Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Politico:

An aide to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said that she would meet with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) Tuesday night, to discuss the plan for appropriating funds.

As congressional Democrats plot strategy for next week’s Petraeus-Crocker appearances, a growing number of Democratic congressional challengers are coming together around something called the “Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq.”

The plan’s author, Washington House candidate Darcy Burner, said that her original goal had been to have 50 candidates sign on to the plan by September. Just 2½ weeks into its life, the plan has nearly that many, picking up six more in the past few days to bring to the total to 48.

The Nation, a major voice of the left, ran an editorial in favor of the plan late last week, despite its lack of a specific timeline for withdrawal. It has been popular in the liberal blogosphere, aggressively backed by OpenLeft.com’s Matt Stoller, among others.

The plan is an organic byproduct of the political stalemate in Washington state over the war, according to its backers. Burner said voters “have been presented with this false choice: to either stay the course … or complete chaos, the end of the world as we know it, terrorist attacks on our shores and the destruction of the American way of life. They get that there must be a third choice.”

Interviews with more than a half-dozen Democratic House challengers who have endorsed the plan yield a similar response: They say that voters’ concern is no longer whether the U.S. should leave Iraq, but how to do so. Polls show that opposition to the war has been stable over the past year, despite security gains. A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll done in the middle of March found that 66 percent of respondents opposed the war, roughly the same as a year earlier.

Supporters of the plan are running in red and swing districts from suburban Seattle to Montana to the Ohio rustbelt to rural New York and Virginia.

An aide to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said that she would meet with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) Tuesday night, to discuss the plan for appropriating funds.

As congressional Democrats plot strategy for next week’s Petraeus-Crocker appearances, a growing number of Democratic congressional challengers are coming together around something called the “Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq.”

The plan’s author, Washington House candidate Darcy Burner, said that her original goal had been to have 50 candidates sign on to the plan by September. Just 2½ weeks into its life, the plan has nearly that many, picking up six more in the past few days to bring to the total to 48.

The Nation, a major voice of the left, ran an editorial in favor of the plan late last week, despite its lack of a specific timeline for withdrawal. It has been popular in the liberal blogosphere, aggressively backed by OpenLeft.com’s Matt Stoller, among others.

The plan is an organic byproduct of the political stalemate in Washington state over the war, according to its backers. Burner said voters “have been presented with this false choice: to either stay the course … or complete chaos, the end of the world as we know it, terrorist attacks on our shores and the destruction of the American way of life. They get that there must be a third choice.”

Interviews with more than a half-dozen Democratic House challengers who have endorsed the plan yield a similar response: They say that voters’ concern is no longer whether the U.S. should leave Iraq, but how to do so. Polls show that opposition to the war has been stable over the past year, despite security gains. A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll done in the middle of March found that 66 percent of respondents opposed the war, roughly the same as a year earlier.

Supporters of the plan are running in red and swing districts from suburban Seattle to Montana to the Ohio rustbelt to rural New York and Virginia.