by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math
I'm still waiting for President Bush to re-launch his Social Security privatization bid to distract the entire center-left blogosphere from various intra-party squabbles, but in the meantime, I ought to eat a little bit of crow for my prediction that Ned Lamont couldn't mount much of a challenge to Joe Lieberman (sorry, Oliver). Boy does that look foolish right now. In the past 6 months, Lieberman has lost 12 points of job approval among Connecticut Democrats, and 17 points among Connecticut liberals. And he's going to take another month of pounding on the airwaves and in local newspapers before he's through dropping in the polls. This is what I deserve for ignoring my own advice; Lamont has tapped into a lot of pent-up frustration with Lieberman that wasn't showing up in the polls as long that frustration didn't have a public face and voice.
Bill Hillsman has really spun lead into gold here—Ventura and Paul Wellstone already had particularly quirky political personalities, but Lamont is a freakin' cable executive who's somehow morphed into a "fiery populist" volunteer teacher—which is just further proof that the DNC might fare better simply by firing its entire pollster-media consultant complex and hiring Stan Greenberg and Bill Hillsman to produce ads for all races not run by David Axelrod (who did Barack Obama's campaign) and Dan Kully (who's the man behind Jon Tester's "I approved the haircut, too" ad). But Lamont deserves a lot of credit for recognizing the opportunity.
