While Chris Dodd was working his heart out on the Senate floor to protect the rule of law and our civil liberties, what do you think Hillary Clinton was doing?
Crisscrossing Iowa in a five-day helicopter tour (“Hill-a-Copter,” as the campaign calls it) she is repeatedly reminding folks that Iowa’s largest paper named her as its choice in the Democratic presidential race (on the Republican side, they picked John McCain).
Monday night, as Clinton wrapped up hours of campaigning with a rally in Coralville (a burg near Iowa City, home of the University of Iowa), she said of the hoops the Register’s editors had her jump through as they mulled the endorsement: “I have never been through a process more grueling.”
Isn’t that special? Chris Dodd didn’t have the chance to talk to Iowa constituents today. He was actually leading. I wonder what Barack Obama was up to while Dodd fought for our Constitution.
Obama’s crowds remained strong throughout the day, though he was stumping in heavily Republican territory.
He ended with a noisy rally before more than 1,000 people in an ornate restored theater in Sioux City, urging backers to throw caution to the wind and not be afraid to be bold.
“If we’re serious about winning this election, we can’t be afraid to lose it,” Obama said, as his staff busily collected names and telephone numbers from the crowd.
He returned to the theme of lobbyist influence on a chilly day in northwest Iowa, speaking to more than 400 gathered at Storm Lake High School.
“The corporate lobbyists are going to have to understand that a new day has dawned,” said Obama. “No child should grow up in a community that is devastated by teacher shortages or nursing shortages.”
Driving into Storm Lake, Obama’s motorcade passed by towers at wind farms similar to those sprouting throughout the region, and he said alternative energy could help rejuvenate rural America.
“We’ve got wind farms that are being built, entirely new industries are being developed,” said Obama. “There are some competitive advantages in our rural economy, not only for wind but for biodiesel and ethanol.”
Looks like he had a full day of campaigning at his competitor Chris Dodd’s expense. Isn’t that sweet of Barack? It’s almost as nice as Joe Biden’s decision to do radio and campaign appearances in New Hampshire.
MONDAY DECEMBER 17
9:00 a.m. (Eastern Time): SEN. BIDEN TO BE GUEST ON NHPR’S “THE EXCHANGE”
2:45 p.m. : SEN. BIDEN TO ADDRESS LOCAL DEMOCRATS AT HOUSE PARTY IN NEW IPSWICH
Place: Home of Lisa Brown
Address: 169 Appleton Rd., New Ipswich, NH
That’s right…while Dodd was wearing out his vocal chords fighting for what’s right, Joe Biden was having tea and cookies at Lisa Brown’s house.
All three Senators said they support Dodd and oppose retroactive immunity, and all three let Dodd do all the work while they campaigned at his expense.
Chris Dodd deserves praise and you can contribute to his campaign if you like rewarding good behavior.
Edwards and Richardson are not senators and couldn’t vote or help filibuster. But Clinton, Obama, and Biden all disgraced themselves today. They all dishonored themselves today. When the FISA bill is brought up again in January it will be right in the midst of the primaries. The progressive wing of the Democratic Party will harshly punish a repeat of this cowardly day.
While I wish all of those Senators were there, or at least had brought up the issue on the campaign trail this is not as stark as you wish to make it.
It is important to not that by absenting themselves they essentially voted “No” on cloture. According to Senate rules they need those 60 votes to proceed, it doesn’t matter how many or how few Senators are actually there. They were not present to vote “No” but in abstaining it counted against cloture and they know that.
Also, Dodd knows that he does not have a serious shot at winning the presidency. I am not sure why he is running, but his chances of making it into the top three are small. He probably helped his presidential campaign more by his actions on the floor than he would have by campaigning in Iowa. They were bold and highly commendable actions and Dodd deserves credit for them, but the sacrifices he made in doing it were as a Senator not a presidential candidate.
Finally, the other Senatorial presidential candidates may have known in advance what was going to happen. They certainly should have known that there would not be a vote today that was actually going to need their “Nay” to go the right direction. They could have spoken and stood with Dodd but it would have been a symbolic gesture. Good symbolism I agree, but still symbolism.
that’s total rationalizing b.s.
Chris Dodd defeated this bill, for now, by convincing Reid that he simply didn’t have time. He couldn’t do it alone, he needed the help of people like Bill Nelson of Florida. The issue was in doubt. The votes were not the issue. It was about whether the leaders of the party were going to stand with Dodd or with the telecommunications corporations.
They all took advantage of this day to aggressively campaign. It was a gutless, spineless move. Horrid, really.
The more I think about it, the angrier I get.
