LINK: http://www.tnr.com/...
More under the fold ...
I posted the article earlier in another diary and a response to my post was "the author doesn't realize Feingold is a man of priciple and not a partisan". My answer is so... who cares. The story isn't about ONE Senator it is about winning the majority in the Senate. Do you think Feingold actually thought about the consequences of what he was going to do and how he was going to do it? If he did you know he must of thought, I don't give a damn what happens to fellow Dems. I dont' care if we lose seats over priciples.
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The nature of the split is obvious. Feingold is thinking about 2008. Harry Reid, Charles Schumer, and other Democrats are thinking about 2006. Feingold cares about wooing the anti-Bush donor base on the web and putting some of his '08 rivals--Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Evan Bayh--in uncomfortable positions. Reid and Schumer care about winning the six seats it will take for Democrats to win control of the Senate. Feingold cares about making a political point with a measure that has no chance of succeeding and which, even if it did, would have no actual consequences. His colleagues want something with a little more bite: subpoena power, control of committees, and the rest of the perks that go along with a Senate majority, which would make Bush's last two years hell.
To understand why the two strategies are incompatible, despite Bush's abysmal national poll numbers, just look at the seven states where Democrats have the best shot at flipping a currently Republican Senate seat: Arizona, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Tennessee. Democrats have to win six of them to win the majority. Only Pennsylvania and Rhode Island are blue states. (That's why Lincoln Chafee is the one Republican who has left his mind open about censure.)
In most of these seven states, Democrats have been successfully pounding their opponents on issues like Washington ethics and the Dubai ports imbroglio. And the Democratic candidate now has the upper hand in many of the races. In Montana, the Abramoff scandal became such a hot local issue that it has all but finished off Republican Senator Conrad Burns. In Ohio, Mike DeWine is on the defensive over health care. In Missouri, which has been trending steadily conservative in recent elections, James Talent has been tied in knots over stem cells. In all of these races, providing a check on Bush and the Republican dominance of Washington is a key Democratic talking point, but it's being advanced subtly by candidates who still often must distance themselves from national Democrats. For example, Claire McCaskill, the Democrat running for Senate in Missouri, has gone out of her way to declare her independence from Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean.
So the partisans on the left cheering Feingold appear to have both the policy and the politics wrong. Censure is meaningless. Changing the FISA law is the way to address Bush's overreach. And the only way for Democrats to change FISA is for them to take back the Senate. This week, Feingold's censure petition has made that goal just a little bit more difficult to achieve. What an ass.
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Sorry for not using backquotes. For some reason when I start a diary the option for Backquotes isn't there but they are when I post inside the diary.