Bush's Favorite Democrat

Billed as a preview to the midterm elections later this fall, with implications for the '08 presidential race, the Democratic primary for the Senate in Connecticut is a hot little turd attracting, for the first time since November '04, the exiled flies of national campaign journalism. They are here in Connecticut now, searching angrily for good coffee and road maps in precious little towns like Wallingford, Fairfield and Danbury, where Lieberman is currently even in the polls with an anti-war challenger in the person of a wide-eyed political rookie named Ned Lamont.

If you believe the propaganda emanating from Lieberman and his coterie of whore-cronies in the Democratic Leadership Council, Lamont is a dangerous, pillar-crushing revolutionary, a preppy, tanned mixture of Lenin and the Ayatollah. The Democrat insiders' strategy vis-à-vis Lamont is very similar to the one used to dispose of Howard Dean a few years back, only it's even more savage this time around: They have chosen to go after Lamont's supporters in the blogosphere, deriding the likes of "Daily Kos" founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and the wackos at MoveOn.org as "liberal fundamentalists" bent on liquidating poor Lieberman for the sake of radical leftist orthodoxy. The DLC started the smear campaign in June with an editorial called "The Return of Liberal Fundamentalism" that used the word "purge" no fewer than eight times, in case you missed the KGB motif the first seven times.

Since then, a spate of similar editorials has appeared in the national media, with anyone and everyone jumping on the theme of blood-hungry blogger leftists scheming to take over the world via the Lamont campaign—from New York Times elitist fuckhead David Brooks ("The Liberal Inquisition") to Jonathan Chait at The Los Angeles Times ("Purely Foolish Democrats") to those always-predictable bards of conventional wisdom at Newsweek ("The War's Left Front"). The whole campaign was a classic bit of bait-and-switch: Rather than face up to its own record on the war, the party tried to defend its own by making the race into a referendum on "leftist" Internet pests, some with suspiciously foreign-sounding names.

And just like three summers ago, when the media cheerfully regurgitated party-concocted code words like "angry," "shrill," "testy" and "strident" when discussing the doomed Howard Dean, reporters this time around made sure to repeat the same terrorist/communist-themed code words in their campaign coverage, with nearly every major media outlet including some combination of the words "purge" or "fundamentalist" in their Lamont stories. New York magazine went so far as to call Lamont's net-roots supporters the "Blogitburo," and Lieberman himself, in an interview, derided his opponents' supporters as being on a "jihad."

This witch-hunting horseshit was preposterous enough, when the DLC and its ilk somehow succeeded in painting a tepid, pro-business centrist from the Hamptons like Dean as the second coming of Karl Marx. But that was nothing compared to the stretch they're making in playing the red-baiting game with Lamont, a Richie Rich Harvard capitalist from the socioeconomic Olympus of Greenwich whose expensively wavy haircut and crisp, supernaturally clean chinos would bring a tear to the eye of the mannequin in the Pebble Beach Pro Shop.

The only thing radical about Lamont is his opposition to the Iraq War policies of George Bush and Lieberman, and in this vague "radicalism" he is joined by upward of ninety-one percent of all Democrats, according to recent polls; otherwise, he is as vanilla and unthreatening as a politician could possibly be, the human incarnation of the white line in the middle of the road. Lamont's non-Iraq politics are not much more than a cautious presentation of already-tried mainstream party ideas, like permitting the uninsured to buy into the congressional health plan, and his stump humor is the gentlest kind of aw-shucks Americana—when he gets applause or cheers from the back of the room, he calls out, "Thanks, Mom!"