July 28, 2006
View From Lodi, CA: On August 8th, All
Eyes On Connecticut [With JoeNote to VDARE.COM readers]
By Joe Guzzardi
In November, Congressional incumbents will face a bitter
cold headwind along their path to re-election.
And aspiring candidates who have close associations to
the White House or remote connections to convicted
lobbyist
Jack Abramoff have steep uphill climbs.
Signs, long overdue, appear everywhere that indicate
that a voter rebellion is underway.
Incumbents are at risk because they are symbolic of the
United States’ broken political system where money talks
and the truth is purposely withheld from the Americans.
The first indication that road will be rocky came from
Georgia where conservative Republican Ralph Reed,
close ally to President Bush, lost by 12 percentage
points in his primary race for Lieutenant Governor.
Reed, said to have had presidential aspirations, had the
active support of former
New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former
Georgia Senator Zell Miller. Big donations also pour
in from moguls like
Home Depot founder
Bernie Marcus.
But in the end, neither money nor big name endorsements
were enough. Once a
G.O.P. darling and the past Chairman of the Georgia
Republican Party,
Reed’s ties to Abramoff did him in.
More indications of voter rebellion came from Georgia’s
4th Congressional District where
controversial Democratic Rep. Cynthia McKinney seeks
re-election.
In March, McKinney was accused of
hitting a Capitol Hill police officer with her cell
phone when he attempted to reroute her through a
security check at the House office building.
McKinney, an African-American, blamed
"racial profiling" for the incident. But
McKinney’s behavior embarrassed her more traditional
Congressional Black Caucus colleagues.
McKinney was made to
apologize, tepid though it was, on the Congress
floor.
When the recent primary that pitted McKinney against
former DeKalb County Commissioner
Hank Johnson ended without a majority vote for
either candidate. So the incumbent McKinney is forced
into an
August 8th runoff.
But on that date August 8th, McKinney versus
Johnson will not be the main event. Instead the nation’s
attention will be on the Connecticut Democratic primary
between three-term incumbent
Senator Joseph Lieberman and political novice
Ned Lamont.
If Lieberman should lose—considered possible—it will be
a referendum on the Republican administration.
Lieberman, rightly or wrongly, is considered by
traditional Democrats to be a crypto-Republican.
Democrats point to what they call
“the Judas kiss” as evidence of Lieberman’s
betrayal.
After President Bush’s 2005 State of the Union address,
the president embraced Lieberman and kissed him on the
cheek.
In anti-war, anti-Bush Connecticut, Lieberman’s staunch
support of
Iraq since the 2003 invasion has infuriated
Democrats.
And Lamont has built his campaign around his opposition
to the
Iraq war.
Lamont, who only last year was a Lieberman contributor,
is not a token candidate. He is a graduate of
Harvard and Yale and his grandfather was Chairman of
J.P. Morgan & Co. A wealthy cable network executive,
Lamont also has an inherited worth of between $100 and
$300 million.
Ted Lamont, Ned’s father, served in the
Nixon administration. And included among Lamont’s
supporters is the former independent Connecticut
Governor and
Republican U.S. Senator Lowell Weicker who was
unseated by Lieberman in 1988.
To appreciate the
magnitude a Lamont upset would represent, remember that
Lieberman is not only a three-term incumbent but was
also
Al Gore’s Vice-Presidential candidate in 2000 and a
candidate for president in 2004.
Lieberman, threatening
to run as an Independent if defeated, is fighting for
his political life. He’s pulling out all the stops—a
call to the
Clintons,
Bill and
Hillary, to stump with him
A
Lamont victory would set the tone for the nationwide
November election and alter the strategy for the
Presidential nomination in 2008.
Most Republicans would distance themselves as far as
possible from Bush and his policies. And emboldened
Democrats could campaign against maintaining the status
quo in
Iraq without fear of being labeled unpatriotic.
JoeNote to VDARE.COM
readers:
Unfortunately, voters
do not have much to choose from between Lamont and
Lieberman on immigration. In their only debate, on July
6th, Lamont came down decidedly in favor of
S. 2611, the
Kennedy-Bush-McCain Amnesty Immigration Acceleration
bill.
But based on
Lieberman’s long, ugly record of supporting virtually
every measure that increases immigration and his
promotion of all types of non-immigrant visas, I would
be inclined to take my chances with Lamont.
As the country’s
resistance to more immigration
increases daily,
Lamont may be the more pliable of the two. Lieberman is
a lost cause.
Consider
these statements
from Lieberman about
immigration made over the last several years:
