So Lamont beats Lieberman, but not with as wide a margin as the previous week’s polls suggested, and so… what? We’re supposed to think that the defeat of a three-term senator who carried the party’s banner on the national ticket in 2000 is not significant? Is tomorrow morning’s spin going to be, “Hey, Joe caught up to within 3 points! It wasn’t so bad!” Sorry, that won’t wash.
This is a 1968 moment. By which I mean it is a revolt of the people against a Democratic party leadership that hasn’t quite kept up with the depth of anger felt by voters about a terrible war. In 1968 the final outcome was fragmentation of the party followed by national defeat. The defeat that year was helped along by sundry assassinations and other schisms, like the Wallace candidacy. It doesn’t have to happen again this time around.
In order for it not to happen, the Democratic leadership needs to do something simple: accept the verdict of its own voters. In Connecticut, this means that Ned Lamont is now the Democratic candidate. If Joe Lieberman insists on the divine right to senatorship and runs as an independent spoiler, the party ought to shun him; given the closeness of the battle for the Senate, where every seat counts, a third-party run on his part says to the world, “I don’t care who controls the Senate as long as I get my revenge.”
On the wider national stage, the Connecticut results send a simple message to the Democratic leadership: Bush’s deceptively launched and incompetently prosecuted war is a disaster of such colossal proportions — such unconscionable cost in human lives, dollars, and lost opportunities — that it looms over everything this year. The Democrats must unite around a simple platform — throw out the liars, the war profiteers, the fanatics and the idiots who have led us into this mess. Bipartisanship is folly in today’s climate. The other guys don’t play that game. (See Paul Krugman, “Centrism is for Suckers.”)
[tags]Democratic Party, Joe Lieberman, Ned Lamont[/tags]
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Arrrrggghhh… politics! I just can’t understand any bit of it. Only know that it is saddening to see the things happening in Lebanon. What the hell is happening to the world!!
Thank God. Lieberman is a limp yes-man, and I finger his flaccid debate against Cheney in 2000 as a watershed moment in the Gore-Lieberman ticket’s decline.
Adios.
A “1968 moment”? So the Democrats are willing to hand more elections to Republicans by making it clear that centrists are no longer welcome?
Uh… hooray?
1968 started with a rebellion against Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War in New Hampshire. That it ended with defeat had more to do with the assassination of the party’s best candidate and George Wallace’s third-party run than with the repudiation of the Vietnam policy, without which the Democrats would have lost far worse.
As for Lieberman, the problem with him was never that he’s a “centrist”, it’s that he chose to support a war that the voters now overwhelmingly reject, and that he had the bad judgment to tell other members of his party that they should shut up and support the commander in chief rather than provide real opposition to a misbegotten war. I think centrists are still welcome in the Democratic party; what Connecticut Democrats rejected was Lieberman’s inflexible support of the war and his tone of authoritarianism.