The Hotline reports:
CT: Lieberman is up with a new ad that hits Lamont as a “flip-flopper.” The ad notes his past support for Republicans, his decision not to release his tax returns and his pledge not to run negative ads. The visuals for the ad are very simple with just a photo of Lamont shifting left and right with the words the announcer saying be typed on screen using a very techy font. Are negative ads what really what Lieberman needs right now? Aren’t voters looking for a reason to come back to Lieberman?
If you saw the debate between Ned and Joe, you must have noticed that Lieberman used Reagan’s famous “there you go again line” three or four or five times. Now he is using Karl Rove’s flip-flopper argument. He is doing this to cement his bona fides as a Democrat. I find that a little ironic. Meanwhile, Kevin Rennie succinctly sums up Lieberman’s main problem:
The intense and important war is on the ground on telephones and front yards around the state. Connecticut is not accustomed to primaries. It’s been 36 years since the last Democratic primary for the United States Senate. Democrats are not in the habit of voting in primaries, so you’ve got to hunt for likely voters.
Both Lamont and Lieberman have enough support to win. The victor will be the one who gets his supporters to the polls on August 8th. And here is where it starts to look like advantage Lamont. The Greenwich insurgent (a new Connecticut oxymoron) has attracted an army of energetic campaign workers.
They are manning the phone banks and hitting the doorsteps in numbers Lieberman cannot match.
Gloria Borger gets it mostly right in her U.S. News & World Report piece on Lieberman. But her take on blogs and national security still betrays her insider bias.
Blog fodder. That’s putting it mildly. The lefty bloggers consider him close to the Most Evil Man in America, and their vitriol and name-calling are enough to make anyone want to vote for Lieberman. But make no mistake–that world counts, big time: Primaries are all about voter turnout. Turnout is all about intensity. Intensity brings out the true believers. And the Democratic believers, in election 2006, are against the war. What nobody can truly figure out yet is whether those feelings will translate to the rest of the Democratic ranks. Howard Dean expected it to materialize in the 2004 campaign; it did not–at least not for him.
No doubt about it, there’s going to be a significant debate on foreign policy inside the Democratic Party before the next presidential election, and it’s going to be high-stakes–establishment vs. outsiders; antiwar vs. pull-the-trigger Democrats. “We can’t send the wrong kind of message that we don’t take these [national security] threats seriously,” says William Galston, a former Clinton domestic policy adviser. “If that becomes the public face of the party, then we lose.”
Lieberman received the endorsement of the Connecticut Laborers’ Political League.
Lastly, Norwich Bulletin reporter Ray Hackett is really dumb to keep up a running fight with the bloggers. We outnumber his ass and have no retraints on the kind of caustic and bruising rhetoric we can use to mock him.