True, it is a bit late in the election cycle. What I was thinking of was the cycle for Class II Senators. (Conrad is I and Dorgan is III, so it would be this year or 2010 in ND.) What I was thinking would be a state in which a Class II Senator would be up for election. 2 years is plenty of time to not only make a name in the public spotlight as a civilian doing some good, but also enough time to run as a reformed outsider. Plus, regardless of what party he runs as, he could have 2 years to spin the record either way. It’s all speculation and spitballing, but I just can’t see him not having a fighting chance to get elected provided he’s campaigning to represent an area that he’s in touch with. (Well, duffer, that’s what a politician does you dunce.) :eek:
Now, a northeastern Democrat for so many years, and to a much less degree a Jew, Texas isn’t a likely hotspot for him. Sorry Texans, I love ya, but let’s look at stretegy. The Lone Star State isn’t the best option. He would look goofy in a cowboy hat riding a horse trying to connect. I’d think Minnesota, with their seeming schizoid voting habits, would be the better arena.
Minnesota seems so fickle based on the day of the week, he’d have a very good chance of winning a lot of voters. Christ, Ventura was elected governor. Need I say more?
[sub]Deep dark secret. Had Joe been the Presidential nominee, I would have given a lot more thought to who I voted for. Probably Bush, but it wouldn’t have been cemented the night of the nomination.[/sub]
Well, to say that is to say the people in Connecticut are completely representative of the whole country. It could be that he’s not as liberal as the majority of the state, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a viable candidate. A loose analogy would be to say Harry Reid wouldn’t be electable in Kansas, therefore not a candidate worthy of Senate service. The point is, for all the talk we hear of indies being given a chance fairly, the fact remains you need to run for election in an area that has an electorate that thinks you represent what they want to have represented in the Senate. Was that convoluted enough? It’s still true. And much clearer than what is portrayed in standard election cycles.
Joe was thrown under the bus. Much more blatantly than the anti-Bushies did in the alleged assassination of McCain in 2000. Connecticut apparently shifted slightly liberal in the past few years. (sarcasm). He could still be a viable candidate in another arena.
That’s a poor comparison. The people who made up Lieberman’s party decided they didn’t want him anymore. McCain was allegedly screwed over by dirtywork from Bush’s campaign.
Lamont did a better job of getting out the people who wanted to vote for him and/or convincing voters that he was the better candidate. Isn’t that Lieberman’s problem if he failed to do the same thing?
If we’re totally abandoning the idea that geography is a factor in Senatorial representation, he should move right way. I think if he leaves Connecticut for that, he’ll seem like a permanent failure. Although maybe my analysis should be taken with a grain of salt, since I said I thought Lieberman would quit the race and so far he’s shown no signs of doing it.
That’s funny- I was just thinking about my own political influence, and how tragic it is that it’s limited to a vote and posts here.
The idea that Senators are supposed to represent their constituents geographically - you know, being part of the community in some general way - does seem to be hanging on by a thread at the most. I don’t know why I care about that idea at all, but I do. Senators choosing their constituents strikes me as very dishonest, a kind of reverse-gerrymandering. It’s why I didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton in 2000, and it’s one of the reasons I won’t vote for her this year either.
Joe will be on the fifth line of the ballot, below the Green Party candidate and the Concerned Citizens candidate. I have no idea of how they choose the order of names:
Obviously, the Lamont people would like her to go to Connecticut and campaign for Lamont (which she’ll almost surely do, if she’s asking how she can help), and it would be even nicer if, while there, she publicly said that Joe should fold up his campaign. (She might have qualms about that, so I’m not counting on it. But maybe she’ll at least tell him that privately.)
It’s got nothing to do with whether Connecticut’s representative of the whole country; the fact remains that there are Dems, Independents (lots of them) and Republicans in Connecticut.
If, out of all those groups, Lieberman can’t draw decent crowds in his own home state, he’s going to be in trouble wherever he goes. Connecticut voters start off with more reason to care about Lieberman than the voters of other states; if he can’t get them excited about him, going to North Dakota won’t change that.
He had almost every Democratic Senator endorsing him in the primary, and a few campaigned for him, too. Lamont had Maxine Waters and Danny Glover. Once JK lost the primary, most Democrats swtiched their endorsment to Lamont, the winner. Why shouldn’t they have? That’s the way the party system works.
The idea of LJ switching states is pretty far out there. He’d look like a desperate opportunist. His problem isn’t so much that he’s not liberal enough-- his problem is that he still supports Bush on the war. Everyone’s cheering for Casey in PA because they want to dump Santorum, but Casey is much more conservative than Lieberman, overall.
Your point about Casey is appreciated, and goes to show that there ain’t no Lefty Purge of Moderate Dems.
I would still say that Lieberman’s position on the war is at best co-equal with his other big problem - his far greater love of smearing other Democrats than of criticizing Republicans.
If there’s any sort of attempted purge by the netroots, that’s its nature: the lefty blogsphere wants to purge the Democratic Party of Democrats who regularly kiss up to Republicans but frequently express their disdain for other Democrats.
I never said there was, btw. No doubt there are many in the “NetRoots” who would like for there to be one, and many posters here think like that, too. My understanding of the Kos-ites’ strategy is to support the most liberal (or progressive, or whatever term you like) candidate in any give race who has a chance of winning.
I’m not sure those are independent variables. His major run-ins with other Dems typically revolve around the Iraq war. I think it’s safe to assume that if Lieberman had a position on the Iraq war more like Hillary or Kerry, and all his other political positions were the same, he would now be the Democratic candidate in CT. Remember, he didn’t lose by all that much. Sure, there’s lots of talk about him being too much of an inside-the-beltway guy now, but it was his position on the war that did him in.
When you don’t lose by that much, any one of fifty things can “make the difference.”
But the factor that has made it personal for a lot of people in the “Democratic wing of the Democratic party” is Joe’s (and Marshall Wittman’s, and Al From’s, etc., etc.) having taken the initiative to do frequent Sister Souljah-style bashings of those who disagree with them on issues of war and peace. And that initiative was independent of his actual stance on the war. Many other Dems (including Hillary) were able to support the war for a long time, without feeling the need to repeatedly attack Dems who opposed it in terms that suggested they were more on al-Qaeda’s side than on America’s.
There’s a big difference between “I believe you’re wrong” and “people like you are putting a smile on Osama’s face.”
Well, that Clinton censure was widely popular among Democrats:
So I guess it’s true that he did bash a Democrat 15 years ago over a non-war issue. Of course, he was right smack in the middle of the pack with most of the other Senators on the issue, so I don’t know what that proves other than that he’s a mainstream Democractic Senator. After all, this was an effort driven by the Democrats in the Senate (emphasis added):
I suppose had he not supported the censure, that could be used to demostrate that he was brown nosing the Republicans, right?
I said that his position on the war and his “bashing” of Deomcrats were not independent of each other. You said he has two problems, and I said that one was simply the byproduct of the other. It’s really not that important. He’s been rejected by the CT democrats for whatever reason, and we’ll see what happens from there. Dean was on Hardball the other day saying he’d have no problem with Lieberman caucusing with the Democrats if he were to win, btw. Of course, we’ve already agred to to disagree on that.
