February 3, 2007 -- 6:50 AM EST // // Post a Comment
DAN GERSTEIN: MAJORITY OF CONNECTICUT VOTERS ARE "ANGRY."
This is a funny one. In the current issue of Blueprint magazine, Dan Gerstein, a top strategist for Joe Lieberman's victory over Ned Lamont last year, has offered up a piece that rewrites the history of that race in a way that's almost comically incoherent. Particularly noteworthy is the following priceless passage:
That, in the end, is how Lieberman was able to become Lazarus, despite the fact that a clear majority of the Connecticut electorate opposed the war. We ran a campaign for all voters and about all voters. They waged a vendetta on behalf of the angriest few.
There you have it in a nutshell: A "clear majority" opposed the war, but the candidate who represented that view somehow simultaneously was waging a campaign "on behalf of the angriest few." It just doesn't get any better than that.
What makes that passage a thing of beauty, however, is not just its witlessly self-contradictory nature, but also the fact that it unwittingly embodies, and hence reveals, the truth about how the Lieberman forces really were able to win the race, despite the fact that exit polls showed that many more Connecticut voters broadly agreed with Lamont than with Lieberman about Iraq. They did it largely by misrepresenting Ned Lamont's views as extreme -- as those of the "angriest few" -- when in fact Lamont's views were generally mainstream. Meanwhile, they duped people into believing that Lieberman's views were mainstream, when in fact his foreign policy views were and are the extreme ones.
Lieberman accomplished this remarkable goal the old-fashioned way: By unabashedly misleading the voters.
During the primary, as Atrios has noted, Lieberman said this:
I am confident that the situation is improving enough on the ground that by the end of this year we will begin to draw down significant numbers of American troops and by the end of next year more than half of the troops who are there now will be home.
...and during the general election he released a 10-point plan for Iraq that said this:
After losing the Democratic primary to Lamont and forming his own party running as an independent Democrat, Lieberman outlined a 10-point plan for Iraq in which he called for increasing the number of U.S. troops embedded in Iraqi units two- or three-fold. But he said this should be done by redeploying existing troops "not adding new troops to the region."
...only to go on after his victory to call for just that -- "adding new troops to the region" -- even disparaging those against escalation by saying this:
LIEBERMAN: I fear that while this resolution is non-binding and, therefore, will not affect the implementation of the plan, it will do two things that can be harmful, which is that it will discourage our troops, who weâre asking to carry out this new plan, and it will encourage the enemy, because as General Petraeus said to our committee, war is a test of wills, and you donât want your enemy to be given any hope.
Come to think of it, that angry majority of Connecticut voters has good reason to be pissed off, given that their Senator misled them so blatantly.
To visit the homepage of this blog, where you can see many more posts, click here.