True or False
Joe Lieberman's supporters have consistently predicted that a Ned Lamont victory would effectively lead to a stampede of security-minded Democrats from the party.
On his Bull Moose blog this morning, Marshall Wittman - a former Republican aide to John McCain who later became a DLC-Lieberman Democrat - decries the influence of blogger "nutroots" on the Lieberman race and Democratic secuirty policy and laments that he is now "a mammal without a party who continues to graze in the political center." (He writes, in case you didn't guess, in the voice of a moose.)
So, getting a jump-start on the thousand or so analytical stories we'll all be reading next Wednesday:
Would a Lieberman loss hurt the party as much as his supporters say?
And have Democrats like, say, Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer -- who haven't exactly rushed to support Lieberman -- calculated otherwise?
-- Josh Benson
Why is Lieberman's fate that of the party? Tasini is a better example of a left-wing activist challenging a moderate-ish incumbent, and he's getting creamed. I think Lieberman folks should stop trying to make it about some left wing bugaboo, and not about Joe Lieberman.
You should look no further than yesterday's US Senate Armed Services Committee meeting. "Our Hilary" was singing from the Lamont New Testament as she threw verbal hardballs at Rumsfeld. Democratic politicos know Lieberman's cooked and smelling fear, are stampeeding to their party's left wing. This won't be pretty, but it needs to be expedient.
What is hurting Democrats, is party leaders like Bill Clinton running and spending time and resources saving a Democrat from a Democrat instead of say, oh I dunno, helping a Democrat beat a Republican!
Couldn't the same be said of Lamont or the lefty bloggers supporting him?
Bush, Tom DeLay, Big Denny Hastert and Bill Frist are smacking their lips at the destruction of the Democratic Party by the Hezbollah lefty hacks who think they are such policy purists. Those purists tend to make very efficient facists when they get into government.