Surprise! Moderate stabs Dems in the back
by digby
What a petty little man:
Wisconsin state Sen. Tim Cullen quit the Democratic caucus Tuesday — throwing a cloud of uncertainty over the party’s narrow 17-16 majority, their biggest victory from the waves of state recall elections.
Cullen announced his decision Tuesday after Majority Leader Mark Miller unveiled a list of committee chairmanships in which Cullen was the lone Democrat missing.
Cullen’s statement leaves some ambiguity as to his new intentions:
As of the sending of this email, I am no longer a member of the Senate Democratic Caucus. I will decide over the next few days or weeks whether to become an Independent. I will not become a Republican.
This entire episode makes clear to me that Sen. Miller has no time for my independent ideas and my support of bipartisan solutions to the state’s problems.
Miller disputed Cullen’s version of events, and said Cullen was indeed offered a chairmanship.
“I am disappointed in Senator Cullen and the decision he made today,” Miller said in a statement. “Senator Cullen turned down the chairmanship of the Committee on Small Business Development and Tourism. He told me that if that was the committee offered to him, he would rather chair no committee at all. It was an important committee as small business is the economic engine for Wisconsin.”
By coincidence I was just writing a post about this John Nichols piece in which he discusses the fact that Wisconsin was a victory because it stopped the Walker agenda. I had long been of the belief that the over-emphasis on Walker himself was probably a mistake and that the real emphasis should have been on the agenda.
But now, it's all just bullshit, isn't it? When everything hinges on the whims of any one perfidious bureaucrat with an ego the size of Montana, this is the sort of thing that happens. That's the real problem with polarization --- it gives all the power to supercilious crackpots like this.
The worst people in politics are often the so-called "moderates" who are only "moderate" by virtue of the fact that they believe themselves to superior in every way to the people who believe in something.
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