And Dodd is living in Iowa. He may have little shot at winning the nomination, but he is campaigning as hard as anyone else to win in Iowa. And his competitors got to reach voters in their hometowns, while Dodd labored on C-SPAN with little national coverage. Yes, it was the best move for Dodd, but it was also the best move for Biden. And where was Biden?
There’s courage and then there is something less than that.
DITTO!!!!!! What a crock. The bastards belonged in DC and they should have been sitting there supporting Dodd. Simple! NO Excuses!
that’s total rationalizing b.s.
Agreed.
Dodd won this battle today, but the three dwarves should have been showing leadership at the Capitol to get this thing knocked down cold. If all four Dem candidates who are Senators had shown up at the Capitol united – it would have been a press bonanza. Nevermind the armtwisting and the favor-calling that they should have been doing (though they should have been doing that too), that would have made this a BIG NEWS STORY with two of the front runners abandoning Iowa to try to stop this bill from being passed.
As it was the media mostly ignored the story and continued to focus on the horserace. Dodd barely pulled this off and only, I think, because Reid wanted to get other business done before the break. The next time this comes up – after the break – I won’t be surprised if Reid budgets in a week of procedural maneuvering to make sure he doesn’t get hit again.
(And Reid looks like a fool, doesn’t he? Stymied at a bill that he wanted passed by the end of the week by members of his own party. Forcing members of his own party to enact a real filibuster. What a buffoon.)
Amen to that! This fact is so obvious that if any indication was ever needed that Harry Reid and the majority of Democrats want telecom immunity or at least are willing to allow it to happen unopposed, this is it.
This story has received virtually ZERO serious press coverage and, when covered, the facts are almost always misstated. Joe Klein is the poster child for that one.
Bravo for Dodd and our Constitution. You can bet that Harry Reid will spend significantly more time over the next few weeks laying the groundwork to not look foolish come January than he will organizing a Democratic fight against telecom immunity. You can bet his goal will be to beat back those few rebellious Dems, not coordinate with them to fight it.
As they say, “past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior”.
We’re all paying Clinton, Biden, and Obama to show up and vote in DC, not trot around collecting votes in Iowa. They have current jobs they were elected to do.
Warrantless wiretapping matters.
Luam, I love ya, but that’s a load.
All of these senators promised to support dodd, and none of them showed up.
Obama’s behavior here is, unfortunately, typical: talk big, do little.
Dodd’s a man: the rest are, clearly, a bunch of little children.
As far as I am concerned it come out as a wash for my guy. I wasn’t defending my guy, I was saying that I understand why they all made the choices they did. I do think that Dodd made the right choice, and if I was was running any of their campaigns or their Senatorial offices I would have made the same choice.
Clinton, Obama, and Biden voted against cloture by not being there. They did not speak out against the telcom amnesty. I think that if they could not give a speech on the senate floor they could have given on in Iowa.
The stakes are high and the game is deep. Dodd really led on this one, they did not speak out, but they did not sabotage the effort either. I will save my outrage for the Senators who voted for Cloture, there is a lot of out rage but also a lot of Senators who voted against the Rule of Law and the Constitution.
There’s plenty of outrage to go around, as well as admiration. But the issue with the No Show 3 is not whether they were needed for their vote, but where their hearts and minds live. I wouldn’t even go so far as to demand that they fly to DC. I’d have been pretty much content if they’d just had the grace and guts to spotlight Dodd’s courageous fight for American freedom, and cheer him on. But even that was apparently too risky, too much of a diversion from their canned talking points.
Their silence was the symptom of some combination of political timidity and political ineptitude. The first suggests a mediocre president, the latter a risky candidate in the general. In any case, I think Obama has slipped out of my top 3.
No mention of today’s events in the Senate on the front-page of Washingtonpost.com.
No mention of today’s events in the Senate on the front-page of Nytimes.com.
BooMan,
What did you expect from the ‘liberal’ media?
Your comments on Dodd’s perseverance and the abandonment of duty for the other three. Some votes you just get your ass back to Washington for. Dodd shines on this. He has my vote over the other 3 senators hands down, and has for a while. Not over Kucinich, and probably not over Edwards, but definitely over the other 3 senators.
Anyone figure out WTF happened to Bernie Sanders on that vote, though? Maybe he’s ill.
what he’s implying is that IF the front runners had gone back to DC to vote on this, it would have created a media moment.
but nope, they took the selfish way out. “All for me and none for you!”
…or on any of the half-dozen news aggregator sites I checked (Google, Yahoo, MyWay, etc.). But let’s not forget that Clinton and Obama could have made the news blackout impossible.
