Thread: Who are the top politicians of the year?

There's an interesting feature this guy Tom Curry is doing at MSNBC - he's listing all the people he thinks were the top politicians of 2005. It's done by successfulness (i.e., who was the most savvy, the best at getting their goals, etc.) not by who you like most. Here's who he put:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10455780/

Gerald McEntee - a union president who helped beat back Bush's social security plan

Iraqi voters - for defying terrorists to get their goal of democracy

Conservative bloggers - for getting the Harriet Miers nomination withdrawn

John Roberts - for sailing past the Senate to get confirmed easily

Arlen Specter - for getting lots of Bush nominees confirmed in the Senate

Ronnie Earle - for getting Tom Delay out of his leadership post

Pat Fitzgerald - this one is unclear to me exactly what he "achieved" because he says he added fuel to the WMD's in Iraq debate, but that seems like Curry's goal, not Fitzgerald's

FDR and Lyndon Johnson - again, this one I think is just dumb. If you like them, fine, but they're not alive and we're talking about who was a good politician in 2005.

So who do people think were the "best" politicians in 2005? Again, it doesn't matter if you like their political beliefs or goals or not - you could completely hate them and what they're doing, just recognizing when someone on the other side is a worthy opponent. I agree with the conservative bloggers killing the Miers nomination thing, I think liberal media members were extremely effective at using the hurricane to kill Bush's popularity as well, and I might add Senate Democrats for doing a pretty good job shutting down agenda items they don't want passed (although I'm not sure how well this will work beyond 2005 as they may face fallout for it).

My vote is for the conservative bloggers who killed the Miers nomination. It was an intra-party fight so nobody on the left was very involved in it, but it seems to me to be more evidence of the power of new media to influence people. They killed a bad nomination using new tools that don't have an established mechanism or method - that kind of innovation merits the award to me.

Wow , thats interesting !