Only the passionate and minimally precise part of me wants to see Lieberman go down that badly. Ultimately I've got to know that, at best, Lieberman's kowtowing to the Fox News set has an impossible to measure impact on the national political discourse or future Democratic fortunes. That is to say, Lieberman really pisses us off, but it's entirely unclear what improves for us once that score is settled. Meanwhile, the two most important raaces of the year are happening without drawing even a relevant percentage of the attention that's been lavished on Lieberman and Cueller. And if we don't win the
governorships of Florida and Ohio, forget about 2008.
Thanks, oddly enough, ought to be extended to Adam Nagourney for
pointing this out today. Although he never touches on the issue of vote manipulation, which I'll come to shortly, he redirects our attention to the obvious fact that a governor helps win electoral votes for the candidate of the same party. Having Jeb and Taft in place--in Florida and Ohio respectively--was surely enough of a boost to seal off the win.
Both men are vacating their seats this year, and it's looking good for us in Ohio, though not so hot in Florida, where name ID is in the tank for the likely Dem candidate Jim Davis.
Horse race aside, the governors of Ohio and Florida control the two most important nominations in the country during the 2008 election cycle: the Secretary of State in Ohio and Florida. Katherine Harris and Ken Blackwell have both exploited those positions to great effect, largely because they have earned the blessing from the national and statewide GOP thanks to their efforts as Chairmen of the Bush election efforts.
Call me an agnostic on whether '04 was a stolen election ('00 obviously was, and at many levels). I kind of don't care, insofar as the fix isn't going to come even if we find DNA linking Blackwell to every miscounted vote in Ohio. The fix will only come if we get control over how the voting is done so that is can be completed fairly and transparently. And that's the only way we can know for sure that our next President wasn't installed by GOP functionaries in swing states. That will be better for us (energies won't be squandered on things like election fraud when fighting elsewhere is more produtive) and good for the country. Then there's the little matter of winning the Presidency for the Democrats, made more likely (even for us voting conspiracy agnostics) by controlling those two state seats. And for those who are certain that those two states were stolen, there can be no greater imperative than these two races. Period.
The vote is going to be close again. Florida, as it does every fours years, is going to add another 450,000 or so voters of relatively unknown political persuasion. (It's because of this particular unknown that it's been so easy to cover up voting abnormalities there.) So once the primary is over in those places, I think we as a commmunity really ought to think about focusing our energies there.