The Kiss

Now that Dick Cheney and Chris Dodd and every interested national political pundit (and that would include most of them) have had a chance to comment on the Lieberman /Lamont primary, I have to weigh in. I think it was about The Kiss. One would like to think that it was all about The War, but a primary is a family feud, and Joe's fate was sealed with The Kiss.

Even a multimillionaire like Ned Lamont couldn't pay enough for that picture. Not only are Americans still not fully comfortable with men kissing each other, but The Kiss incorporates aversions inherited from the tribes who brought down the Romans in 476. It was public. It was personal. It was disloyal. Like it or not, ever since Leonardo's plaster dried in 1498, the kiss has been the image of a betrayal of one's own. It was arrogant for Joe to think that The Kiss could be just a kiss.

Voters in both parties can accept, and even encourage, their candidates' working with the folks on the other side of the aisle. Bill Clinton was still adored by Democrats even as he moved his party to the right of center. It wasn't until he was seen as a betrayer of personal trust that he was maligned by his own. His wife also lost political ground when she chose to overlook that betrayal. That is what The Kiss did for Joe. It made it personal

We send a Senator off to do our bidding only once every six years, so voters had to speak on August 8 or for a very long time hold their piece. A vote for Lamont in this primary was most certainly a vote against the war, but it was also a vote against The Kiss, (and maybe also about holding on to the Senate seat while running for the vice presidency?) Statewide elections are never determined by just one issue (if they are determined by the issues at all) even when the issue is as important as a war. In any election, a candidate asks people to choose him and not the other guy. You can't get more personal that that.

Eighteen years ago when Joe Lieberman first won the Senate, he had an arrogant opponent whose arrogance helped to defeat him. Joe should have remembered how successful was that image of the slumbering bear, an image strong enough to make voters forget even the Watergate hearings. Many have touted Ned Lamont's Howard Dean style mining of the Internet and the blogosphere as the way he used the media to win hearts and minds and money. But the medium that won this election was more old style. A picture is worth a thousand words, and many more votes.