[Heh. I'm posting about the same TAPPED entry as J. Oh well!]

Senator Lieberman's National Press Club speech yesterday had a couple of interesting soundbite-ready nuggets.

One is his boxing metaphor - "I'm in training", "a left hook won't work", "the main event", etc.This rings as phony to me as Al Gore yelling "I will fight for you!" when Bill Bradley was challenging him in the 2000 primaries. If you have to make a big deal about how you're "a fighter", guess what: you just sound sad. If you were really a fighter, you wouldn't need to say it; it would be clear from everything else you do, and then other people will say it about you without prompting.

Then there's the assertion that "[other candidates are] threatening to take us back into the political wilderness". TAPPED articulates the rebuttal we've been snapping at Lieberman's talking head:

TAPPED: Wild Thing

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... 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.

We're still independents, but when one party has all the reins of federal power and is doing a poor job at, well, everything, you can't help but root for the opposition to get its act together as the first step in improving things.

That Lieberman does not understand the situation on the ground makes him a dangerous choice; nominating him will doom the party to further years of electoral irrelevance.