Mark Udall heckled by own donor over War on Women obsession

Mark Udall heckled by own donor over War on Women obsession

Hilarious.

(Unless of course you’re Mark Udall, desperately trying to hang on to your Colorado Senate seat.)

Paul Lewis of The Guardian has the scoop:

Mark Udall had been looking confident, just moments earlier, when he climbed down the steps of his campaign bus and began addressing what should have been an audience of the party faithful.

These were people who had given up their Sunday afternoon to knock on doors in Centennial, in the southern suburbs of Denver, in search of votes for Udall.

In a populist, energising speech, Udall mocked the “plutocrat” Koch brothers, who bankrolled TV ads for his Republican rival Cory Gardner, and praised “the clipboard army” who were about to begin knocking on doors.

“I know you can do it. We’re surging. Ignore the polls.”

The crowd cheered and autumn leaves fluttered about the senator like confetti.

Autumn leaf confetti sounds delightful! But let’s pause here for just a moment. Because, fact check. Surge? I’m not sure where he’s getting “surge.” Real Clear Politics seems to indicate exactly the opposite, which is probably why Udall is imploring his faithful supporters to ignore the polls:

But now for the best part (emphasis added to highlight hilarity):

Then, finally, came the only reference to policy in Udall’s speech. “And by the way, I’m proud to stand with Colorado’s women,” he said, almost as an aside. “I’m proud to stand for reproductive freedom.”

An angry voice from the crowd jeered: “That’s not the only thing you stand for! Jesus Christ!”

Udall turned to a short, dark man on his left. The senator look genuinely stunned. “I’m sorry?”

“That’s not the only thing you stand for!” The heckler was Leo Beserra, a 73-year-old who made millions on Wall Street and, since the early 1990s, has shared a generous slice of that wealth with Colorado Democrats.

Beserra’s grievance – that the senator’s narrow focus on abortion has backfired – is shared by others in the party, but rarely voiced in public and never in the midst of the candidate’s campaign speech.

Minutes after interrupting the senator’s speech, he vented, once again, to the Guardian. “I’m trying to figure out who in the hell decided this was how the campaign was supposed to go.”

He said he had just watched a Sunday morning talkshow in which Udall was ridiculed.

“Who is running the worst campaign? Him. Because fucking abortion is all he talks about. He should not talk about it any more whatsoever. There are so many other issues.”

Referring to the 2012 election strategy, Beserra added: “Two years ago it might have made sense. But didn’t they get an inkling that it wasn’t working [this year]?”

Ouch. It seems even the Democratic donor base is fed up with the tired War on Women schtick. No one, not even the people literally buying the War on Women, are buying it any longer.

But one trick ponies by definition know only one trick. NARAL‘s ridiculously bad ad running in Colorado harps on the same chord: Republicans, War on Women, banning access to contraception, rinse, repeat.

Which of course begs the question for where the Democrats go moving into 2016. With the War on Women finally blowing up in their faces, abortion restrictions on the rise, their foreign policy in a shambles (if you can even give it the honor of being a cohesive policy) and a country more concerned about the economy and the increasingly nasty mess of Obamacare, it will be interesting to see where the Democrats go from here.

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