Imagine that you are a Connecticut Republican. It’s November. Your gubernatorial candidate is polling ahead in double digits. Your Senatorial candidate doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell. Why even bother to go to polls? Where’s the excitement? In your Congressional race? All that way down the ticket? Nah. There’s no juice in that.
But what if your party leaders tell you it’s critical to save the world from terrorism and elect Joe Lieberman? What if the Lieberman/Lamont race is polling within the margin of error? Yeah!! Then maybe you can get excited about voting. And while you are there at the polls, of course you will vote for your Republican representative.
That’s the theory anyway. There are three Republican representatives that are at grave risk of being thrown out of Congress. If Lieberman were to drop out, Lamont would win Connecticut in a walk and Republican turnout could be depressed all over the state. But with Lieberman still in the race, and Republicans rallying to his side rather than supporting their own candidate, Lieberman is ahead in the polls and may well pull off a victory. Ari Fleisher explains another reason why this is a good thing for the GOP:
“It would be far better for Republicans if Joe Lieberman won than Lamont,” Mr. Fleischer continued. “There are enough liberals for Republicans to point to — from Russ Feingold to Hillary Clinton to Nancy Pelosi — that we don’t need another one to make our case. But what kind of message would it send if a strong defense, pro-Iraq senator won in this environment? It would prove you can be for what George W. Bush is doing in Iraq and still win, even in the Northeast.”
I love Ari. He is such a sniper. Hillary the liberal. Okay. Next we’ll be calling Newt Gingrich a moderate. Oh wait???
“The right thing for people who believe the world is deeply dangerous is to re-elect Lieberman,” Mr. Gingrich said. That is especially true, he said, because “the Republican Party’s own candidate does not have any possibility of winning.”
I guess William Kristol is becoming a moderate now, too.
“For me, it’s an uncomplicated decision,” said William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard and a neoconservative who is helping Mr. Lieberman through an independent group called Vets for Freedom, which is helping to raise funds and providing strategic advice for the senator.
“Partisan Republicans may be ambivalent; they see a partisan advantage to Lamont,” he said. But, he said, “Foreign policy hawks and Bush doctrine believers and prowar types, we want Lieberman to win.”
Progressive Democrats have been arguing for several years that Joe Lieberman was a trojan horse within our party. People at The New Republic thought we were hyperventilating, engaging in a purge, being anti-Semitic, or some other thing. But now you can see for yourself. PNAC founder and lead cheerleader for expanding the war in the Middle East, William Kristol, endorses Lieberman. Newt ‘Let’s Let Medicare Wither on the Vine’ Gingrich endorses Lieberman. The party is giving no money to their candidate. They’ve even asked him to drop out. And why?
Because they are worried about their three house seats and they want to be able to argue that Bushism is popular (at least, survivable) even in the northeast.
If Joe Lieberman wants to be used like this, that’s great.
