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After the Future

Lieberman’s Loss

Lamont’s victory isn’t just a win for the antiwar wing of the party. It’s a victory for Americans who fear the recklessness of the Bush administration, who feel the wheels…

Lamont’s victory isn’t just a win for the antiwar wing of the party. It’s a victory for Americans who fear the recklessness of the Bush administration, who feel the wheels are falling off the truck, and who want Democrats to fix it. Mainstream Democrats who can’t see that political reality are a threat to the party. The demonizing of Lamont voters and their lefty blogger-backers by some Beltway voices, including Beltway Democrats – based mainly on the words of anonymous posters in comments threads, by the way, Lanny Davis – is far worse for Democratic prospects than the random excesses of the antiwar left. Imagine a GOP in which Karl Rove penned op-eds in the New York Times savaging the Christian right. The notion that Lamont supporters are somehow “destroying the center” or killing bipartisanism is fiction; Bush did that. Lieberman is suffering the consequences.  Joan Walsh at Salon

I don’t know that there is more worth saying than that.  I’m glad Lieberman lost, but it will be a Pyrrhic victory for Lamont tonight if he loses in November.  What matters most to me is working toward taking the majorities away from the GOP in both houses.

Comments

One response

  1. Matt Zemek Avatar
    Matt Zemek

    Jack,
    Both elements–the sniping at the Left from the DNC centrist core, AND the excesses of the anti-war Left itself–are bad for Democrats.
    What’s being missed in this whole discussion is that Lieberman–as much as I might disagree with him on the Iraq war (I would have preferred Lamont myself)–was a well-above- average US Senator, and an example of what a good Senator should be: civil, thoughtful, beyond easy categorization, not a firebrand, possessing considerable leverage and enjoying much respect. The very things that made him a terrible presidential candidate made him a great Senator.
    More to the point, Lieberman has always been the same kind of man. It’s not as though he was an overly cautious Democrat in the wake of the Iraq War–that would apply to people with more liberal credentials (Kerry, Hillary and many others) who, out of pure cowardice, went along with the crowd. Lieberman had a long-established track record as a foreign policy hawk that preceded the Iraq War. He (Lieberman) was and is a rare political creature with a rather airtight consistency, even purity. Yet, Lamont activists made him out to be a sellout. It shows how little political sophistication the Left has; why Hillary isn’t paying the same political price offers even more proof of the same.
    The extreme left–whom I agree with in terms of policy positions and issue stances–is still displaying the tone-deafness that will lead it to ruin.

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