OD'd on Nedrenaline

Connecticut's anti-war, anti-Lieberman Senate candidate Ned Lamont is going to spend some of his time today doing what every politician does to boost his career: appearing on the Colbert Report. This comes as "Scarce," a videoblogger who had been compiling video of the Lamont campaign for YouTube—a significant component in Lamont's ability to build buzz—posts a 150-second music video of about the way total awesomeness of the campaign.

Question: Why do these insurgent liberal campaigns always end up wasting their time on this stuff? Remember that the Howard Dean, in the crucial last month before the Iowa Caucus, also had a campaign apparatus that was developing cool, hype-worthy tools (a MySpace-style Dean voter-to-Dean voter meeting place) and blowing a not insignificant amount of time doing it. Lamont's Colbert jaunt and Scarce's distraction (to be fair, Scarce isn't actually working for the campaign) come from the same playbook. Joe Trippi, who groused about the way the Dean campaign lost its footing before Iowa, pointed out that his effort turned attention from the candidate (aren't I special?) to the volunteers (aren't you special? Although Trippi consdidered this basically a good thing.). So, are these hot blogger-boosted campaigns cursed to get distracted and self-congratulating at the 11th hour? Or does twice not make a trend?

UPDATE: The Connecticut excitement continues. In Joe's corner, Joe Biden. In Ned's corner, Al Sharpton. Only one of them can lose!