{"id":17489,"date":"2011-01-18T12:46:56","date_gmt":"2011-01-18T18:46:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=17489"},"modified":"2011-01-18T12:47:05","modified_gmt":"2011-01-18T18:47:05","slug":"the-north-dakota-quad-fecta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=17489","title":{"rendered":"The North Dakota Trifecta?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The news just broke; North Dakota’s long-serving Democratic-NPL senator Kent Conrad is retiring after 2012<\/a>:<\/p>\n

President Obama said in a statement that he was “saddened” about the news of Conrad’s retirement but added: “I look forward to working with him during the next two years on the important issues facing our country.”<\/p>\n

Conrad, who currently chairs the Senate Budget Committee, has been in office since 1986 and risen to become one of the most influential — and intellectual — policy makers operating in the nation’s capital.<\/p>\n

Conrad had been open about his ambivalence about running for another term and had taken several actions in recent months that suggested he was leaning against running again.<\/p>\n

Conrad turned down a chance to chair the Senate Agriculture Committee — an industry of huge import in North Dakota — to stay on at the helm of the Budget committee and supported the debt commission report, a decision that would have almost certainly put him in political hot water in the context of a political campaign.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And with that, North Dakota’s trifecta of Congressmen, which two years ago was pound-for-pound among the most powerful threesomes in Washington – Conrad, plus Byron Dorgan, who retired last year and Earl Pomeroy, who was soundly thrashed last November – leaves the stage after a combined total of something close to eighty years in Congress, leaving traditionally-conservative North Dakota with a decent shot of being represented by…conservatives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The news just broke; North Dakota’s long-serving Democratic-NPL senator Kent Conrad is retiring after 2012: President Obama said in a statement that he was “saddened” about the news of Conrad’s retirement but added: “I look forward to working with him during the next two years on the important issues facing our country.” Conrad, who currently […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-12","category-midwest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17489"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17489\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17492,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17489\/revisions\/17492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}