Continuting salvos of the Lieberman — Lamont campaign
The fake bumper sticker says, “No More Joe,” and is pictured alongside a Lieberman sticker.
“Of these two bumper stickers, this one has a simple message: `No more Joe.’ But what else does Lamont really have to say?” an announcer asks.
A brief photo montage of Lieberman is shown as the announcer recites Lieberman’s accomplishments and concludes: “He has the experience money can’t buy and the courage of his convictions. Experience, principles, results. Not a bad bumper sticker after all.”
FactCheck disagreed.
“Overall, the Lieberman campaign is well within its rights to argue that Lamont’s campaign lacks a positive message and is simply `anti-Lieberman.’ But creating false campaign material and passing it off as authentic? That seems at odds with the ad’s praise of Lieberman’s `principles,'” FactCheck said.
Marion Steinfels, a Lieberman spokesman, said the bumper sticker was hardly more outrageous than doctored video in a Lamont ad of Lieberman’s voice coming from President Bush’s mouth.
“Did Joe Lieberman’s voice really come out of George Bush’s face?” she said. “It’s so silly.”
“Did Joe Lieberman’s voice really come out of George Bush’s face?”??? If you can take that political ad literally, I wouldn’t quite understand what the point of it would be. One day Bush woke up and sounded like Lieberman in not just rhetoric but in voice pitch? The faux bumper sticker, on the other hand, presents the basic problem that I don’t understand how you can proport that there’s a bumper sticker that says “No More Joe” and not literally mean that there’s a bumper sticker that says “No More Joe”.
I saw two competing articles about the Democrats. One that said that there’s a bunch of “populists” or liberals running: Montana, Connecticut, Virginia. Another that said that there’s a bunch of “centrists” running: Tennessee, Missouri, Arizona. Why, even the “centrists” that are running are sounding populist themes of sort, and the same in some respect for that other group. I suppose they’re not necessairly mutually exclusive ideas of where the Democrats are heading, but they do denote a valuable counter-point to the conventional wisdom being tossed out on how Lieberman spells the doom of a “big tent” Democratic Party. And…
It’s worth mentioning that Lieberman states the belief that Al Gore’s eventual slogan “The People Versus The Powerful” politically cost the campaign. I simply disagree, believing that it’s the only thing that kept the moribud Gore — Lieberman ticket alive… a slogan, a message, anything that connects — however facially, with the electorate. Thus I’m in the sort of minority opinion that Ralph Nader’s candidacy ended up helping Gore, as it forced Gore to political definition. But for Lieberman, it was a cost of his political soul to even throw a political token to, quote-in-quote “populism”.
I hear that the political death of Lieberman spells doom for bi-partisanship. He works with Bush; we need Democrats who can be congenial in working with Bush for government to operate just as we need a Lincoln Chaffee to be able to work with Clinton in order for government to operate. But if the Democrats win the Senate in 2006, the Democrats would be giving us all a Harold Ford, Jr… a “Gang of 14” member waiting to happen.
Harold Ford has been making a living by courting Tennessee voters with frequent Fox News appearances. He lives in Tennessee. Lieberman lives in Connecticut. He seems to believe the general gist of, or rather more strikingly wants to force the general gist of into existance, say:
CAMERON: Antiwar liberals say Lieberman is out of step with his party and should be ousted. The problem, of course, is that that will invite Republican criticism that Democrats are the party of cut and run, unserious about security — by definition a weak position in a wartime election.
In Washington, Carl Cameron, FOX News.
And…
BRIT HUME: Well, it tells us that even in relatively dovish Connecticut where Joe Lieberman, if nominated, would be an odds-on favorite to win re- election, his own party may deny him that nomination, which gives you an idea of the extent to which the Democratic Party has drifted to the left because of Iraq.
What has happened is that all the antiwar sentiments of a huge part of that party’s base have been awakened by this war. They are emerging as the dominant force within the Democratic Party, pulling the party to the left on that and other foreign policy issues.
And the result is that a war that is going badly in the eyes of the public has been redounding amazingly in recent weeks to the benefit of the president who took us into that war, a remarkable achievement for the Democratic Party.
“To the benefit of the president”. That Fox News roundtable, sooner or later as it must, rebounds over to Hillary Clinton:
KRISTOL: Well, you could or you couldn’t. But she went out of her way to say that she wouldn’t, having left it ambiguous, because she might be running for president and she doesn’t feel you can take on the left-wing base of the Democratic Party.
So we have a Clintonian Bush administration and a McGovernite Democratic Party. What a wonderful situation.
This for saying she’ll back the Democratic nominee, whether or not Lieberman runs as — quite literally a member of the Lieberman Party.
Ugh. There’s really only three entertaining races at the moment. Entertaining being an operative word that does not necessarily mean relevant to actual issues. As those things go, this one is the only one that matters at the moment.