TAPPED: August 2003 Archives: "Maybe one of Lieberman's high-priced consultants could sit him down and explain to him the fact that the Democrats are already in the political wilderness. And that they got there with him at the helm, as the vice presidential candidate in 2000. Yeah, yeah, we all know that Gore and Lieberman won the popular vote and if weren't for the Supreme Court . . . blah, blah, blah. Tapped sympathizes, really. But the fact of the matter is that you don't lose the game in the final play; that election was Gore and Lieberman's to lose and they lost it. Politically, it's not 1972; it's 1973. But things are actually worse this time around, because Nixon was a relatively liberal Republican and Bush is a conservative radical. Combined with the loss of the House in 1994 and of the Senate in 2000 and 2002, the situation facing the Dems in 2003 is much more dire than it was three decades ago, or even in 1992. No candidate who doesn't get this can win the Democratic nomination. It's not a question of avoiding the wilderness; it's a question of finding someone to lead Democrats out of it. Because they are already in there, and deep.
Posted at 10:55 AM"

GOING DOWN SWINGING. Tapped has long thought that Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) would be a better candidate if he'd stop droning sonorously and just run hard on his own record. So Tapped was intrigued to read over the weekend that Lieberman had decided to become the anti-Dean. Certainly, it's a great role for some candidate to take, especially in a race where everyone is running in ideological drag. After all, Dean is a moderate running as a liberal; Kerry is a liberal running as a moderate; Edwards is a conservative (for a Democrat) running as a moderate; and Lieberman is a moderate running as a conservative

To begin with, there's no evidence that the era of big government is actually over, and saying it doesn't make it so. Even Andrew Sullivan, in this great formulation from his blog, notes that "the difference between Republicans and Democrats right now is not between big and small government. It's between the Democrats' Big, Solvent Government and the Republicans' Big, Insolvent Government."

we are all fiscal conservatives now. The Democratic presidential candidates have been acknowledging this, with wonderment, for several months in their tours through conference rooms full of insiders -- but the transformation has yet to reach the level of conventional wisdom

If The New York Times or The Washington Post had been explicitly partisan papers, for instance, Tapped is convinced neither of President Bush's tax cuts would have passed Congress at the size they did. Debates over the effects of Bush's policies were covered not on empirical grounds but as "he said, she said" arguments. It was a national disgrace.

increasingly discontented libertarians at CATO who are busy blasting Bush for being "the most gratuitous big spender to occupy the White House since Jimmy Carter. One could say that he has become the 'Mother of All Big Spenders.'"