The vote count is in: Steny Hoyer defeated Jack Murtha 149 to 86 for the majority leader post in the House.
In my opinion, Hoyer was the better choice anyway because he is widely regarded as a champion for Federal employees, and is well known as a leader on education issues and is a respected voice on human and civil rights -- and his pro-environment voting record is impeccable compared to Murtha's.
There's no way to spin this: this was a big loss for incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The vote wasn't close. Her ally was rejected. This reflects poorly on her. And it will be remembered by her political opponents--particularly those who want to undermine Pelosi's efforts to enact lobbying and campaign reform--that in this contest she endorsed a fellow who has long been accused of slippery ethics.
Moreover, Murtha, the candidate with the most ardent antiwar credentials, lost--and did so decisively. How will this be interpreted (or exploited) by pundits and politicos who oppose the Pelosi/Murtha call for the withdrawal of troops? Murtha champions did try to turn the majority leader race into a debate on the Iraq war. Can the vote be read as an indicator that many House Democrats don't support Pelosi all the way on her opposition to the war?
Cited story.
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I think you can make too much of this. Hoyer won because the position was the obvious next step for him as Minority Whip, and because he did a lot of hard work supporting his fellow Democrats in their election campaigns. He earned the position. (Disclaimer: Hoyer is my Congressman.)
Pelosi was facing an uphill battle from the start. If Hoyer had been in any way controversial, she might have had a chance at getting Murtha in there, but Hoyer has spent years laying the groundwork. I think you can conclude from this that Pelosi's judgment is somewhat suspect, and that the House Democrats are not going to follow her blindly (and just as well), but nothing about what this signifies regarding the war in Iraq.
Neither choice was close to my ideal. Murtha certainly has a better record on Iraq than Hoyer, but Murtha's environmental and civil liberties records were not as good. Hoyer's other main problem [IMO] is his close connections with K Street.
I think this will blow over relatively quickly. Leadership elections are forgotten once Congress gets down to its real business. That said, I was not very happy with either candidate. I would rather have seen someone who was good on all Democratic issues. But then, I rarely get to see my ideal candidates, even from the Dems.
I agree with most of the comments above. I supported Murtha, myself, because Iraq is for me a bigger issue than ethics and because I thought they were about evenly matched on the ethics front, anyway.
But I don't think Pelosi is much hurt by this. She demonstrated loyalty to a friend, which all admire, in a situation that was pretty much preordained to go against her desires, which most understood. It was a gesture more than a battle.
I would like to know, has anyone here seen this? (Via Digby). It seems CNN referred to Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi as 'damaged goods'. Did CNN really refer to her that way? Now - perhaps I read too much MZB as a child, but I believe that phrase traditionally referred to a woman who was no longer marriageable due to having been raped. This strikes me as amazingly misogynistic to say about her, whatever their reasoning.
(cross-posted here)