Joe-mentum

Lieberman losing the Democratic primary yesterday wasn't a big shock, as Ned "I got lots of money to spend for tv ads" Lamont did quite the rhetorical hatchet job on old saggy-faced Liebs.

One thing for sure, if you're a current Democrat in D.C., I'd stay away from kissing distance from Dubya. Perhaps it was a compassionately conservative kiss o' death.

It's hard to gather what will happen with that race in CT with Liebs now out in the political wilderness, with no party to back him. A lot of pundits see Liebs fading away in the race, but I kind of disagree. The wild card, obviously, is whether traditional Democratic voters will switch to an former "Democrat" and now Independent. Hard to gauge. I don't see it happening because Lieberman has the charisma of a turnip, but we'll see.

Some of the liberal intelligentsia seem to think that a strong anti-war message and/or general displeasure about Iraq is going to swing a number House and Senate seats toward the Democrats, possibly even making the Democrats win the majority in the House or Senate.

The professional odds-makers disagree though. As related in the most recent issue of The Atlantic, the folks at www.tradesports.com give a 54% chance the GOP keeps its majority in the House, a 81% chance the GOP holds its majority in the Senate, and a 48% chance they win the presidential race. In particular, the rationale is that the Dems won't garner a majority in the Senate because "swinging six seats, with just thirty-three in play, is a tall order. And because senators are usually better known to their constituents than are House representatives than are House representatives, they tend to be less vulnerable to negative perceptions of the party or the president" (39).

Nevertheless, the Republicans should be on the defensive in November. If Claire McCaskill's tactic of seriously questioning Iraq War related graft, as related in an interview last night, is any indication of how some Dems might approach their campaigns, they might not win a majority in either of the two chambers, but they could make it fairly close.

Even if it boils down to the fact that a number of Americans are fed up with the ways things are going at home and abroad, the party in power of all three branches of government could become the scapegoat, or so some hope.