Well, given the news this morning a message has been sent. Lieberman's loss shows that rubberstamping unpopular policies, and more importantly, betraying your base, has severe consequences. Mighty impressive that a man who only six years ago could possibly have been second in line for the presidency has now lost his primary election.
Some on the right will be quick to point out that police-assaulter Cynthia McKinney, Representative from the House of Representatives in Georgia lost her primary bid. Small potatoes. She wasn't slated to be second banana.
Amongst the political wonks, there's the phrase RINOs and DINOs, which stands for (Republicans or Democrats in Name Only). Plenty of the current field of presidential hopefuls, including Hillary and Biden, if judged on their voting records, clearly don't have a clue about what that means to the American Democrat.
The lesson Joementum has taught will not suffer fools lightly, and the other would best be served by taking careful note. Politics is serious business – and the next couple years for all the marbles.
Democrats simply could not support Lieberman. Was it the kiss? The rumors that he be picked to replace Rumsfeld (that'd be a nice face saving mood – but must happen before the general election). Was it the war? Or all of them?
And let's not even address the baseless claims that Lieberman's website was hacked… I am not a SYSADMIN, but based on my prior experience and knowledge setting up my own sites, that when you use shared hosting, the IP address that is targeted in a DDOS attack goes down, ALL of the sites on that box go down as well. For Joe2006.com to be dowm while MeetNed.com (Lieberman's Lamont attack site) stays up, is ludicrous. That site, as well as the 70-some odd others should all have been down, as well as their email, which was not the case. This is just more noise to substantiate their loss.
Joe failed because he didn't listen. The right knows – run to your base, no matter what. Specter learned it in 2004 – his challenge by Club for Growth honcho Pat Toomey stripped every vestige of moderate out of Arlen, making him tow the party line, be a Rubber Stamp Republican, and be a good little proxy, from NSA spying all the way through the expansion of Executive Power. What Joe was selling didn't pass muster in the marketplace of ideas.
Like Billmon says:
"The old politics of partisan polarization won today," said Lieberman.
Joe's right: A Republican got beat by a Democrat. Doesn't get much more partisan than that.
If you want a better reason why, go see the GOP's love letter to Joe here… complete with focused group tested buzzword "Weak and Wrong". The other thing to contemplate is how long it will take for cries that Joe was the victim of anti-semitism, and that being against Joe is being against Israel? Oh wait, there it is….
