Dems Can't Hackett

"This is an extremely disappointing decision that I feel has been forced on me… For me, this is a second betrayal. First, my government misused and mismanaged the military in Iraq, and now my own party is afraid to support candidates like me."

That's Paul Hackett, the outspoken Iraq war veteran, Democratic star of tomorrow, and surprise near-winner of a heavily Republican House seat in last year's election, announcing that he has bowed to party pressure and abandoned his quest for a Senate seat in the Buckeye State. Democratic honchos had encouraged Hackett to run for Mike DeWine's Senate seat after he came within 3.5 percentage points of defeating Republican Jeanne Schmidt in the race for Ohio's second congressional district last year. However, Senate Democratic leaders realized that you always win with a seasoned candidate, and have for several weeks been urging Hackett's contributors to stop funding his campaign, so that longtime Rep. Sherrod Brown can run against DeWine.

The deathblow came Sunday, when the grotesque Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) publicly urged Hackett to quit, and run for the House again. Hackett now says he'll quit and leave politics altogether, noting that he had promised other Democrats he wouldn't run again for the second district seat: "The party keeps saying for me not to worry about those promises because in politics they are broken all the time. I don't work that way. My word is my bond."

And the award for best there's gotta be a pony in here somewhere response goes to DailyKos:

Hackett is complaining about betrayal. Yet Rahm was trying to get him to become one of his candidates. In other words, Rahm was recruiting him. That's not a bad thing. That's a flattering thing.

Or as Lyndon Johnson once told George H.W. Bush: "The difference between serving in the U.S. Senate and serving in the U.S. House is the difference between chicken salad and chicken shit."