The Blue Voice

Monday, July 10, 2006

Pundits go bananas over the Lieberman primary

The primary challenge in Connecticut in which Ned Lamont is running against Joe Lieberman is causing a surprising amount of consternation among the punditocracy. The Big Pundits are confused by their own postmodern views, I believe. If they don't think about it and talk about it, it must not exist. So when they discovered that lots of people in Connecticut are upset with good ole Joe, who the punditocracy loves because, well, he bashes Democrats all the time, they could scarcely believe what they were seeing. Not only that, but Democrats nationwide are upset with him for being a Bush shill, too!

Of course, the press corps script doesn't tell it that way. The framework into which they are trying to squeeze it is "Eugene McCarthy in New Hampshire in 1968". A one-issue antiwar challenge. I heard Cokie Roberts on NPR this morning reciting the script.

Here in the reality-based community, the Iraq War and Lieberman's faithful support of Bush's policies on it is a big issue, as much as that might offend the tender sensibilities of the Big Pundits. But Hillary Clinton's and Joe Biden's positions on the Iraq War have been pretty much as bad as Lieberman's. I'm a big admirer of Wesley Clark, myself, but even his criticism of the war leaves something to be desired.

Yet grassroots Democrats aren't ready to write them out of the party. Because, unlike Lieberman, they don't concentrate on bashing Democrats every chance they get. There's a time and a place for everything, and the 2008 Presidential primaries will give the Dems plenty of chances for us to bash each other. What Lieberman has been doing is not only playing kissy-face with Bush and the Republicans on the Iraq War, women's rights and Social Security phase-out, he's used the high profile he got from being Al Gore's winning Vice-Presidential candidate in the 2000 election to go on national talk-shows and recite Republican talking points against the Democrats time and time again.

Steve Gilliard keeps emphasizing at his blog that Lieberman has a bad reputation on constituent service, which he believes has made the difference between the Lamont campaign becoming a serious threat to Lieberman's Senate seat rather than just a protest candidacy.

This is a typical piece of corporate Democratic thinking: No Conservative: Lieberman's A JFK Democrat by Marshall Wittmann and Steven Nider Hartford Courant 07/02/06. Both Wittmann and Nider are with the Democratic Leadership Council (DNC).

Their spiel argues:

Since the Vietnam war, liberalism has shifted leftward [whatever that means!], particularly on the use of force and on the social issues that emerged in the 1970s. Today, we are confronted by another totalitarian foe, in the form of radical jihadism, and there is a need for progressive leadership that can forcefully defend America and our values.

Joe Lieberman, more than any other national Democrat, represents the JFK tradition in the national Democratic Party.

It strikes me in seeing the arguments over the Lamont challenge to Lieberman how stuck both the punditocracy and the Republicans are in the language of Nixon's Presidency, both in their rhetoric on the war and on race-related issues, primarily immigration right now. Nixon's "Southern strategy" has become the total strategy of today's Republican Party.

Wittmann and Nider write:

That tradition is now being challenged by the left in the Democratic party. Driven by a motley coalition of left-wing bloggers and the MoveOn.org crowd, a serious primary challenge has been launched against Lieberman. However, if Lieberman is defeated, a disastrous message would be sent to the nation that centrist hawks are unwelcome in the Democratic Party. ...

However, he rejects the leftist pose that the loyal opposition must be motivated by rage toward the president during wartime. His unwavering support for the war in Iraq has made him unpopular with some in the base of the party and inspired angry calls for his ouster.

Got that? Democrats who oppose the Bush policies on the Iraq War, like a solid majority of the country in various polls, are a bunch of angry "leftists". Oh, and they're "motley". The only safe posture for Democrats, according to those allegedly "centrist" hawks, would be for Democrats to join Lieberman in supporting the Republicans' "More Of The Same" approach to the Iraq War. Of course, the reason Lieberman and the Republicans take that approach is that don't have a [Cheney]ing clue about how to get out of this war.

Over the past 30 years, many of the JFK Democrats and their children have gravitated away from the Democratic Party. It is likely that they became alienated from the party of their ancestors because they perceived it as weak on national security and not representing their values. And they will not consider returning to the donkey because far too many Democrats view George W. Bush as a greater threat to the nation than Osama bin Laden. (my emphasis)

That's the difference between hardcore DLCers and Republicans: Republicans openly accuse the Dems of aiding and abetting The Terrorists, the DLCers use "only" sleazy innuendo to say that Democrats love The Terrorists.

