Kerry, You ******...Follow

Which brings me back to my point about Schlesinger. The dozen house races aren't between Democrat A and Democrat B. They're between Republican A and Democrat A.

The Republicans didn't abandon Schlesinger and throw their support behind Lieberman because they thought Lieberman was a great guy, they did it because they saw Lieberman as their only hedge against a certain victory by Lamont over Schlesinger.

Let me go on record here and state it won't surprise me in the least if Congress goes to the Democratic Party on Tuesday. While I hope that it won't happen, I do expect Dems to gain more seats than they have now at the very least.

Seeing as Iraq has become the leading fulcrumic issue on which this election has moved, there is perhaps a more telling issue at play which is getting little notice. While the deaths of 2500+ soldiers is definitely a tragedy under any circumstances, it is the inability of the American public to absorb these scant losses (in historical terms) that gives me pause.

Certainly there will be some among you who would object and say it was just this particular war which causes Iraq to be such a contentious and dividing issue. I'd counter that by saying there has been no war in which we've been engaged which had overwhelming support other than GW1-- which only adds to my argument due to that war's brevity and low cost. The cost in human life appears to be one we have little stomach for and by that standard perhaps we have forfeited our ability to remain a superpower. I can only wonder what our response would be if we were faced with the same price that Chickamauga, Antetiem, 1812, WW2, and every other war where the cost in human lives was tremendous.

Yes, it is a guerrilla war and we are fighting it as a standard army. There is no way to get around that. But short of accepting either total annhilation or no engaging ourselves militarily I cannot see how we will be able to effectively project any kind of force that needs backing by the military. At best I see ourselves telling those who would force us to resort to arms that if we come to blows we'll just come in, kill people, and break lots of stuff until we are satisfied, and then leave. No reparations, no support, no apologies.

At this time that seems to be all what we are capable of, because we don't appear to have the spine to finish what we started.

Totem

Sure. But that's why the CT race is so much more telling. If it was a Republican versus a Democrat, we could assume that differences between the two had something to do with party affiliations and such and could perhaps discount one particular difference on one issue as less relevant.

But in the case of Lamont and Lieberman both are Democrats (even though Lieberman is running as an independant). Thus, the party affiliation issue is a wash. We're left purely with which one's agenda resonates with the voters as a whole more then the other. The only significant difference between the two is their position on several things that have become the common "talking points" of the left (opposition to NSA surveilance, and bank tracking, and Iraq, and Bush in general). Lieberman represents a "moderate" position on those things, in all cases supporting the current administration on how it manages the war on terror. Lamont opposes the administration's handling of all of those things.

And Lieberman is winning. By a lot. How can you not see the significance of that? It means that the Kerryesque approach of bashing Bush for everything from Iraq to the war on terror to his education level does *not* resonate with voters. Because it's that exact "bash Bush" ideology that Lamont represents. And it's that ideology that's losing in CT.



The Republicans had no chance of winning against Lieberman anyway. Not really seeing your point here. And at the end of the day, it really doesn't matter. The voters as a whole are being presented with a choice between a Democrat who represents all the things that Democrats stand for but does not bash or undermine Bush on the war on terror, and another Democrat who stands for the same things, but does bash and undermine Bush, and they're voting for Lieberman.

If this was another state, where a Republican was not inately going to lose to a Democrat (as is the case in all the close races), we can again say that the party affiliation is a wash (or at least unchanged from some normative value). In that case, this issue can be critical *if* the public gets the sense that voting for the Dem candidate is a vote to put people like Kerry in power and they're aware that people like Kerry would do the sorts of things that the voters in CT are voting against Lamont for.


It's just hard for me to explain this clearly. To me, what CT shows is that when voters are presented with a clear choice between someone who supports Bush on Iraq and one who opposes Bush on Iraq (and all the other stuff), they clearly choose the candidate who'll support Bush. In CT, this is a clear choice because both candidates are of the same party, with that support/opposition being the only significant difference.

My argument assumes that in most of the races across the country, most of the voters are not making any sort of connection between the candidate they are voting for and a more general support or opposition to Bush's policies in Iraq and the war on terror. But Kerry's statement will make some of them make that connection. It's an argument that Republicans have already been trying to make for weeks now, trying to push the connection between a Dem controlled house/senate to folks like Kerry and Pelosi being in charge of things (with all the bad things that implies). When Kerry then opens his mouth and confirms the things that these Republican ads have been saying for weeks, it's going to solidify that belief among a lot of voters.

How much effect? That's hard to say. But it's pretty clear to me that it does tie directly into the talking points that Republicans have been using for the last several weeks. Kerry just conveniently gave the Republicans a perfect exmple of what they've been claiming Dem leaders are about. And that's got to have a damaging effect...

Because Connecticut shows us how the voters respond directly to two candidates who are otherwise identical (from the same party originally even), where the only difference between them is whether one supports the president in Iraq and on terror in general, or whether one critisizes the president and opposes him.

Um, no. Nothing even vaguely resembling that, actually.

Your argument makes as much sense as taking Lieberman's Jewishness as the only diffrence and then building some elaborate castle in the sky explaining that people vote for Jews because it starts with J.

Actually it makes slightly less sense than that, but you've gone through all this trouble to justify being an idiot and making Analogy That Doesn't Apply At All #232333 so I didn't want to be cruel.

How much effect? That's hard to say. But it's pretty clear to me that it does tie directly into the talking points that Republicans have been using for the last several weeks. Kerry just conveniently gave the Republicans a perfect exmple of what they've been claiming Dem leaders are about. And that's got to have a damaging effect...

Yeah clearly. Good call.

Echo! Echo! Echo!