I See Dead People

I just had a belly laugh watching Chris Matthews mutter "I see dead people" after showing Joe Lieberman's ridiculous campaign commercial promoting his independent run for the Senate. "There's Joe Lieberman, the guy running for Senate who doesn't know he's already lost."

Matthews usually stakes out the ground where he feels the public will be. His willingness to defend the President and marginalize his critics ("just a bunch of whackos") is troubling, but he clearly knows which way the wind blows. What we're seeing is the change in conventional wisdom. Jon Chait is coming around as well. Clearly all these guys are pretty shaken up by what they saw in Connecticut last week. They can't play their usual games and provide their usual frames. The pundits on the right are still interested in slamming and smearing and calling Ned Lamont Al Qaeda's candidate, but the Gang of 500 has seen the evidence on the ground and has begun to change their tune.

A narrative of inevitability is as important as anything for the Democrats in November in terms of how the news coverage will be discussed. Because the national Dems too often take their cues from the media as opposed to the other way around, a favorable media environment emboldens them more than positive reinforcement from their constituents. As Lieberman loses all his friends in the punditocracy and is made to look ridiculous, the media implicitly and explicitly gives more creedence to those voices outside the Beltway. Politics is still a game to these people, a horse race of process over policy, but Democrats can do little but try to work within that system, at least for now. And at this point, they're winning the game.

This bodes extremely well for Ned Lamont in particular, as the tables have completely turned. Lieberman is now the fringe element, the clown, while Lamont is the reasonable and mainstream. What a difference a week makes.

Of course, ultimately Ned will need the cash to defend himself against the sure-to-be relentless attacks to come. But he won't get the giant brush-off from the media, and that's significant.