I should have linked to this post from Jane on Maxine Waters stumping for Lamont (more from Steve Gilliard here).  It's a big deal that Waters was in Connecticut working for Lamont.  The African-American vote is hugely important in this primary, and Bill Clinton is beloved in that community.  Waters is highly respected, and as the head of the Out of Iraq caucus, carries a lot of weight.  She put her thumb on the scale for Lamont, and that's one of the only ways to counterbalance Bill Clinton's appearance.  It's nice of the press to mostly ignore the significance of her presence, but hey, what else is new.

African-American politics is hugely fascinating and not at all well-understood by most white Americans.  The press tends to ignore most stories about black politics that aren't about outright corruption, which means that a lot of very basic facts are left out of our media narrative.  Before Iraq, the anti-war contingent was portrayed as a bunch of hippies, but a substantial and disproportionate chunk of that group was composed of African-Americans who knew better than to trust George Bush and the liberal punditocracy.  African-Americans are extraordinarily progressive/liberal on most issues, but it's not a process or identity liberalism.  90% voted for Gore in 2000, and there were very few Nader voters.  

The CBC itself is a fascinating caucus, split between business-backed members and genuinely strong progressives that are routinely betrayed by the party.  If you watched the electoral college count in 2000, you would have seen this betrayal.  Waters, in splitting from the incumbent Democrats and backing Lamont, is showing genuine courage, as well as a real strategic sense.

This alliance, of African-American progressives like Waters and white good government progressives, could be enormously powerful.  Combined with the youth vote and a majority of Hispanics, that's a majority progressive country right there.  In the more immediate short-term, if Ned Lamont wins, it will be because CBC member Maxine Waters decided that taking a political risk and bucking the party was the right thing to do.

Last week, Maxine Waters was a progressive hero.