Ned Lamont, Tony Snow and Jellyfish
Kudos to Madalene O’Donnell and Julie Fischer for their contributions while I was away on vacation.
Much of the media’s attention is focused on the defeat in Connecticut of Sen. Joe Lieberman in the Democrat primary on Tuesday, and the nomination of Ned Lamont as the Democrat’s candidate for Senate. Attention is also on Lieberman’s declaration that he will still run for Senate – as an Independent.
White House spokesman Tony Snow, at the “Western White House” today, addressed these events, of course, announcing that “the stakes are high.” But rather than call for support for the Republican candidate for Senate in Connecticut, Snow instead suggested that the nomination of Lamont was going to encourage terrorists, lead Iraq to become a failed state, damage American credibility, and offer up a “white flag” to the war on terror. He also managed to link Lamont’s upstart nomination to threats to the US from Iran, North Korea, and terrorists worldwide (again, and again).
Lamont seems to have shaken up more than Connecticut. If he is that powerful, perhaps he should be in the Senate.
Snow, no surprise, was trying to suggest that Democrats, by embracing Lamont, were representing the Democratic leadership’s approach to all foreign policy issues. Did he miss the fact that the national Democratic leadership generally embraced Lieberman? And that Lieberman defended the President? And that grassroots voices in Connecticut may not be expressing an easily, immediately discernable point of view?
Sometimes it takes a few days to sort out such messages, such as whether Lamont represents a re-alignment for Democrats or a more mainstream, bipartisan concern with the direction of war in Iraq. Or something else altogether. Things can seem to happen out of the blue, of course. I was recently in Connecticut’s neighboring state, Rhode Island. After a lifetime of swimming at the same beach right on the Connecticut border, I got stung – for the first time – by a Portuguese man o’ war jellyfish. Such jelly monsters have no business in New England! The sea creature left one leg bruised badly; my family had a happy burial for the animal after it washed up on the sand.
Like the occasional attack by an unexpected jellyfish, politics can express surprising results, especially to those who have not anticipated change. It will take a few more days and weeks to understand if Lamont represents new political focus for the critics of President Bush and his Iraq policy; it will take a few more months to understand what course we will see at the polls in November; and it will be a few more years before we know if a new President will take our nation in a different direction. From my point of view, we should be open to such change and messages. Lamont is not to be derided by Snow, rather, he should seek to understand that holding the course – no changes – may leave you ill-prepared for shifts at home or abroad, on land or at the beach.
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Ah! The sweet smell of Republican desperation…
Comment on August 10, 2006 @ 7:14 am
I’ve actually been amazed by all the strong pronouncements I’ve heard regarding the Lamont win…everyone seems so sure about their analysis, but most are just saying what they wish to be true. Eventually the most compelling story (not the true one, mind you) will win out and become the conventional wisdom. The closed loop that pundits operate under makes this so, and it is so painful to watch…
The one fact that has been completely ignored by the circle-jerk pundit class is that 60% of americans want us to pull out of iraq. It is no longer a far-left position. It is the mainstream position. Yet Lamont is derided as being to the far left due to his stance on this issue (since it’s the only one the pundits are talking about).
The pundit-class will always just push the storyline that reinforces what they consider to be conventional wisdom, even when reality has changed dramatically from that wisdom.
Comment on August 10, 2006 @ 8:25 am
Tony Snow is full of shit. He’s a joke.
Comment on August 10, 2006 @ 5:47 pm
Some good points. I’m amazed by the idiocy of much mainstream media commentary on this, as you say, assuming that there is some very simple lesson to be learned, e.g. that voters everywhere are going to vote against the war or that the Democratic party is a bunch of loony defeatists. I often wonder how these political commentators can keep their jobs after offering such cartoonish analysis.
Call me crazy, but it seems that few have noticed that this wasn’t a national referendum on the war, but rather a vote on the relative merits of two individual men. Few have recognized that there may be other things about Lieberman that might offend people, aside from his being somewhat more supportive of the war than other mainstream Democrats. If people want a national referendum on the war, why don’t we just have one, rather than just pretending that these kind of elections serve the same purpose.
Another thing that really annoys me is that it is assumed that it is totally freaky for an incumbent senator to lose a primary. Folks, if incumbents always win primaries, than in my opinion we live in a pretty shabby democracy. I think that lots of incumbents should get seriously challenged in primaries, unless they are so obviously beloved and great that no one could possibly beat them. Lieberman hardly fits this description. The guy is a slouch. Maybe some of the Connecticut voters got tired of being represented by a slouch.
Comment on August 10, 2006 @ 10:54 pm
I am a political animal. So, I wasn’t surprized at either the terror alerts the day after the Lamont/Lieberman primary, nor the message from the snowman. The message from the snowman was be afraid, be very afraid. That is the message from our fearless leaders and their decider. They know that no less than 3 incumbants were defeated in these early primaries. Change is comming, and the snowman and his boss deserve everything they get.
As far as our Corporate owned media, is concerned, I and many americans have utter contempt for them as they mearly parrot the words of the current Administration and the Corporate P.R. firms who spread lies here from Europe.
The snowman will soon learn that, you can’t fool all the people all the time.
Comment on August 11, 2006 @ 8:26 am
[...] It seems that the dust has settled somewhat from last week’s political events in Connecticut. I’d like to follow up on Tori’s earlier post primary examination. One thing that I feel strongly about is that this election was not about partisanship vs bipartisanship, though Joe Lieberman tends to be casting it as such. Lieberman argues that a vote for Joe is a vote for bipartisan cooperation on the tough foreign policy issues of our time. A vote for Lamont, on the other hand, is a vote for the partisan hackery that has become so prevalent in politics today. I argued in my previous post on this issue that for me, my support of Lamont was primarily about Lieberman’s continuous support of an extremely unpopular war. A nationwide Zogby poll taken after the Connecticut primary confirms that the dominating issue is Iraq and on that Democrats are fairly united – they want candidates that increasingly move us towards a decrease in troops in the country. [...]
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