weighing in really quickly on Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman

Ned Lamont or Joe Lieberman. Who cares about which man won? The important thing is what does Ned Lamont's victory come to mean to the larger electorate? And we can see how it's being spun by the Republicans simply by looking at Time Magazine's coverage, which suggests that now the Republicans will be able to scare people by using the "L" word again. They seem pretty excited about that.

Let them. The meaning, it can be argued, is that people are tired of reducing arguments to meaningless words, words exactly like Liberal. Liberal used to mean big government, now it means not thinking gay people are going to hell or that Iraqis were behind 9/11.

Conservative used to mean being against big social programs and being for states rights. Now conservative apparently means really large and intrusive government and religious bigotry. So if they want to go to scare politics, it might be better to use the "neocon" label and that's one better employed by people like Ned Lamont. And that's precisely why he was able to win.

Joe Lieberman is not a neocon, isn't even all that different than Lamont once you get beyond the Iraq War. But that's the rub, because while Lamont was able to fire away at his neocon tendencies in regards to Iraq, how was Lieberman supposed to react? What simplicity could he resort to? So I take back my initial argument above, I believe the control over the reduction of argument, the shorthand that passes for political discourse in the United States, actually presents a slight advantage right now to the Democrats. Americans aren't tired of reducing arguments, it's just that what's reducible right now favors the Progressives rather than the Plutocrats.

The big question is does that actually mean anything?

I don't believe that Ned Lamont OR Joe Lieberman have anything in them that's ready to deal with the problems as they are here. I don't think there is a Bobby Kennedy, after he had whatever moment of clarity that he did in the mid-1960s to be what he was in 1968, don't think there's any politician out there who responds to the needs of the most vulnerable. What's more, I don't think most of the people who vote actually want one.

So it's Ned Lamont.