2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Is anyone here in favor of third way/new democrats? [View all]joshcryer
(62,331 posts)He didn't go after high capacity magazines because he was pandering to the left. That should have been something that got the left to come out and vote for him. One of those "inspiring" things I was talking about.
This was the midterm after the 2012 Aurora shootings where 12 people were murdered due to high capacity magazines (James Holmes had a 100-round drum magazine at his disposal, which fired 65 rounds before malfunctioning, from one weapon). Mark Udall was sincere in his damnation of those magazines. He may have thought he was safe in this assessment because it would actually inspire the left to come out for him. The pragmatic choice would've been to keep his mouth shut until he was reelected, and then come out against them. But he saw a crisis in the state and something that needed to be addressed, reelection be damned. And he lost. He fucking lost.
Or rather, the left let him lose. Maybe because he was Third Way. Maybe because they didn't give a fuck about his staunchly liberal environmental stance, his staunchly liberal surveillance stance (him and Wyden broke the illegal spying long before Snowden did it). Maybe because he voted for free trade agreements with countries like Singapore, Australia, Peru and Chile, because fuck him, right?
What a loss.