With so many competitive and exciting races in the 4th CD over the past decade, we have heard time and again, "This is the year!"
I do believe this is the year (again), but some lessons need to be learned from past elections and Super Tuesday and the 2006 Generals. Himes cannot win without being strongly competitive in the lower Valley (Trumbull, Shelton, Monroe, Oxford) and cannot lose if he wins there.
Having worked elections in all of these towns over the past decade, it is crystal clear to me that the Democratic base are moderate, pocket book voters. "Change" is not a buzzword that will go over well here at all.
Chris "Both Ways" Shays' cynical flip-flops on the Iraq War have become breathtakingly blatant. Last August, Mr. Shays returned from his fourteenth trip to Iraq and announced that "the only way we are able to encourage some political will on the part of Iraqis is to have a timeline for troop withdrawal." Shays added that he supported a one year timetable for withdrawing most of our troops from Iraq. Yet just two months after insisting that he advocated a timeline for withdrawal, Shays came out in strong support for Bush's "surge" that is sending tens of thousands more young Americans into combat, and voted against the Democrats' anti-surge resolution (HR 157, roll call #97, February 13, 2007).
(Jim Himes on Shays, with some bio information courtesy of TH. - promoted by mattw)
Jim Himes, Greenwich's DTC chairman and member of the town's Board of Estimates and Taxation, published a guest commentary in Greenwich Citizen this morning that slammed Chris Shays (R-CT4) for his continued support for the disastrous war in Iraq. Titled "Time for Honesty on Iraq," Himes strongly criticizes Shays for backing Bush's escalation of the Iraq War. Jim is well down the road toward a decision to challenge Shays in '08.
Himes writes:
"In a speech before Congress supporting the 20,000-troop `surge,' Congressman Shays put forth a string of half-truths that shows the confusion of a man who was a conscientious objector during Vietnam who now finds himself mired in a war he helped to start."
Excellent point. Why hasn't Shays been taken to task for hyping this war and voting to send hundreds of thousands of young Americans to fight in Iraq, when he saved himself from combat when his draft number came up during Vietnam? After all, Shays was 27 years old at the time, and not a naive teenager.
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