Lamont: "I just can't believe Joe's been fighting so hard to save his job."
"I was genuinely surprised he came out swinging so hard so soon after the election."
-Ned Lamont to Marcia Kramer half an hour ago, discussing Lieberman's conduct on the night of the CT primary
Is he for fucking real? He was surprised that a three-term senator who had already declared his intention to run as an independent "came out swinging"? Lamont desperately needs new blood to replace whatever jokers have been running his campaign. Kos would do a better job. Hell, that 14-year-old who was dispactched to fix Team Lieberman's computer problem would do a better job.
-Ned Lamont to Marcia Kramer half an hour ago, discussing Lieberman's conduct on the night of the CT primary
Is he for fucking real? He was surprised that a three-term senator who had already declared his intention to run as an independent "came out swinging"? Lamont desperately needs new blood to replace whatever jokers have been running his campaign. Kos would do a better job. Hell, that 14-year-old who was dispactched to fix Team Lieberman's computer problem would do a better job.
posted by Solomon Grundy @ 10:36 AM
11 Comments:
At 5:32 PM,
Antid Oto said…
Here's my dime-store psychoanalysis: Lamont's reactions after the primary remind me of that flashback episode of the West Wing where Bartlet freaks out on his staff during their winning primary run and his wife says he's scared to death he might actually win. I don't think Lamont has fully processed the fact that he could win and actually have to be a Senator. I think he really wanted to win the primary, but on some level I'm not sure he's made up his mind to win the general yet.
That's the most charitable explanation I can come up with, anyway. I still can't believe he went on freaking vacation in another state.
At 7:01 PM,
Solomon Grundy said…
That would sort of be the Anthony Weiner profile (though that seemed more calculated). Or he might just be really stupid.
A(n anonymous) reporter friend who's been covering the race described him as "perpetually confused" and "very rough around the edges."
At 7:18 PM,
Antid Oto said…
I think Weiner was much more calculating: he assessed his odds of actually winning the runoff and then the general, decided it wasn't likely to happen, and folded for the sake of his future political career. Now he's the de facto frontrunner for 2009, when he won't have to contend with Mike's Millions, and he didn't piss off a lot of Ferrer supporters who genuinely thought it was Freddie's turn. After all, why make an enemy of the Bronx machine if you have only an outside shot of going all the way? If Ferrer hadn't come so squeaker-close to avoiding a runoff his calculation might have been different, but demanding a runoff under those circumstances was bound to give Ferrer supporters a perfect scapegoat for the inevitable Ferrer loss to Bloomberg, creating long-term resentment similar to what Mark Green still totes around.
At 7:20 PM,
Antid Oto said…
Another crucial difference, of course, is that Lamont won his primary.
At 11:25 PM,
Solomon Grundy said…
I am in New Haven at the moment, and I liked Lamont's TV ads this morning. For me, the fact that he's a teacher whose students are all campaign volunteers is his most emotionally compelling asset. For those of us looking for an excuse to vote against Lieberman but not for a cypher, that probably suffices. It serves as a proxy for commitment to liberal values.
And he was saying good stuff about poverty at an event with Edwards yesterday, although when Marcia Kramer pressed him on exactly what he meant in terms of specific policies, he got flustered and just sputtered something about using the money we're spending in Iraq on education instead. OK, but how about a specific policy agenda regarding poverty, Ned?
It's all feeling very Howard Dean-ey to me, except with a stupider candidate.
At 11:27 PM,
Solomon Grundy said…
And yes, Weiner-dog's logic was more compelling (for one thing, there was a logic). But he still used his candidacy merely to raise his profile, which is exactly what he promised his supporters he wasn't doing.
At 12:31 AM,
Antid Oto said…
As usual, Matt Taibbi says it best.
The only kind of change most dissenting voters in this country can contemplate is the rejection of an openly drooling imperialist like Joe Lieberman, whose real crime was not his war stance but his refusal to participate in the kind of craven cover-your-ass posturing the Hillarys and Joe Bidens and John Kerrys have indulged in this election season. Had Lieberman merely pretended to be antiwar once things went wrong in Baghdad, he almost certainly could have counted on the pusillanimity of the American voter to carry him to yet another Connecticut landslide.
Beltway pros like Hillary have long understood that in tough times, the vast majority of disgruntled Americans would rather find a way to convince themselves that their party agrees with them than face the fact that they never had any choice at all on a wide range of crucial issues. They're willing to be swayed by a carefully scripted display of canned anger like Hillary's outburst in the Senate because the alternatives -- third-party politics, grass-roots activism, dropping out of society altogether -- are too exhausting and radical to even imagine. Because getting to the root causes of things is so hard and scary, they'll settle for punishing an unpopular politician, even if it means electing his accomplice.
At 1:35 AM,
Solomon Grundy said…
wait, so lamont is joe's accomplice? it's late and i didn't follow that last phrase.
At 2:00 AM,
Antid Oto said…
I think other pro-war Democrats like Hillary are the accomplices, and he's talking about Democratic politics more broadly. You're right that it's not clear.
At 12:06 PM,
Solomon Grundy said…
How would you evaluate the sincerity of the following:
They're willing to be swayed by a carefully scripted display of canned anger like Hillary's outburst in the Senate because the alternatives -- third-party politics, grass-roots activism, dropping out of society altogether -- are too exhausting and radical to even imagine.
It seems like the key graf, but it's also a bit hard to swallow from someone whose beat is electoral politics. He really thinks his readers should "drop out of society" if only they had the will and imagination? Weak swill much? It all feels a bit like when Phoebe Evergreen scored in the lowest leftest corner of the political compass and then immediately confessed that "I took the test as if I believed in the revolution but live as if I've, er, left (it) behind (me)."
Nice use of "pusillanimity," btw.
At 3:01 PM,
Antid Oto said…
Actually I would say that the sentence before is the key one, and that once he gets into what "the people" should be doing, it goes astray. My bad in excerpting, I guess.
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