Order The Pink Slips

by digby

Jane has an interesting post up today about the odd choice of the Lieberman campaign to run against the “crazies” and the blogs instead of Ned Lamont. It ended up creating a thoroughly incomprehensible caricature of him as a wealthy, country club, angry hippie, which I don’t think makes much sense to the voters of Connecticut.

What has struck me the most as I watched this campaign unfold from afar, is just how inept the Lieberman campaign has been on almost all levels. He had the money and the incumbency and the professional big time advisors and he ran a campaign that was almost laughably lame. I think it just shows, once again, that the tired, uncreative, tone deaf Democratic consultants are a big part of the problem for the national Democrats. If this is what the establishment produces you can see why we have lost everything.

For instance, is it even remotely understandable why, in the final week-end of the campaign, it was Atrios who dug out statements by Lieberman from 2003 in which he quite aggressively challenged Bush on the war? Why in the world didn’t the Lieberman campaign have that appearance in an ad running on a loop?

It’s probably because Mr Contrarian, having done a 180 on those views since then, nixed the idea for unfathomable reasons. But if somebody had dug that footage up and circulated it to the powers that be in the Democratic party, there undoubtedly would have been pressure brought to bear for him to use it — and endorse it. Maybe that happened, but I doubt it.

All Lieberman had to do in the early going was ignore the sniping, distance himself that schmuck in the white house and it would have been very difficult for Lamont to get enough traction to get this far. Perhaps it would have happened anyway, but I have my doubts. In fact I sincerely believed when this whole thing began to bubble to the surface that the point of this challenge was to get Joe to distance himselof from that schmuck in the white house and keep him on the reservation. I never dreamed he’d be so stubborn about something so obvious.

And now to find out that he had originally been critical and then changed his mind (because of what is speculated to be petulance about his treatment in the 2004 presidential campaign) is stunning to me. I’m actually beginning to wonder if deep down Joe wanted out anyway. (Or perhaps he really does want Rumsfeld’s job.)

In any case, this is a primer on how to screw up an election by Democratic Insiders Inc. Again.

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