UNFINISHED BUSINESS. My dad always said being an adult means admitting your errors and apologizing when those mistakes have harmed others. Well, I�ve been wrong about a couple of things on Tapped, so it�s time to come clean. First, post-Ned Lamon's primary victory last August I truly felt confident that statewide polls which showed Joe Lieberman winning a potential three-way race would crater (as the primary numbers did) for him, and that soon enough Lamont would be winning the general match-up. Seeing that, I predicted, Joe would fear adding humiliation to embarrassment and bolt. Well, wrong on the polls, and really wrong on Lieberman letting go. At any rate, it remains a safe bet that Lieberman will be nearly insufferable if he wins -- especially if Democrats have 50 seats in the Senate including his on January 3, 2007. Second, I finally got around to watching the second half (third and fourth acts) of Spike Lee's documentary about Katrina, When the Levees Broke, and it was much better than the first half, which I found very slow and quite annoying at times -- especially when Michael Eric Dyson was on screen. The latter half is much more detailed on the governmental response, still chock full of the interviews with regular folks, and seemed to have less Dyson. So: Sorry, Spike, for doubting you. Finally, there is our dear Ezra, who, like the gnat he is, is trying to annoy me with posts like this "Schaller v. Schaller" one. Of course, he does have me over the barrel: I wasn�t very clear that I was talking about civil/social issue libertarianism and the possibilities for Democratic gains out West. But I was, and as my analyses in the book show, when you remove guns from the equation, white westerners are less conservative on a range of other litmus social issues (gays in military, abortion, affirmative action) than white southerners, who also love their Second Amendment but are less likely to hear Democratic messages on economic populism because there are too many cultural hurdles to clear first before they'll listen. The South was once quite populist: As Tom Edsall and Mary Edsall wrote in Chain Reaction, after Jews and African Americans, white southerners were about as economically progressive as they come. But now they are less so, and so on both the social side of the libertarian question and the economic populist side of the equation, the case for turning West instead of South(east) makes far more sense.
--Tom Schaller
