The biggest story of the Lieberman-Lamont battle? Connecticut's Secretary of State's lousy website. A fun game to play - Which takes longer: finding the election results, or figuring out how to pronounce "Bysiewicz"?
Update: Lamont wins and Lieberman will form a new party with the terrible name "Team Connecticut". Can't say I'm too worked up about his 3rd party run - there's clearly an ego problem, but it's not obvious to me that he doesn't really believe that he's the preferred choice of the voters of Connecticut. Bad for the Democratic party and most brands of liberalism, but it's hard to see why Lieberman can't just say that such problems aren't the unfortunate, but short-term, costs of democracy. We're talking more Ross Perot than Ralph Nader.
Interesting wrinkle - what will Harry Reid do?
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4 comments:
Well, it lookd like Lamont has won. At this point every single remaining vote would have to be for lieberman for him to win.
I hope Lieberman has the grace to bow out. Also, I hope all the talking-heads who opposed Lamont on strategic grounds start supporting him now.
I certainly hope Lieberman pulls out, but I'm not sure I'd load the question by saying that's the graceful thing for him to do. If he feels like running as an independent is the best thing to do, he's entitled to do that. He'd be wrong, but it'd be a justifiable position from a public point of view.
Now, it would be fairly ungraceful if he suddenly adopted a Nader-esque tone about the twin evils of America's two political parties, but that doesn't seem like the line he's taking. He's taking more of a "When you expand the vote to the entire electorate of Connecticut, I'm really the preferred candidate" line - which seems wrong as a matter of fact, but doesn't involve feigning indignation.
Sure he has the right to run I'm just mostly thinking that it would be better for him if he bowed out now rather than in a couple weeks when it becomes clear that his support is shallower than the... something shallow.
The thing about the three-way race is that the Republicans are currently fielding somebody no Republicans are actually excited about. I think Lieberman has a coherent, albeit unlikely, theory to the effect that he can pick up enough indpendents and Republicans to supplement his Democratic faithful in a general election. I gather the GOP is not totally averse to such a scenario, especially if they think they can eventually woo him over Jim Jeffords style.
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