Blue Crab Boulevard

All Wind, No Sail

The New York Observer has an article that describes the pre-mortems that are already happening in the Connecticut Senate race. Mainstream Democrats and the netroots are already pointing fingers at one another. Imagine how bad it will get if the Democrats fail to win either chamber?

Still, bloggers held Mr. Wolfson responsible for the campaign’s derailment. This month, the left-wing Huffington Post compiled its readers’ grievances about the fizzling campaign into a premature concession speech for Mr. Lamont.

“I turned my campaign over to hired guns who think that running to the middle is a winning strategy—even though it’s proven to be a loser time and time and time again,” the post read.

In a recent post for his popular left-wing political blog MyDD, Matt Stoller called Democratic leaders “moral lepers” for abandoning Mr. Lamont.

“What I have seen in this race is a complete abrogation of responsibility on the part of everybody except the netroots and Ned Lamont,” Mr. Stoller said in a telephone interview. “Trusting these people is a huge tactical error. Never trust anything that these insider Democrats tell you,” he said, adding, for good measure, “Bill Clinton is a liar.”

….

Some Democratic strategists argued that Mr. Lamont served as a field test of the theory that grassroots energy and blogger support were sufficient to win an election.

“They give you wind, but they don’t give you all the sail,” said Donna Brazile, who managed Al Gore’s 2000 Presidential campaign. “But it is the responsibility of any good candidate to put together a campaign team that is not just smart, but also understands how the political environment will shift, and that you have to shift with it.”

Oh yeah. That is going to get very ugly indeed in the coming months. It will be bad whoever wins or loses next week. It will be really bad if the Dems lose, though.

Politics | Gaius Wednesday, 1 November , 2006

By crosspatch, Wednesday, 1 November , 2006 @ 12:15 pm

I think the Democrats will probably win the House but by a very slim margin. Not enough to overcome the Democrats that tend to vote with the Republicans and it will probably result in nothing at all getting done. In other words, the Democrats seem to be talking at this talk but when they get what they claim they are after, they are going to be unable to walk the walk.

So my prediction is: Democrats get the house by a small margin and are unable to actually do anything with that. So they win but they still lose.
By Frank_The_Tank, Wednesday, 1 November , 2006 @ 12:57 pm

I think it’s fantastic how you use the internets to post this fascinating conservative perspective.

Hey, do you think the President will use maps from the Google to find Osama and WMD?
By Puggsthegrey, Wednesday, 1 November , 2006 @ 1:12 pm

Kos’s influence may be reaching it’s limits though. His hardcore leftists may be able to hijack a primary where only the most dedicated voters turn out in numbers. They clearly can’t win in a general election by being the extremists they are. They’ll lose, blame every single mainstream democrat, and conduct another purge, forcing out as many moderate democrats as possible.

How they think tacking even further left will get them elected is a mystery.

They do think that though, it’s plain from their commentary. They despise the middle of the road dems almost as much as they hate the right. The arguement seems to center around some delusion, that if they just stick even harder to their leftwing core, that’ll get them enough votes.

History and common sense says otherwise, but they can’t seem to learn anything from defeat after defeat. A sign to me at least, the hard left is well on the road to becoming completely unhinged. How many times do they need to smack themselves in the forhead with a hammer, before they figure out, that it hurts?
By Gaius, Wednesday, 1 November , 2006 @ 1:23 pm

Pretty tired talking point, Frank.
By Frank_The_Tank, Wednesday, 1 November , 2006 @ 1:36 pm

Jeez, I think it’s awesome that Mr. Liberals-are-Stupid-and-Evil-and-the-MSM-is-mean is telling me about tired talking points.

Thanks for the tips Gaius.
By Gaius, Wednesday, 1 November , 2006 @ 1:48 pm

No, I pretty much think the MSM is stupid and that the left is pretty irresponsible (and often foolish).
By crosspatch, Wednesday, 1 November , 2006 @ 1:58 pm

The fastest growing political group is the group that identifies as neither Democrat or Republican. In the 2004 elections the polled electorate was 37% D and 37% R … so neither party has enough to get a candidate elected on their own. Whoever wins the independent vote wins the election. You don’t get them by playing to your “base”. The farther left the Dems go, the more they leave behind the independent middle and make it less likely they will win elections. That is one of the reasons that the only issue they are campaining on is the anti-Bush issue. Even though Bush isn’t running for election, the Democrats are trying to make every single local House district election about Bush because that is the only issue the Democrats and the Independents have somewhat in common (approval rating for Bush among Dems is around 15%, around 30% for independents and around 75% for Republicans). The anti-Bush rhetoric is the only lever the Dems have to try to win the Independents.

The Democrats have through the fiasco that is the Lieberman thing shown they they have zero tolerance for any diversity of views within the party. The Republicans, on the other hand, show much more tolerance for a wide spectrum of opinion … to wit: Rudy Giuliani, a pro-choice, pro-gay rights, pro-gun control Republican. It is the Republicans that stand to take a much larger chunk of the center once the Bush issue is gone in two years. At that point the Democrats are going to be left without a strawman.