Reply #2: ...

[Julien Sorel]

The lesson everyone should take from that election is that a centrist candidate will beat a center-left candidate, even in a blue state like Connecticut. There wasn't a dime's worth of difference between Lamont and Lieberman on any issue besides the war -- but that was enough to make Lieberman the more centrist of the two candidates to the voters. Heartbreak aside, it's unfortunate that people here aren't seeing the plain lesson that this election has to teach. Lieberman won, not because of "experience," but because ideologically he was viewed as being closer to where the average Connecticut (as opposed to Democratic) voter was. It's the sort of thing that people can't articulate well, so they use words like "experience" and so on to communicate something that's actually a little more primal.

Q: Why didn't Chafee's "experience" save him?