The political campaign is heating up in my old home state of Connecticut. Two new developments suggest that Senator Joe Lieberman is now in the political fight of his life:
#1: His anti-war challenger Ned Lamont has a new political ad that is — realizing it is marketed to a Democratic voting audience — truly devastating in the way it presents its argument to its TARGET audience. WATCH IT HERE.
Remember: if you are a Democrat, independent or Republican who likes Lieberman, you are not really in that target audience. It’s the primary audience of the anti-war, anti-Bush Democratic rank-and-file in the state that proudly once had Democratic Senator (and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley nemesis) Abraham Ribicoff and hugely-independent Republican Senator Lowell Weicker (whom Lieberman defeated). Connecticut is also home of various colleges and universities including Yale University. This ad will probably play quite well with them.
#2: Lieberman is under fire for his campaign tactics. Again, think of the voters whom he needs — not the ones he already has. This kind of thing will not sit well with them.
(In answer to likely questions: I have been out of Connecticut since 1980 and a registered voter in California since 1982).
Hotline On Call says:
The ad features audio of Lieberman saying that “In matters of war, we undermine the president’s credibility at our nation’s peril” and “We’re at a point in Iraq where war is a necessity.”
If it talks like George W. Bush and acts like George W. Bush, it’s certainly not a Connecticut Democrat.
If Lamont wins this thing, this ad will become legendary.
Indeed, you can’t quite compare it to LBJ’s famous mushroom cloud ad, but it packs a lot of political punch with incredibly precise imagery in an amazingly short period of time. You can say that this ad is perfectly suited to the 21st-Century MTV/music video generation. Again: the CONTENT and MESSAGE is another matter; we’re talking here about the efficacy of the delivery system. And it IS effective.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.