Down to Three

It's official, Wayne Dudding has withdrawn from the race.

Sources tell me it was a matter of funding and timing. The campaign started late, couldn't get much traction, and was having trouble raising money.

So now that leaves three:

• Steve O'Donnell
• Beth Hafer
• Brien Wall

To duke it out for the chance to take on Tim Murphy.

Meet The Candidates - Wayne Dudding UPDATE

Remember this?

There was another one of those "pizza and blogger" things with Wayne Dudding last night. Repeating the full disclosure from last time (just to be safe). I work in the same office as Dudding's wife - we've known each other for a few years.

Slag Heap blogger (and, of course, editor of the City Paper) Chris Potter showed up and I gotta say it was an education to watch him interview Dudding. Early on I realized that his questions, while certainly more detailed and articulate than mine, ran basically parallel to what I asked a few weeks ago. And as I didn't want to get in the way of the real professional in the room, I figured it would be best for me to just ask a few follow up questions once they were done.

I asked about what effect the possible end of the Muqtada al-Sadr cease fire would have on the reduction of violence in Iraq. You can read about the cease-fire's possible end here. Dudding said that while it was potentially destabilizing with little upside, it would be hard to say how much of an affect it would have. The "Anbar Awakening", he said, had a much greater impact on the reduction of violence in Iraq.

The Times had a good description of the "Awakening":

Anbar Province, long the lawless heartland of the tenacious Sunni Arab resistance, is undergoing a surprising transformation. Violence is ebbing in many areas, shops and schools are reopening, police forces are growing and the insurgency appears to be in retreat.

“Many people are challenging the insurgents,” said the governor of Anbar, Maamoon S. Rahid, though he quickly added, “We know we haven’t eliminated the threat 100 percent.”

Many Sunni tribal leaders, once openly hostile to the American presence, have formed a united front with American and Iraqi government forces against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. With the tribal leaders’ encouragement, thousands of local residents have joined the police force. About 10,000 police officers are now in Anbar, up from several thousand a year ago. During the same period, the police force here in Ramadi, the provincial capital, has grown from fewer than 200 to about 4,500, American military officials say.

This was from April, 2007 long before the beginning of Sadr's cease-fire.

On yesterday's survey, he offered up some details on how wide and deep the strain really is.

Not only is there a huge strain on families (with rising suicide rates, divorce rates and so on) but there's another more silent strain - the equipment being used in Iraq was never designed for such a quick "operational tempo," he said. The C-130 cargo planes, for instance, are degrading quicker the more they're used. "It's almost like dog years," he added. There are repair depots with huge backlogs for humvees and other vehicles.

The human cost is also very high - he said he'd heard that 70% of those troops in Iraq who contacted a JAG (a military lawyer) did so because of a divorce.

He added that he's not cinfident that the military could respond someplace else in the world adequately because of the the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Meet The Candidates: Wayne Dudding

I met Wayne Dudding last night. He's running for Congress - Pennsylvania 18th District.

A few local bloggers were invited to a meet-and-greet with the candidate but as it was a last minute thing, only Johnny Mac and yours truly were there. It made for a far-reaching and yet close-knit discussion.

Full Disclosure: Dudding's wife Fran and I work in the same office and have known each other for a couple of years.

Chomping on some pizza (initially plain and then mushroom and olive), Dudding held forth on his number one reason for entering this race: The Iraq war.

We can do a lot better, he said. He began by saying that he's in favor of getting the troops out as soon as we possibly can. It's the "as soon as we possibly can" part that's tricky. While praising General Petraeus a number of times in the evening as having done a great job, he said that a military solution won't solve the problems of Iraq.

Only when some progress has been made on the non-Military issues in Iraq (the economy, reconstruction, government and so on) will it be possible to bring the troops home. Rushing them home too soon would only increase the danger they face. There are no easy answers. And this is where the American Government needs to do better. There's no single unified department to run the reconstruction. The infrastructure needs to be rebuilt. The Iraqi police and military needs to be rebuilt. The caliber of diplomats the US sends over there needs to be upgraded. He said that nowadays, the diplomats are rotated in every 90 to 120 days and so the Iraqis aren't even speaking to them - why bother when a new diplomat will be standing in the same place in three months.

In general, he doesn't think we should be occupying any country - it's "against America's values," - and occupying Iraq has only enhanced al-Qaeda.

The war was about oil - and by shifting the nation's energy dependence away from oil, we'd greatly reduce the possibility for fighting another war for oil. The nation's dependence on foreign oil needs to be reduced, he said.

The conversation swept far and wide, from Nigerian oil prices to the limitations of laisse-faire economics to the "disgrace" (his word) of Abu-Ghraib.

Healthcare needs to be tackled, he said. One possibility is to have the government pick up the tab for catastrophic issues and then offering to everyone a set of options (one being a government run single payer system) for everything else.

Speaking about his candidacy, he said that most people can spot BS and that the voters are looking for someone of substance, so perhaps a guy with 27 years in the military might have something to say about Iraq, a chemical engineer might have a few ideas about energy independence and someone with an MBA from CMU would be able to speak on the economy.

AND he has an iphone!