Need a job? Run against Sen. Cantwell

Donald Lambro:

Antiwar critics running against Sen. Maria Cantwell lost one of their candidates this month when the Washington Democrat hired him to work in her campaign for $8,000 a month.
In a contest that was always one of the Republicans' better opportunities to beat an incumbent, the big story of the summer was Miss Cantwell's decision to hire (and silence) anti-Iraq war candidate Mark Wilson, one of several war critics whose candidacies threatened her bid for a second term.
With polls showing Republican business executive Mike McGavick in a near dead-heat with the liberal lawmaker, as antiwar Democrats attacked her opposition to immediate troop withdrawal, Republican chances of taking her seat have improved significantly.
Miss Cantwell's first response was to buy off her opposition, first with Mr. Wilson at the handsome annual rate of $96,000, and then by silencing yet another vocal antiwar critic and potential challenger, Dal LaMagna, by making him her campaign co-chairman. Her second tactic, in an attempt to defuse a rebellion in her party, was to change her position on a troop pullout. In May her position was that this was a year in transition in Iraq. That evolved into a vote for some modest troop redeployment by year's end. Last week, campaign strategist Michael Meehan said she was now "for changing course" in Iraq. "We think troops should come home by the end of this year."
Her payoff tactics, however, created a furor in the state's newspapers, and the GOP's campaign machine went into overdrive ridiculing her cash offers to eliminate her opposition. "Cantwell campaign strategy: Going once, going twice... sold" blared a Republican campaign committee press release.
Yet another antiwar Democrat remains in the Democrats' Sept. 9 primary race. Hong Tran, an attorney who fled Vietnam with her family in the 1970s, said she, too, was asked to join Miss Cantwell's campaign, which she regarded as a job offer. She declined.

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While she has been buying off the anti war pukes she has also been selling out to them. She is a mediocre senator from a state whose other senator is a poster child for proof that Democrats really are not very smart--Patty Murray whose comments about bin Laden's popularity resulting from providing child care centers is still a hoot.