OPTIMAL OUTCOME:

Longtime Lieberman Aide Has Joe Punching Back in Connecticut Race (Jennifer Siegel, August 18, 2006, The Forward)

In the days before Lieberman lost in the Democratic primary last week, [Dan] Gerstein, age 39, emerged as one of the senator’s most effective defenders. He offered up verbal punches: “‘There’s a small but vocal pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel and perhaps antisemitic faction of the Democratic Party.” [...]

Now, in the aftermath of Lieberman’s bruising primary defeat, Gerstein has been tapped as the communications director for the senator’s independent general election bid — a hire, some insiders say, that likely signals a more hard-hitting strategy.

“No one has ever accused Dan of being a shrinking violet, and I have to think that his aggressive approach is well-suited to what will surely be a closely fought campaign,” former Lieberman spokesman Adam Kovacevich wrote in an email to the Forward. Kovacevich, who worked with Gerstein both in Lieberman’s Senate office and on the 2004 presidential campaign, added that “near the end of the primary campaign you started to see a more aggressive posture on the part of the Lieberman campaign, in terms of confronting criticism head-on, and I think you’ll probably see more of that in the weeks ahead.”

If you were in the Rove Cave drawing it up on a map you could hardly ask for better than the leading Jew in America accusing the Democrats of being an anti-Semitic party.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 17, 2006 4:22 PM