From
The Day:
New London -- If there is worse news for Sen. Joe Lieberman than the fact that another poll shows him well behind his primary challenger, Ned Lamont, it may be this: Almost two-thirds of his party's voters said they thought he should bow out of the race if he cannot beat Lamont on Tuesday.
Lieberman, who is seeking a fourth term in the Senate, trails Lamont 53 percent to 43 percent, according to a poll of likely Democratic voters commissioned by The Day.
And 63 percent of those polled said they thought Lieberman should not run as an independent candidate if he loses the primary, as the senator has said he will. Only 24 percent said Lieberman should stay in the race if he can't win his party's nomination.
The numbers are grim for Lieberman, said Delair Ali of Research 2000 in Rockville, Md.
And they don't say anything about a threshold; if Joe loses, CT voters want him out. Less than a quarter of Dem voters want him back.
Contrast that with the folks in his adopted home town, like Robert Kagan:
The only thing that doesn't pay is honesty. If Joe Lieberman loses, it will not be because he supported the war or even because he still supports it. It will be because he refused to choose one of the many dishonorable paths open to him to salvage his political career.
He is the last honest man, and he may pay the price for it. At least he will be able to sleep at night. And he can take some solace in knowing that history, at least an honest history, will be kinder to him than was his own party.
Yo, Kagan. It's not that he was honest about his view of the war (
at least until this week), it's his actual view of the war. Like any politician he was disingenuous about a few things, like his claim to support Social Security or voting against Sam Alito, and he was honest about a few more (school vouchers, Fed intervention over Terri Schiavo) to the point where Nutmeggers have just had enough of his positions on the issues. Honesty didn't do him in, democracy did.
It's fascinating, because I don't have much as trouble with Joe or his CT supporters as I do with his pundit and out-of-state supporters. People have and will disagree with the war, its purpose, and its need. While a majority of the country agrees with us that the war was a mistake (the vast majority in CT), it's not a unanimous point of view. The longer we go on, the more people come around, but people will make up their own minds and vote their opinion.
That doesn't mean that CT voters are obligated to rally around the proven-wrong war-monger neocons in DC like Kagan just because Lieberman is "one of them". If that is how he regards Lieberman, I wonder what he thinks of Francis Fukuyama?
Fukuyama's After the Neocons is a long goodbye letter to Bush and intellectual hawks such as Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol and Robert Kagan.
He says that under their guidance, neo-conservatism moved away from its roots into something wrong-headed and counterproductive. For good measure, he puts forward an alternative, gentler foreign policy.
They are threatened, and yet they still don't and can't get it. I think perhaps we can do a service to many in DC by airlifting mirrors into the place. Let everyone who wants to write a eulogy for Joe be forced to look into one for a few days before posting anything else.
In the meantime, Lieberman's still in the fight.
Sen. Joe Lieberman vowed to launch the "most aggressive" get-out-the vote effort of his political career yesterday, trying to make up a double-digit deficit to a political novice just four days before Connecticut's Democratic primary.
And what does Lamont have? Well, from the Stamford Advocate,
there's this:
Through the glass of the center's front doors, Malcolm Boxwell, an employee and Lieberman supporter, observed the puckered lips of a giant, papier-mache bust of President Bush aimed at a similar likeness of the senator.
"It's the kiss of death, I think," Boxwell said.
But he's got more than that. Out-of-state pundits consistently, sometimes wilfully, miss the point that Lamont is doing well because despite his inexperience, he has presented himself as a viable, smart alternative to Lieberman, and has run a superb campaign. If he weren't viable, Lieberman would be a shoo-in to return to DC. The locals get it though (see multiple examples on the FP here, including this).
We're in the homestretch. We assume this is a close race. We have work to do. And like any campaign, we'll all breath a sigh of relief on Tuesday when it's over. But get yourself ready for the eulogies, especially the ones written before the election. Some of them will make your hair stand up. Just grit your teeth and smile; that's politics.
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