“Ned Lamont is an unlikely vehicle. It’s always unlikely people who turn history. It must be God has a funny sense of humor. In my imagination, I see the meeting in heaven when they say it’s time to really deal with this war: ‘We need a messenger to send to the Democratic Party.’ And an angel says, ‘I got this guy in Connecticut, a real goofy, rich Greenwich, Connecticut, white guy who in Harlem would be like Gomer Pyle. Let’s make him the candidate.I can see everyone falling down laughing. And look where we are this morning. I tell you one thing: I don’t think Joe Lieberman is laughing. No matter how this night ends, he ain’t laughing. They’re gonna have to rethink the whole centrist strategy. Democrats everywhere are going to have to rethink their strategy. It’s just amazing.”
—Reverend Al Sharpton, quoted in “The Kiss of Death”
I think this quote because God has a sense of humor.
The article mentions the Rovian Hambergergate which I read about at the time here.
It is amazing the amount of Tu Quoque that needs to go on internally to rationalize these sort of strategems.
Rethink their “whole centrist strategy”, eh? Obviously the good reverand did not take PS12 and thus does not know about the Median Voter Theorem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_Voter_Theory . I think Lieberman knows this theorem, but just forgot that it must be applied to the people who can actually vote for him.
The Median Voter Theorem only applies to single issue agendas where there are only two parties. There are also a couple other assumptions that go into it.
The Democratic Party tries to play a variant of this on multiple issues known as “triangulation”, this is what Al Sharpton was referring to. The assumption is Clinton won because he “went to the right” on a couple issues. This is what Gray Davis did with the death penalty (obviously afraid of being Willie Horton’d). Etc.
This idea is in decline. Right now there is not an issue I can think of where the Democratic party isn’t closer to the median voter preference than the Republican one. (And lets face it, while Clinton exited as the most popular president in the modern era, he only won (twice) because Ross Perot ran both times.)
The Republican Party actually learned from the parts of PolySci 12 that mattered: given multiple issues and foreknowledge of how people perceive them, you can reach any voting outcome you desire if you can control the agenda. The Republican strategy is to set the agenda through the media and a well-run messaging platform based on repetition. They believe that this message creates the “reality” that the others live in. This is where the infamous, “Reality-based community” quote comes from.
This hold on the agenda setting is running away from them. It has long since spun out of control and they’ve long since relegated to doing it for it’s own sake (maintenance).