The Nation explains [1] that Ned Lamont was successful tonight because he was much more than an anti-war candidate. Lamont continually pointed to the domestic losses caused by the diversion of big money to finance the Iraq occupation:
How did Lamont succeed where others – including 2004 presidential contender and current Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean — failed? Not by simply expressing opposition to the war, nor even by expressing frustration with Lieberman’s refusal to question even the most misguided of Bush administration foreign policies.
Lamont won by doing something most national Democrats have failed to do over the past several election cycles. He put the war in perspective, telling voters that the $250 million a day that is shifted from the U.S. Treasury into a failed fight in Iraq and the deep pockets of defense contractors like Halliburton could be better used to pay for education and health care at home and smart foreign aid programs abroad.
$250 million per day is an enormous amount of money. Imagine injecting that kind of money to dramatically improve the infrastructure of a new American city every day. Tap tap tap! $250M $250M $250M! Imagine working your way across the country allowing hundreds of schools, hospitals, utility improvements, new roads, bridges and mass transit. Job training for the unemployed and the disabled; enough money to hire that extra teacher or two that every school needs. Tax incentives to bring jobs back to America. Hey, mayors of big cities! Raise your hand if your city is not desperate for $250 million, the amount we spend on occupying Iraq each and every day. I don’t see any hands . . .
The availability heuristic makes it hard for Americans to see the great tragedy of spending tax dollars overseas (we’re actually financing our Iraq occupation through massive debt). We have to work harder to see what could have been than to see what is.
If we work at it just a bit, though, we realize that the failure to invest is the moral and economic equivalent of destroying existing American assets and lives [2]. What the President is doing each time he diverts $250M is the equivalent of knocking down and destroying $250M of valuable American assets. Not investing $250M versus destroying $250M worth of existing property–it’s the same result: something isn’t there that should be there. This logic is inescapable unless one believes that the U.S. occupation of Iraq has been a success.
I’m relieved to see that a prominent national candidate has successfully made this connection between the flow of tax dollars to Iraq and the loss of use of those tax dollars back home. In short, Iraq is a domestic issue. I’m crossing my fingers and watching to see if the media will give further traction to this important idea.
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