BAD DEMOCRATS... WORSE REPUBLICANS... HOW MUCH DOES IT REALLY MATTER? INDIANA GETS A "CHOICE" BETWEEN BARON HILL & MIKE SODREL AGAIN

fric'n'frak

Look at this list of the (Baker's) Dirty Dozen:

Baron Hill (IN)
Jim Matheson (UT)
Zachary Space (OH)
Brad Ellsworth (IN)
Dan Boren (OK)
Joe Donnelly (IN)
Chris Carney (PA)
Heath Shuler (NC)
Jason Altmire (PA)
Gene Taylor (MS)
Nick Lampson (TX)
Jim Marshall (GA)
John Barrow (GA)

Regular DWT readers can probably make an educated guess what it's a list of. I mean you know it's a big pile of crap. But what it is, specifically, are the 13 Democrats-- or "Democrats"-- who, according to Progressive Punch's new "When the Chips Are Down" rating system are most likely to defect and vote with the Republicans. They are all reactionaries who tend to vote with the GOP against women's choice, against equality for minorities, against immigrants, against health care for children, for endless war in Iraq, for economic policies that give special treatment to corporations at the expense of ordinary citizens, against the environment, etc.

None of them is as bad as an actual Republican but they are the closest thing to a Republican and in many votes it just wouldn't matter. Example: if you want to see enactment of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) you might not be surprised to find that many on the list above were "no" votes. Persuasion from real Democrats-- both in Congress and in their home districts-- have convinced several of them to agree, however reluctantly, to vote to override Bush's odious veto. Only 5 persist in their opposition:

Baron Hill
Jim Marshall
Gene Taylor
Mike McIntyre
Bob Etheridge

I hope those first 3 names look familiar. They're on that list above-- and they're always on lists when Democrats vote with Republicans to screw ordinary citizens. Let's single out one of them-- the one on top of each list, Indiana's on-again-off-again Congressman Baron Hill, a grubby career politician who keeps getting voted out of office and then clawing his way back in. Of course, the identical description could be applied to his wing nut Republican opponent, Mike Sodrel. Sodrel announced yesterday he's running against Hill-- again. Of course, to Indiana's needy families it wouldn't matter; neither of these guys support ordinary Indianans. They both vote for the special interests who donate to their campaigns. Is Sodrel worse? Sure... but the difference is between an "F" and a "D," not an "F" and an "A" or "B." And ask sick children; to them there is no difference whatsoever.

This will be the 4th match-up between the two reactionaries from opposing political parties.

Sodrel and Hill have both been rubber stamps for the worst of Bush's agenda, particularly in Iraq, the issue that matters most to voters.

Sodrel said he was not discouraged by his loss to Hill last year because he believes the election was affected by issues unrelated to him.

"In the last election people were upset with the president for not changing tactics in Iraq, for his position on border security," Sodrel said. But, he said, "I was the only one running."

Hill won last year with 50 percent of the vote to Sodrel's 45.5 percent in a three-way contest. The third candidate, Libertarian Eric Schansberg, a professor at Indiana University Southeast in New Albany, said he also intends to run again and welcomed Sodrel's announcement.

At a news conference following his announcement, Sodrel said he decided to declare his candidacy early -- more than a year before the election-- because it will take time to raise the minimum $1.3 million he expects will be needed to run a credible campaign.

Sodrel spent $2.7 million for the 2006 race and the GOP and other groups spent $3.3 million to help him. The Democratic Party and interest groups spent $3.1 million to boost the $1.8 million spent by Hill.

Today's Congressional Quarterly looks at the rivalry between the two reactionaries. Par for the course, they mislabel Hill "a moderate," although fail to point to any moderation whatsoever in his very conservative voting record.

Voters in the mostly conservative-leaning southeastern part of Indiana have to go back to the year 2000 for a House general election that wasn’t Hill vs. Sodrel. Hill, a centrist Democrat who was first elected to the House in 1998, won his first matchup with Sodrel — the owner of a trucking, shipping and motor coach company-- by a 5 percentage-point margin in 2002. Sodrel then captured the seat for the GOP in 2004 by a margin of half a percentage point. But Hill rebounded to take the seat back, defeating Sodrel by fractionally less than 5 points in a campaign year marked by Republican setbacks nationwide.

Sodrel and Republican strategists are hopeful that the political environment will be more favorable to them next year than in 2006, when Indiana’s 9th was among the 30 districts that the Democrats wrested from the Republicans in their successful campaign to take control of the House. In that year’s hard-hitting contest, Sodrel attacked Hill’s votes on social issues and portrayed him as a liberal, while Hill’s campaign ads referred to the wealthy Sodrel as “Millionaire Mike” and linked him to some Republican members of Congress who had committed ethical misconduct.

The 9th District has usually voted Republican for president, including in 2004, when Bush carried it by 19 percentage points. But there are pockets of Democratic voting in the district, the largest of which is in Monroe County, which includes part of the liberal-leaning academic community in and around Indiana University in Bloomington.

Close House elections in Indiana’s 9th have, in fact, been the norm since 1998, when Hill was elected by a 3-point margin to succeed retiring Democrat Lee Hamilton, who had dominated elections in his 34 years of service (1965-99). In the past five elections, the high water mark for the winner in Indiana 9th was the still-modest 54 percent vote share with which Hill won a second term in 2000.

Sodrel had a strongly conservative voting record during his single House term. On House votes that pitted most Republicans against most Democrats, Sodrel sided with the majority Republican position 96 percent of the time in 2005 and 97 percent of the time in 2006-- “party unity” scores that were among the highest in House Republican ranks.

Hill votes with most of his own party’s colleagues most of the time, but his party line record on the Democratic side is not as strong as Sodrel’s was among Republicans.

Yesterday the Blue America PAC helped finance 40,000 calls to Democratic voters in Hill's district making sure that they understand that he may call himself a Democrat but that he votes with the GOP on crucial and basic issues-- like on children's health care. If Congressman Hill thinks we've had our say and we're finished with him, he is in for a very big surprise.