mummy.gif

Making the trains run on time seems like it's simple enough. Even if they're a few minutes late, they still follow a schedule.

Campaigns are not nearly as neat.

I know many of you have been following the travails of Joe Lieberman, but are still worried he might rise from the dead, like a zombie, and win.  And he might. 

And the Red Sox have better odds of winning the American League East.

Well, not to be too trite, but a well run campaign is set to a tight schedule. You move the candidate around and do much of the thinking for them. You get them from a to b efficiently, if you want to win.

What you don't do is argue about being in parades or any of the nonsense you've read here.

Why is Lieberman's campaign running on fumes?

1) Their attempts to depict Ned Lamont as this horrible person surrounded by left wing crazies failed badly, but Dan Gertstein keeps at it. Lamont's weakness is not that he's Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky with some Henry Wallace mixed in. It's his lack of experience in elective office. But because Lieberman has made his campaign so personal, so bitter, so driven by animus, he cannot see his attacks on Lamont are backfiring.

2) He's not getting any real money. That drop in the polls really hurt, because his candidacy is only viable with a large lead and momentum, not mistake after mistake. People are not going to pay for that. And Hillary Clinton has made it clear that she's blocking support from New York and that means he's not getting much from Wall Street or the insurance industry. Howard Wolfson is good, real good with the local media while Dan Gerstein is a whiner who doesn't get that his campaign is under the microscope. He and his boss pissed off a lot of people with their race baiting and insults and false allegations. If they fart, someone is gonna record the smell. So where is that FBI investigation about the "hacking" of their site.

Right.

3) No ground game.

Forget all the Republican support in the media. They're making michief, not helping his campaign. Ask yourself a simple question. Are GOP activists going to spend their time helping a man whom they can't trust and is on the wrong side of the issues while they spend millions to save Lincoln Chaffee regardless of what their base wants.

Lieberman needs an organization of volunteers to win, one which covers the entire state. But because he has such contempt for the internet, they have no way of organizing one. How is Lieberman going to replace the Democratic Party? Last time, he had to buy an organization. He can't buy street teams in November, they have their own races to work.

Joe Lieberman's run may be fueled by spite, but it has little else going for it.

(Steve Gilliard blogs at The News Blog)