Majority Leader

The race is on. Hoyer,

For the last four years, I have been honored to serve as your Whip, working
on a daily basis with Nancy, Jim, John, Rahm, and all of the Members of our
Caucus to bring us to this point. Together, our Caucus has achieved
unprecedented unity – and our unity, I believe, proved to be instrumental to
last night’s tremendous Democratic victory. This was a team effort!

Today, as part of the leadership team that helped our Caucus regain the
House Majority, I am writing to ask you to support my candidacy for the position
of Majority Leader when the Caucus elects its leaders for the 110th Congress on
November 16th. I would be honored to serve as your Majority Leader, and am
grateful for the depth and broad range of commitments that have been given by
Members for my candidacy. While my top priority has been helping our Caucus
regain the Majority, I assure you that I have given a great deal of thought to
the duties of this leadership position.

vs. Murtha,

Talk is cheap, which is why, up until Iraq forced me to, I didn't do a lot of
it. But empty rhetoric is expensive. It has cost America three years in a failed
war at nearly three thousand lives lost and will cost us a trillion dollars by
the time we can extricate ourselves from it. Empty rhetoric has cost us years of
lost time in finding a solution to our dependence on foreign oil, at a price tag
that is nearly impossible to guess, but surely in the hundreds of billions.

This so-far bipolar decision has generated some discussion in the blogosphere (dkos, mydd), with what I think can safely be said as the majority of participants favoring Murtha. I have to agree. Even though Murtha has a pork problem and is a fairly conservative Dem, I think he would make a good majority leader by enforcing order and not stabbing Pelosi in the back. Hoyer, on the other hand, has one of the worst K-Street problems of any Dem and has backstabbed Pelosi.

What I would like to know, however, is who do people think would make a good majority leader? We have almost 200 contenders to choose from and I am sure there are some more interesting candidates out there.