"I bet he was......oh, never mind"
Posted on 02/02/2012 3:28:15 PM PST by tobyhill
A rare breed just got rarer. Rep. Heath Shuler of North Carolina, one of the few remaining white Southern Democrats in the House, has announced he will retire rather than run in what was expected to his toughest race yet.
Shuler is a leader of the so-called Blue Dog Democrats, a shrinking coalition of moderates who were known for, among other things, causing headaches for Nancy Pelosi during her years as speaker.
Shuler launched a doomed bid against the California Democrat for the minority leader post in 2010. He got 43 votes.
The Heisman Trophy runner-up and former Washington Redskins quarterback was first elected to the House in the Democratic wave of 2006. But he was facing a much tougher electorate this year. The GOP-led state legislature has redrawn his district to cut out the hub of Democratic voters. He was expecting a fierce and uphill fight.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Blue Dog!? No such thing. Dem=Marxist
"I bet he was......oh, never mind"
Guy is a Moron, he should have switched to Independent and caucused with the Republican two years ago. I really have a hard time believing that the Rat party ever represented even 15% of his core beliefs.
Well Heath Shuler wasn’t much of a quarterback in retrospect, although at the time he signed with the Washington Redskins, he became the highest paid player in franchise history.
And Washington didn’t get much in return on that investment, that’s for damn sure.
Yeah, how people like him can remain Demonrats is beyond me. At least I saw the light in my 20s.
The process took about a year. And man...after that...trips home were FUN. /sarcasm
Any idea if a conservative will be running for this seat with a chance for a pick up in the House?
Jesse Kelly is likely to run for the seat in AZ’s 8th congressional district (where he almost knocked off Giffords 2 years ago).
It’d be great to pick up these 2 seats.
Shuler played high school football with some of my family, and he’s an OK guy. I’m glad he’s out of politics, though. He didn’t handle the tradeoffs very well. He came from a traditional FDR/Truman kind of area, so far as democrats go, and that kind of mountain folk are rabidly conservative in everything except their political party. It always caused me to scratch my head, but the justification is always, “Gramps was a democrat, so our family is democrat.”
And that’s why I started out as a democrat, became a Reagan Democrat, eventually became a republican, and NOW am leaving them because the republicans are just liberals who give lip-service to balancing budgets.
Filing deadline is Feb 29.
politics1 has 10 Republicans announced for the seat and one Democrat besides Shuler.
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