“If, after all this fuss, the Senate manages not to enact ObamaCare, one man we will have to thank for it is Ned Lamont. He's the liberal-left cable-TV executive who successfully challenged Joe Lieberman, Connecticut's junior senator, in the 2006 Democratic primary. Lieberman, taking advantage of the Nutmeg State's nutty election laws, ran as an independent in the general election and trounced Lamont.
“The Republicans didn't put up a serious candidate for the seat, so that if Lamont had not run, Lieberman would have coasted to re-election as a Democrat--and as a Democrat, he would have felt much greater pressure to back ObamaCare in its original version out of party loyalty. Instead he has emerged as a holdout against some of its worst provisions, and we can credit him with making the Senate bill unacceptable to the likes of Howard Dean (though we shall see if enough "progressives" who actually have seats in Congress are willing to buck the party line in Deanlike fashion).”
Dean, not the best of friends with President Barack Obama’s Chicago coterie in the White House, wants to junk the effort to pass the senate’s rump bill and “go back to the House and start the reconciliation process, where you only need 51 votes [in the Senate].”
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