Politically speaking, the biggest winners out of all of this, aside from Lamont and his campaign backers, are the blogs and Maxine Waters. Waters is now a kingmaker, a key piece of the magic coalition that struck down the former VP nominee in what seemed like an impossible race. And the blogs are now vital parts of the party, displacing the lobbyist-lawyers-operatives whose organs were The New Republic and the Washington Post editorial page, and whose power flowed through their alliances with insular state machines and bigwig journalists.
As for movement on the Republican side, I don't yet believe reports that Karl Rove called Lieberman and offered unqualified support. I see little reason for the Republicans to do that. I've heard through the grape vine that there is furious candidate recruitment going on, although there isn't a lot of Republican talent in Connecticut. Actually, there are several competing rumor streams. The local Connecticut stream seems to think that the Republicans are going to swing behind Joe, wholeheartedly, and that he's got the edge in a race against Lamont. The national stream seems to think that the Republicans are going to find a candidate to run. After all, why not just try to get the seat in a three way race outright? My sense is that the most likely path is that the national Republicans are going to make overtures to Lieberman, while searching for a candidate to run against him. There's lots of cake-eating and having it too in that scenario.
A huge loser in this race is AIPAC and the Bloomberg Democrat crowd. It's telling for instance that Michael Bloomberg endorsed Lieberman. If you gave Michael Dukakis $4 billion, a massive ego, and made him Jewish, you'd have Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg is a technocratic Democrat with strong streak of AIPAC in him, so it's not surprising he endorsed Joe. Now, I have a bit of a personal gripe here. I absolutely HATE Bloomberg Democrats. They are immoral, somewhat racist, and live in a bubble where a corrupt AIPAC lobby that sacrifices Israel to the far right in the name of making middle aged billionaires feel good about themselves is the definition of virtue. They are the ultimate example of elitist liberal, only liberalism to them has nothing to do with social justice and means not having to pay for their daughter to fly to Europe to have an abortion. They bulldoze neighborhoods in New York City but don't consider the neighborhoods really a part of the city since they aren't in Manhattan. They think artists are adorable, and then evict them to erect another Starbucks in a luxury condominium building. These are bad people, and I don't care how many colleges name buildings after them.
The Bloomberg endorsement is a good sign that these people are very unhappy with the Lieberman loss. The $1.3 million Lieberman took in over the final two weeks came from a few sets of donor communities, and one of them was the Bloomberg Democrats. Now, AIPAC doesn't lose. It just doesn't. Except that here, it did. Now the loss was quiet, and Lamont is pro-Israel, so the policy implications aren't clear. But make no mistake, AIPAC's champion got completely spanked. That's a big deal, and we'll see how big a deal as the Bolton nomination heats up. We're in a weird place with AIPAC, since it's impossible to oppose Bush's foreign policy without coming into contact with the corrupt Israel lobby and a thicket of accusations. That's a new and puzzling space for many of us on the left, especially since I grew up imbibing the 'Israel is always good' mantra in Hebrew school. (update: Sure enough, the Republican Jewish Coalition weighs in with the 'don't be a traitor to your religion line')
In the lobbying and PR communities, I'm getting a sense that there's nervousness around what happened in Connecticut. They don't understand blogs, or rather, they don't understand the problems with unethical behavior, and they are conflating the two. Within the party, most Democrats sort of get what's happening, but there's a kind of insular middle manager type that doesn't. The people who would back Lieberman's independent bid are the cream puffs of the party, largely unimportant and insignificant except when they go out of their way to screw liberals. Otherwise, they are just sort of 'motion but not progress' time-wasters. For instance:
One House Democratic official said party members had been "urgently trying to send the message to Connecticut voters that a Lieberman loss jeopardizes our ability to take back the House." Some Democratic officials said they can already imagine the ads in November races saying that Lieberman, once within a few hundred votes of being Vice President of the United States, is now "not liberal enough" for the Democratic Party.
If only the Democrats had kept Lieberman, the Republicans would have disarmed. I wish I had thought of that. Apropos of this theme, Russ Feingold smacked the DLC around. Nice.
Anyway, it's an interesting time to be thinking through these ramifications. There's a lot of political lessons here having to do with race, religion, Israel, and other taboo subjects that we are terrible at discussing. We're going to have to get better at talking about them real quick.
Where's Dave Chapelle when we need him? Or rather, at least we have the Colbert Report.
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