LAT: Political winds shift on prairie
Staunchly Republican Nebraska finds itself at the center of Congress' debate on the Iraq war.
By Noam N. Levey, Times Staff Writer
April 16, 2007
MCCOOK, NEB. -- In early February, the war in Iraq came home to this small railroad town on the Nebraska prairie where farms begin to give way to high plains.
Seven thousand miles away on a Baghdad street, a bomb exploded beside Army Sgt. Randy J. Matheny's armored vehicle, killing the 20-year-old McCook High School graduate and stunning his small hometown.
"It caused us all to reexamine what we were thinking," said Walt Sehnert, who has run a popular bakery on McCook's main street since 1957. "Those of us who were adamant about the war had to stand back and take a deep breath."
Across Nebraska, there has been a lot of reexamination lately.
Although politicians here still score points by poking fun at vegetarians, this deep red state, which has voted for a Democratic presidential candidate only once since Franklin D. Roosevelt, finds itself playing a central role in the congressional war debate.
Nebraska's two U.S. senators cast the critical votes last month to pass a bill that would force President Bush to start withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.
And one — Republican Chuck Hagel — has become one of the war's most fiery critics. Hagel, who was an infantryman in Vietnam, recently suggested Bush could be impeached for defying the will of the American people....(T)he votes by Hagel and Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson seem to resonate in a state of tightknit communities where a soldier's death is felt personally and where a tradition of prairie populism still rewards politicians who speak their minds....
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