The Lieberman-Lamont primary has certainly had an effect on Rahm Emanuel, the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. On Friday, days before the primary, he was already pretty harsh on Lieberman:
What’s playing out here is that being a rubber stamp for George Bush is politically dangerous to life-threatening.
Then right after Lamont’s win, he got harsher:
This shows what blind loyalty to George Bush and being his love child means. […] This is not about the war. It’s blind loyalty to Bush.
If this keeps up, I may have to reconsider my moratorium on donating to the DCCC.
And Emanuel is one of the DLC folks. If he’s really feeling this way about standing up to Bush now, maybe he can put in a word for cutting off the DLC’s support of Marshall Wittmann, who has no business being a spokesperson for any Democratic organization. Wittmann is an independent who doesn’t even claim to be a Democrat, and he goes much farther than Lieberman ever has in bashing Democrats as weak on security for not falling into line behind Bush.
The Lieberman-Lamont race has driven Wittmann into hiding, or at least taking a vacation from his Bull Moose blog. It would be great if he could come back from vacation to find his walking papers from the DLC.
Update: I forgot to mention that Wittmann adopted the fashionable new insult “nutroots” last month, thus enhancing the already high standards of his prose.
Too bad the DLC will only speak up when the primary is over. If they’d listen to the people a bit more and do a little more leading instead of following, maybe Democrats wouldn’t be in this position.
—doubtful • 2:36 pm