Iraq already making 2008 campaign ugly

In Maine, Allen’s campaign manager Valerie Martin said “Iraq is the dominant issue in this campaign. It is where you can see the clearest contrast between Tom Allen and Susan Collins. Tom Allen is aggressively fighting to end the war and bring the troops home.”

Allen voted against the 2002 resolution to use force and voted in May to end funding of the war.

As for the Collins-Nelson proposal, Martin said, “It is hard to see this as strong leadership. She could have voted for tough timelines months ago.”

Maine has had a tradition of Republican senators (including Sen. Olympia Snowe and former Sen. William Cohen) even as it trends Democratic in presidential races.

In fact since 1988, Maine hasn’t voted Republican in a presidential election or elected a Democratic senator.

Mirror image of Collins
In some ways, the Democratic mirror image of Collins is Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, who, like Collins, is seeking her third term next year.

Louisiana is a state which Bush carried with 57 percent of the vote, a place where there’s a tradition of having Democratic senators even as the state trends Republican in presidential elections.

Like Collins, Landrieu has often supported Bush in the past. In 2005, according to Congressional Quarterly, Collins voted with the Bush administration’s position 62 percent of the time, but Landrieu was bit more supportive, backing Bush 64 percent of the time.

At the moment, there’s one significant difference between Collins and Landrieu: while the Maine Republican faces a well-funded foe, the GOP has yet to find a candidate to oppose Landrieu.

On Iraq Landrieu, like Collins, is supporting an amendment offered by Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., that would require Bush to adopt the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group – including refocusing troops on counterterrorism rather than door-to-door patrols of Baghdad and other cities.

Mulling over timeline for troop cut
But Landrieu said, “I’m open to consider the parameters of the Levin amendment” with its requirement that Bush begin reducing the number of U.S. forces in Iraq within 120 days.

“The public clearly wants a change in direction in Iraq — not just a change in message,” Landrieu said. “The president has resisted it, despite all the evidence to the contrary.”

Landrieu was chagrined that the president opposed a measure offered this week by Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., which would have required a one-to-one ratio between the time troops spend at home bases and the time they spend in Iraq.

“The president himself has said the country should be prepared for a marathon – but he has set our troops on a sprint’s pace that cannot be sustained,” she said. “So he is the one that is being not completely honest with American people about what it is going to take in terms of time and treasure to fight this war. Until he starts putting some smarter strategies on the table and stops blocking all the smart strategies that we put out there, then I’m not going to believe his rhetoric any longer.”

She spoke not in terms of withdrawal dates or of a funding cut-off but in terms of “salvage.”

“The American people would like us to try to salvage what we can, to win what we can to protect this country and to develop a smart strategy to do so. And every effort made by Democrats, even moderate, more conservative Democrats is being thwarted by this administration.”

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