"Ending The War In The Senate"

Chris Bowers:

There are currently four sitting Democratic Senators who have announced that they are also presidential candidates in 2008: Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Chris Dodd, and Barack Obama. All four have now introduced legislation to end the war in Iraq. And yet, despite this, we still aren't getting anywhere in the Senate.

We need a Democratic Party that is willing to work together to end the war, instead of a Democratic Party whose most visible leaders are more willing to one-up each other in an ongoing attempt to burnish their anti-war credentials to the primary electorate. Unfortunately, right now we have the latter, instead of the former.
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At some point, if we are ever going to get anywhere on ending the war in the Senate, Biden, Clinton, Dodd, Feingold, Kennedy, Kerry and Obama--all of whom have introduced different types of binding legislation to end the war--should sit down and fashion a combined bill legislative plan of some sort. Ideally, this bill / legislative plan would work in concert with the Pelosi-Murtha plan in some fashion, and it would also be something they can force the Senate leadership to get behind. While I realize it still probably would not reach 60 votes, it would, at the very least, put us in a situation where we know how many more votes we need to reach, which Senators we need to target. It would also provide us with a concrete plan and sense of shared purpose--insiders and outsiders, establishment and grassroots, House and Senate. That is desperately needed in what has so far been a chaotic movement to end the war that has constantly been moving in several different, yet all ineffective, directions at once.

If we are all working together, we can all but end this thing over the next twenty months. When it comes to those who wish to lead us, I would like to see some leadership to make this happen. Right now, it just isn't there.