The Fighting 29th

All about New York's 29th Congressional District

According to a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) press release, I should be upset with Randy Kuhl for not immediately denouncing President Bush's threatened veto of H R 1585, the 2008 Defense Appropriation. The DCCC claims that Bush wants to veto the bill because the increases in troop pay and survivor benefits are too high. If you want to go down that rathole with the DCCC and Rep. Kuhl, this story will take you there.

I'd rather not engage in a silly debate, so I'm ready to stipulate that both Kuhl and the DCCC are 100% grade-A all-American troop supporters of the first rank -- but only if they promise to stop arguing about who "supports the troops". Kuhl's constant repetition of that phrase is a poor substitute for a real defense of his continued support of the Iraq war. The DCCC's usage is worse, because it is textbook case of letting the other side frame the debate by using their language. The DCCC is apparently unwilling to challenge Republicans on the substance of Iraq, so instead it focuses on whether we should raise soldiers' pay 3% or 3.5%.

Both sides are doing the public a disservice. While they're slinging platitudes and arguing over minutae, they fail to address the real issues in the war on terror. One of those issues, Guantánamo, is finally being addressed in H R 1585, no thanks to Randy Kuhl.

The House version of the 2008 defense appropriation included an amendment [pdf] asking the Department of Defense to identify and transfer all prisoners from Guantánamo Bay by the end of the year. Randy Kuhl voted for H R 1585, but against the amendment, which ended up in the bill anyway.

The plain fact, as documented by the UN [pdf], is that the US has used Guantánamo Bay as a way to circumvent the Geneva Convention, to torture inmates, and to delay the release of some prisoners who are probably innocent of all charges against them. Gitmo will go down in history with other US overreactions in times of war, and it needs to be cleaned up.

I think that last paragraph is completely uncontroversial, but unfortunately a lot of pundits and politicians continue to defend Guantánamo. I would ask anyone who agrees with those opinion makers to imagine what they would call a place like Guantánamo if it were located in Castro's Cuba instead of on our base there. What would we call a facility in a communist country where people can be held indefinitely without trial, threatened with dogs, and made to endure sleep deprivation and other forms of "soft" torture? I don't think "gulag" is a hysterical term for such a place.

A strong country dedicated to a long fight against Islamic fundamentalist extremism does not need Guantánamo Bay. We are smart and tough enough to treat prisoners humanely while we fight a war. To do anything less is profoundly un-American, since it denies the principles upon which our country was founded.

Many Democrats and most Republicans have been afraid to challenge the administration on its handling of prisoners because they are afraid of the same kind of demagoguery that is behind "support the troops". That's why, years after Guantánamo should have been shuttered, only four Republicans voted for closing Gitmo, and 15 conservative Democrats voted against.

If the DCCC were interested in real issues, they might have highlighted Kuhl's vote against the Guantánamo amendment. If Kuhl really wanted to do something to "support the troops", he could have voted with a few of his colleagues to close Gitmo. Instead, we get inane press releases from both sides.

McClatchy reports that the AgJobs bill, which is supported by Randy Kuhl, has made it into the compromise immigration bill. As mentioned earlier, Kuhl supports AgJobs because it would ensure that the fruit farmers in the 29th have enough labor to pick their crops.

Exile of Rochesterturning reports on his conversations with regional Democratic leaders about the Nachbar candidacy. He believes that Louise Slaughter will not officially endorse Nachbar for the 2008 race, and that most of the town and county Democratic committees will publicly support Massa. My sources aren't as numerous as Exile's, but a source that I trust has also reported that Slaughter will not endorse Nachbar this time around.

Exile mentions that he started getting DCCC press releases around the time of Nachbar's announcement, and speculates whether Nachbar is their candidate, since he's using a PR firm with ties to Rahm Emmanuel, the DCCC chair. I don't know about the PR firm, but I've also been receiving those press releases, which are formulaic, low-quality efforts.

Since the issue of Veterans' health care was an important issue in the last election, some readers might be interested in a (relatively) new blog, Wounded Warriors. This blog is maintained by the McClatchy (formerly Knight-RIdder) Newspaper chain, and it aggregates news from their wires as well as other sources.

Last week, McClatchy broke a story about the exaggeration of claims by the VA. They have also been instrumental in investigations of the Gonzales affair as well as being the only Washington bureau to doubt claims about WMDs in Iraq. So, at the moment, they're darlings of the left. In reality, they're just good journalists whose customers are a set of papers in the Midwest and South. I'm sure they'll manage to annoy Democrats in the near future, now that the Democrats are running Congress.

Yesterday was an interesting day in the House. The Republicans called for hours of procedural votes, most of which were supported by Randy Kuhl. According to Congressional Quarterly, the reason for the delays was concern on the part of Republicans that Democrats would restrict amendments in the coming debate on the Budget.

Kuhl's support of these procedural votes is consistent with his general voting pattern, which mirrors that of most Republicans. When a major bill is up for consideration, the Republicans usually offer a few amendments and then move to send the bill back to committee. That last motion fails on a party-line vote, and then the bill passes, often with bi-partisan support. The vote for H R 1257 is a good example of this pattern.

My statistics show that Kuhl votes with the majority in about 60% of tight votes on important legislation. There's a hard core of 30-40 Republicans who oppose most important bills, but Kuhl is generally not among that group.

So far this session, Kuhl's voting record, like almost every other Republican, is that of a party loyalist on procedural votes. On other votes, he generally supports most legislation that doesn't hit a hot button like Iraq, stem cells, or the rights of corporations. He's a moderate-to-conservative Republican, pretty much as advertised.

A reader who has some access to media buy figures in the 29th wrote to question the effectiveness of third-party media campaigns in the district. Pointing out that the most recent campaign will air 250 ads this week in Rochester, and none in Corning or Elmira, this reader argues that the ads end up being a "media splash" that won't really make an effective impression on area residents.

