What a week...

So at a campaign stop for a CT-Sen candidate yesterday, a group of people supporting the rival candidates aggressively confronted the candidate, loudly asking him leading questions in the presence of the cameras and the other voters at the venue.

Sound familiar? Well, it should. Except this time, Ned Lamont was on the receiving end of the verbal barrage rather than Joe Lieberman.

There are a couple of universal (i.e. applying equally to both sides) observations to be made about this. First off, the First Amendment obviously gives supporters on both sides the right to verbally confront the rival candidate while he's campaigning. Unless they cross the line into harrassment or physical assault, it's legal and - in some ways - healthy for democracy.

But at the same time, it's also pretty damned silly, and is certainly an unwarranted distraction. The purpose of such confrontations is to embarrass the rival candidate or keep him from being able to speak his mind, and is most definitely not to ask the candidate insightful questions on the important issues. It's a grab for attention and an attempt to disrupt.

But the thing that struck me most about all this was the response of the anti-Lieberman camp to this. When Lamont supporters verbally confronted Lieberman, it was called a healthy display of the voters' anger. When the Lieberman campaign did it, they called it "thuggery," "Rovian," and accused the Lieberman supporters of trying to incite violence. They say Lieberman ran away and attempted to hide from the voters, while Lamont "escaped" the "hooligans."

They say one reporter caught an elbow and got a bloody nose, but does anyone here really think that the mainstream media wouldn't pick up on the story if Lieberman supporters got physically violent at a campaign event? Reporters were obviously at the event; if the Lieberman supporters had gotten physically violent, you can bet your life that they would all be rushing to produce a story on it - or at the very least, the reporter who got a bloody nose would make sure a story was printed on it.

I've checked Yahoo News, Google News, the National Journal's Hotline Blog (which picks up on everything), and no one is talking about this encounter outside of the anti-Lieberman blogs. There was one amusing article on the encounter in a small neighborhood paper called the Record-Journal which carried an amusingly tabloid-esque headline and was decidedly sympathetic to Lamont, but even that did not seem to mention anything about the Lieberman supporters engaging in physical violence. The progressive blogosphere's echo chamber is the only place where this can still be heard, and the story appears to have fizzled out even there. I suspect an objective account of what happened will never be printed.

All that being said, I repeat that the use of these "disrupt and harass" tactics by both sides is, shall we say, unproductive. I'm sick of this whole campaign at this point. There's obviously no hope that there will be a substantive discussion of the issues between now and Tuesday. The only two things we've learned from the past few days are that the Lamont camp can dish it out a lot better than they can take it, and that BOTH camps are thin-skinned. This campaign has devolved into fratricide, and regardless of the outcome, it will be a blessing to the Democratic party when it ends.