Clinton and Obama could have also campaigned by making a big fuss about how they needed to return promptly to Washington to save the country and let the press follow them there. They could have turned the whole thing into another campaign soap opera. Their jobs are in Washington, I thought, not Iowa. Or are they being paid to run around Iowa to realize their ambitions? Or maybe they’re taking vacation time and deducting the expenses from their tax returns? Quite a racket. And the newest jewel from the HRC crowd is that when she becomes president we will get back her hubby and his new-found crony Mr. Bush, Georgie’s daddy, as international goodwill representatives. The source is none other than Mr. Clinton himself. Evidently his opinion of himself is big and expansive. Maybe that’s why he will be disappointed to learn that the whole world has not been sitting around for the past seven years waiting for saviors like him from the U.S. Not at all. The lessons have been learned.
P.S. John Edwards for president.
Did Edwards give a speech against immunity? If so I would like to see it.
Google ‘john edwards against retroactive immunity for telecoms’ and take your pick. Obama and Clinton conspicuously stayed away from the Senate chamber doing their own bidding in Iowa. Okay, maybe I’m too strict. We’ll see how they get out of voting on the matter in January. But then they’ll be held hostage by the voters in New Hampshire or somewhere else. These poor senators who are too busy to do the job they’re paid for.
Ha! And they even have super-duper health coverage.
I asked for a link because I had already done my search and found nothing useful. I used your search terms and found things about Dodd and Kennedy. If you have better searches give me a link, I am not finding any recent quotes at all on this issue from Edwards.
Yes, you’re right. I only looked superficially. The references aren’t very useful. I don’t have the equipment or the patience to look at the videos. Anyway, I can’t say more. Could he be in favor or retroactive immunity? I doubt it.
This pretty much finished Obama for me. I was lukewarm at best, but if he couldn’t take a risk and get out front on this, what will he do as president? Where’s the change?
I think Paul Krugman summed it up well.
The only candidate who was on message with FISA is Dodd. If Obama has lost your support I hope that you will give it to Dodd. Any of the candidates could have tried to highlight this effort only Dodd did to my knowledge.
It is possible that they knew things we didn’t know and would have flown home for an actual vote on TelCo Amnesty, but we won’t know that. They were not visibly part of the solution. At least they weren’t part of the problem 76 Senators voted for Cloture they are the ones who I am angry at. People like Reid, Byrd, Whitehouse, Webb and Kennedy.
The 10 who voted against are heroes. The 14 who didn’t vote, knew that their failure to vote made the Cloture whip marginally more difficult.
Memo to Luam: we lost the vote.
Forget the vote.
Well, if you look at the video on the Dodd site Booman posted above, you’ll see that he praises Kennedy, among others, for their support. I still don’t get the politics of this.
Not only did the nyt decide that it wasn’t important enough to post on front page, but if anyone wants to see whats going on regarding MSM control of the truth, just read the openning sentence of the nyt article which is present – if you first link to “washington” the search for and exit the full page ad that next appears and finally get to the article!
What a joke. And, there is no excuse.
Oh, by the way, unless i missed it, the report continues to twist the facts by finally referring to “immunity”- NOT RETROACTIVE IMMUNITY! Quite a difference.
The LA Times ran a strangely vague AP story on page A20 or something like that.
in the hinterland calling in. Reid was heard to say something like “even Nevadan’s don’t like wiretapping!”
I was just going to do an entry on my own blog about this. I was disgusted that the sitting Senators couldn’t be bothered with doing their jobs, instead chose to campaign.
i agree that the other senatorial presidential candidates should have run back to DC for this. but it also occurs to me that the reason dodd did it is because he’s not a front-running candidate. he could afford to risk leaving iowa for that.
i agree that clinton and obama* should have gone back anyway, but it would have been risky for them too. common wisdom is that iowa is decided on retail politics. with only a few weeks left, every day there counts.
there’s also a lot of issues that come before congress this time of year that are extremely important. things like funding of iraq, which arguably is just as important as the FISA measure. if they did come back for FISA, then the obvious question would be: why didn’t they come back for iraq? isn’t the fact that people are dying there important?
i’m not saying that they shouldn’t have acted differently–i think both should have. but what i am saying is that they were in a tougher situation than you’re giving them credit for.
————-
* obviously, this excuse doesn’t apply to biden. he’s basically in dodd’s situation, the comparison is more fair.
Boo Hoo
They are running in a campaign that has a week to go.
Dodd has no chance of winning and he knows it.
If he were in the race, it might mean something, but he’s not.
Rockefeller is slime. Read this:
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/10/dem-pushing-spy.html
This is why we have a broken democracy.