Though I wasn't able to independently confirm those numbers, the publicly-available information on April's anti-war ad indicates that the initial buy for that campaign was even smaller: 120 ads. These are $10-20K buys, far less than the hundreds of thousands spent for the seemingly constant ads we saw during the last election.

Since these ad campaigns are small, I think two conclusions can be drawn from the attention they've been given in blogs and in the mainstream media of the 29th. The first is that this reader is right: the media splash accompanying the ad campaigns is probably seen by more people than the ads themselves. This is especially true for the most recent ads, because Batiste's firing from CBS news gave the story a second day of life. The second conclusion is that the ads probably won't significantly impact attitudes about the war in the 29th. There just aren't going to be enough eyeballs seeing the ads for them to have a mass effect.

Though the ads themselves won't change attitudes, I think the Batiste story, which stands on its own apart from the ads, is still an important one. Batiste is making a principled stand, and it's hard to dismiss him as either uninformed or a partisan.

The Massa campaign has issued a press release announcing the receipt of an endorsement from the Allegany County Democratic Committee. Allegany is the third-smallest county in the 29th.

Congressional Quarterly has an overview article about the 29th, including recent developments like the Nachbar candidacy.

In a WETM story about worker shortages, Randy Kuhl is quoted as supporting two immigration reform measures. The first is the "Z" Visa, which requires a worker to pay $3,500 for a 3-year work permit. The second is an expansion of the H2-A program, which allows farmers to import temporary workers under a stringent set of conditions intended to ensure that foreign workers aren't taking U.S. workers' jobs.

Unlike the AgJobs bill, which he cosponsors and is preferred by the Agriculture industry, the Z-Visa and H2-A programs don't provide a path to citizenship. However, AgJobs has not cleared committee, so the Z-Visa or H2-A expansion might be the best compromise that will come out of the current debate on immigration reform.

As expected, Randy Kuhl voted against redeployment from Iraq, and against the short-term emergency supplemental yesterday.

In related news, Maj Gen (Ret) John Batiste was fired from his job as a CBS commentator over his recent ad for VoteVets.org. His day job at Klein Steel is probably still safe, since his boss Joe Klein is no stranger to controversy.

I agree with VoteVets.org claim that Randy Kuhl is "close to breaking with the President on Iraq". But what does that mean?

My take is that Kuhl (and Jim Walsh and a number of other Republicans) will become part of a compromise that will lead to the beginning of a withdrawal after September, or perhaps even earlier. I base this on a pretty basic analysis of the factions in this debate.

There are four broad groups of opinion on Iraq in Congress, which can be roughly characterized as follows:

1. The No-Compromise Anti-War Faction: This group has been vocally opposed to the war since it began. They won't vote for any kind of funding for war, even with strings attached. Because of their position, they've essentially isolated themselves from the debate and ensuing compromise that will end the war. Such is the irony that defines the existence of Dennis Kucinich: on the rare occasions when he's right, he's right too soon, and resented for it.
2. Get Out Sooner Pragmatists: This group might have voted for the war, but they've decided that the war just isn't getting us anywhere. This group favors some form of deadline-setting now, which will lead to an orderly withdrawal over the next few months. The vast majority of Democrats are in this group. They recognize the risk that the Iraqi government will collapse upon pullout, but they think this collapse is inevitable anyway and isn't worth sacrificing more lives.
3. Wait For September Pragmatists: This group is composed of those who want to judge the effects of the surge, and who plan to get out after that. They believe that the surge will buy some breathing room for the Iraqi government to come to terms on some of the most sticky federalist issues, but their patience with the Iraqis is nearing the end. This group is composed of Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats who understand that an open-ended commitment in Iraq will be damaging to the country (and, in the case of Republicans, deadly to the Republican party). Though he still uses the rhetoric of a Bush loyalist, John Boehner may have been hinting that he's in this group during his appearance on Fox News last weekend. Unless the Petraeus report in September is all roses and sunshine, this group will vote for withdrawal in the Fall.
4. No-Compromise War Supporters: This is the position of the Bush Administration and its loyalists. Members of this group are comfortable with rhetoric containing terms like "victory" and "completing the mission". Like the no-compromise Democrats, this group risks irrelevance because their position is out of sync with reality in Iraq.

I don't think this analysis is anything more than conventional wisdom, but notice one thing: group (2) and group (3) merge into one after September. At that point a large majority of Congress will be comfortable supporting deadlines in Iraq. In other words, September is the nominal beginning of the end of the Iraq War.

Randy Kuhl has toned down his war rhetoric lately. His stock response to anti-war ads had contained "white flag" rhetoric. Kuhl's response to the VoteVets ad is a much more sedate, though part of that might be because it's just not a good idea to use surrender rhetoric against a retired general who led troops in combat. No matter, I think that he's going to pivot in September, and I think he'll do so in part because position (3) will become the majority Republican view.

The interesting question is whether (2) and (3) can move closer, sooner. VoteVets is betting that they can change a few minds in the third group, Randy Kuhl among them. Those who argue with VoteVets' timing probably believe that the surge should be given time to accomplish its salvage mission. Those who think VoteVets are on-track probably believe that the surge is more of the same solution that hasn't worked before.

I think that the VoteVets ads are worth a try. Though the Septemberists' strategy is internally consistent, it's hard to maintain in the face of continuing bad news from Iraq coupled with evidence of strain on the Armed Forces at home. Jim Walsh is clearly running scared, and for good reason: defending an arbitrary deadline is brutal business. With the country badly wanting to close this chapter, the urge to hasten the inevitable end will become ever more seductive to politicians who want to keep their jobs.