Jonathan Chait in the Los Angeles Times joins in to sing in harmony with the "press corps" script: Purely foolish Democrats: Sen. Joe Lieberman's irritating, but his enemies in the party are worse 07/09/06. This article, read in conjunction with the Wittman/Nider column, is a good illustration of why much of the public has strange ideas about what liberals stand for. Because people like Chait or Joe Klein are taken as representing liberal opinion. To paraphrase an old saying, "With liberals like these, who needs conservatives?"

Chait quotes the sleazy Bin Laden line from Wittman and Nider - and agrees with it! His argument is so dumb I'm not even going to quote it here; check it out at the link. This is what you would expect from an 18-year-old working on their first campaign. Someone challenges them with, "Democrats practice witchcraft and kill babies." And the new person scrambles for an immediate response and starts arguing, "Well, witchcraft is a perfectly valid belief system, maybe better than Christianity, and killing babies is sometimes necessary."

It's understandable that a novice might get baited into giving credibility to the arguments of the opposition part that way. But where in the name of Apollo the far-shooter do newspapers come up with Big Pundits like Chait to portray Republicans characatures of Democrats and liberals?

Chait, having given a goofy cartoon "defense" of the anti-Lieberman Democratic position, proceeds to trash those motley leftist terrorist-loving witches and harpies of the Democratic base that Wittman and Nider warned us about. This is what is called "balance" by our "press corps". He writes:

Their technique of victory-via-purge is on display in Connecticut. Although Lamont decided on his own to run, the left bloggers made his campaign their central cause. One result is that Lieberman has announced his intention to run an independent candidacy should he lose the primary. Moulitsas and other Lamont supporters are filled with outrage that Lieberman has opened up the possibility of splitting the liberal vote and letting a Republican win.

Well, OK, some anger is appropriate here. But doesn't this suggest that the whole Lamont crusade has sort of backfired? Although I'm no Karl Rove, it seems to me that turning a rock-solid Democratic seat into a potential Republican pickup represents something less than a political masterstroke.

The whole anti-Lieberman blog campaign has a self-fulfilling quality: They charge that Lieberman isn't a Democrat, they drive him from the party, and they declare themselves to be correct. The more ex-Democrats they create, the more sure of their own virtue they become.

Maybe I'm missing something basic here. Maybe there's some sort of secret requirement that to become a Big Pundit, you have to spend two years writing comic books marketed to 8-year-olds. That would explain a lot about the fantastic constructions they sometimes come up with, as Chait does here.

It's quite a scam. First, raise Cain about any Democrats who dare to differ from the policies of Dear Leader Bush and his Republican Party. Then, when the Democrats do badly in the fall elections, then you complain, "Of course the Democrats did badly. They weren't able to distinguish themselves from the Republicans!"

If this Nixon-era-retro thing keeps up, before you know it Wittmann and Nider and Chait and David "Bobo" Brooks and the rest will be talking about long-haried hippies who riot in the streets and smell bad because they don't use soap (a Spiro Agnew special). How about a "silent majority" that, umm, maybe not that, since a majority is opposing Bush's war policies. And not all of us are doing it entirely silently.

Those two columns together make a beautiful illustration of Ron Suskind's quote from peace activist William Sloane Coffin from October of 2005: "I never thought I'd live to see the day when old-fashioned journalism would be a form of civil disobedience".

For extra entertainment, check out Bobo's take on the Connecticut primary linked just above:

Well, he has made life difficult, especially for Hillary Clinton, because, in my conversations - we're talking about the netroots, who are the real problems for Lieberman, the people generated by the Daily Kos and the other Web sites, I find, privately, most of the Democrats despise those people, because of the way they practice politics so viciously.

But they don't want to get in the crosshairs. And they don't want to offend the liberal base of primary voters. So, they want to support Joe Lieberman, but they don't want to get in the crosshairs.

So, a few have come out, Barbara Boxer, Joe Biden, a couple others, have come out strongly for him. Others, Hillary Clinton has sort of been on both sides. Others just won't commit.

posted at 12:44:00 PM by Bruce Miller

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