NP: Pandora

I keep meaning to wade into the Internet morass that is the Connecticut Senate race, but I keep thinking that I'll absorb everything I've read and synthesize it into some sort of masterful treatise on the three-way fight between the left, the right, and the middle. Not gonna happen.

Instead, I should try to keep it simple and bite-sized, so that I can keep up my own Joementum. Kos said today that Senate Minority Reid was "weak" for not burning all bridges with Lieberman. In a nutshell, this is a big part of my problem with the histrionic left. They want no part of Lieberman, period, because everything is us and them now.

Except what happens if Lieberman would actually give you the majority in the Senate if he's still on your side come November? The conventional wisdom isn't necessarily that he's become a Republican, but more that he's become primarily a political opportunist who doesn't want to lose his job. Why alienate him when that political expediency might benefit you in a couple of months?

I'm in a bit of a quandary about this whole situation, because I'm relentlessly centrist, and one way of looking at the Lamont primary victory is a rejection of centrism for polarizing partisanship. But the problem with that interpretation is that the only way to attempt compromise with the current GOP leadership is to walk all the way over to their side to start the conversation, because they have just as much disdain for the middle as this new left, and so Democratic centrists have to go further to the right in order to try to be centrists, at which point they're no longer really centrists. It's just not viable in the current political climate.

Anyway, it seems short-sighted to make Lieberman the enemy of all Democrats right now. To me, anyway. If the left is -- if you'll excuse the dissonance -- right, he'll lose in November anyway and his committee memberships won't matter anyway. If he wins, there's a conspiracy theory floating around that he'll then get a cabinet position and a Republican will get his Senate seat. Which is intriguing on the one hand, but also makes the committee stuff entirely moot.