Dean Christakos« D-Day | Main | The Summer Spike In Gas Prices »
August 9, 2006
Nedrenaline and the Lieberdammerung
| I amar prestar aen... | The world has changed |
| han mathon ne nen, | I feel it in the water |
| han mathon ne chae | I feel it in the earth |
| a han nostan ned gwilith. | I smell it in the air |
This is the first campaign I volunteered for that actually won. From now on, politicians are going to know that supporting the war and turning a blind eye to official use of torture in favor of sucking up to the White House runs the risk of costing them their jobs.
There's a story about this that starts back in late December of 2003. On the website CTNow.com, there was a picture of the Lieberman campaign HQ in New Hampshire which, as you might remember, resulted in Lieberman scoring a "three-way split decision for third place" (or, as Jon Stewart put it, "winning the bronze for the bronze"). The campaign HQ featured a smiling volunteer in the office, and in the background, you could see a homemade poster with the words "HIPPIE DEANIES GO HOME." That picture is long since gone, but it was featured on atrios, and referred to in the comments of this Decembrist post. Apparently a bunch of people who had never got involved in poitics before who decided to come out and help a candidate who admitted in public that the White House was taking the country in the wrong direction was some kind of intrusion. This would become a pattern, actually. Lieberman wasn't shy about insulting people who would be willing to work for a campaign, people who criticized the president, or primary voters in Connecticut from his own party, who he seemed to regard as fringe interlopers interfering with his God-given Senate seat. The man was just as condescending to everyone in 2006 as he was to people like me back in '03.
I may have cut off my ponytail many years ago, traded in my round tortoise-shell glasses frames for a pair of oh-too-hip dark-framed glasses, and my tie-dyes are normally hidden under a button-down shirt (which, let's face it, were more part of a scruffy-engineer-aesthetic than anything else), but I never forgot that. I knew I was going to get Joe Lieberman for that. This hippie Deanie did go home, and he finished this thesis, and then he went down to Hartford to volunteer for Lamont. Who made up the staff of the Lamont offices there? A bunch of other people regarded as "hippie Deanies"-- Dean supporters from Connecticut and elsewhere from 2004 who cut their teeth on the primary campaign as their early campaign experience. We got Joe. We got him good.
Photos from my photo archive:
The Lamont Campaign
The Lamont Victory Celebration
Updates: Well, I suppose Lieberman fans are heading to the Connecticut for Lieberman website. Too bad someone other than the Lieberman campaign seems to have registered the domain.
Also, there's this open letter to Joe Lieberman written the day of the election, before the returns came in:
Look around you today. Look at the passionate activism, the voter engagement, the way people are willing to jump on planes and walk the streets and build floats and wave signs and sleep on other people's floors and couches all for the chance to participate in a democracy. Look at the national media, focused on the concerns of your very own constituents like they're the barometer for the rest of the nation. Look at all the attention being paid to the people you once cared about, Joe. Look at the spotlight on the job you used to love.That all could have been yours.
That could have been yours if you had stood up to the president when he dragged us into a war with no cause and no solution.
In 2003, Lieberman told me to go screw myself for supporting a candidate who was doing good things. Starting in mid-2004 and 2005, he told the rest of the Democrats who disagreed with Bush's policies on war and torture and warantless wiretapping to go screw themselves. Now he's spent most of 2006 telling Connecticut Democrats to go screw themselves. Gee, wouldn't you know it, they weren't too thrilled with that?
Posted by Dean at August 9, 2006 12:33 AM
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