The dean of Washington Columnists, David Broder, has just filed his dispatch from the war-torn state of Connecticut. The most revealing quote:
One woman, Karen Schuessler of Ridgefield, told me she had bought an expensive ticket to a Lieberman fundraiser last December so she could tell him directly how much she opposed the war. “He told me, ‘Things are looking better over there. They’re voting. They have a constitution.’ I thought, ‘What a moron!’ The next month, I went to the first dump-Lieberman meeting.”
Now for a bit of disingenuousness:
State Rep. Denise Merrill of Storrs, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said she regards Lieberman as a mentor and “I feel a terrible tug” in working to defeat him. Her leaders in the legislature are angry with her. But, she said, “I know as a legislator, there’s sometimes a conflict between your personal convictions and the strong wishes of your constituents. Joe thinks he is sticking to his convictions on the war. But on an issue important as this, you have to respect what your constituents are saying. You can’t ignore them.”
Really? Would Rep. Merrill make the same pronouncement, and reach the same conclusion, about an anti-war Senator (think McGovern) who stood by his principles, thus defying the preferences of his constitutents? Or an anti-segregationist Southern liberal who refused to kowtow to the racism of his constitutents? I doubt it.
Recently I asked:
Do the Dems who support Lamont and want to purge Lieberman also want to purge from the party all the Dems who support Lieberman? Or do they want to retain those voters but simply make sure they have no candidates to vote for?
Broder seems to have the same concern:
The people backing Lamont are nothing if not sincere. But their breed of Democrats — many of them wealthy, educated, extremely liberal — often pick candidates who are rejected by the broader public. Many of the older Lamont supporters went straight from Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern in the 1960s and ’70s to Howard Dean in 2004. They helped Joe Duffey challenge Sen. Tom Dodd in Connecticut for the 1970 Democratic nomination on the Vietnam War issue, only to lose to Republican Lowell Weicker in November. Lamont’s campaign manager, Tom Swan, is also director of Connecticut Citizen Action Group, a populist organization founded in the 1970s by Toby Moffett, a Ralph Nader protege and anti-Vietnam activist who was one of the “Watergate babies” elected to the House in 1974. Moffett’s political career also was ended by a loss to Weicker, who stayed in the Senate until Lieberman finally beat him in 1988.
Democrats everywhere are looking to Connecticut for clues about the party’s direction. The primary will probably point them leftward, toward a stronger antiwar stand. But often in the past, the early successes of these elitist insurgents have been followed by decisive defeats when a broader public weighs in. That is why this contest is so consequential for the Democratic Party.
Of course, one of the ways that the “broader public” gets broader is when partisans push unwanted voters out of their party.
“Merrill make the same pronouncement, and reach the same conclusion, about an anti-war Senator (think McGovern) who stood by his principles, thus defying the preferences of his constitutents?”
Interestingly, Lieberman came to office opposing the War in vietnam. He may have ‘convictions’ but they’re wrong and they don’t represent Connecticut democrats. Probably even connecticut in general.
But that don’t stop the right wing and washington insiders from rallying for him. Democracy is to be feared, it seems. Thats why losing an election has to be argued as a “purge.” Because normal people see it as a feature, not a bug, of our process that politicians are elected and have no right to rule.
But, according to Actus, this is the party responding to its constituents. I mean, just because they are unelectable doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be on the ballot, right?
“But, according to Actus, this is the party responding to its constituents. ”
Well, its the method by which it happens. Do you have a better method other than primaries?
actus has vociferously disagreed, here and on previous posts, with my point that the lefty Dems want to “purge” not only Lieberman but Democratic voters who agree with him. Oddly (or maybe not so odd, since my point is merely descriptive), even liberal commentators agree. Thus E.J. Dionne describes in the Wash. Post today what the Republicans did when they ran conservatives against incumbent liberal and moderate Senate incumbents (Javits, Case, and Kuchel) as the “cleansing of progressives from Republican ranks….” I doubt that he would have changed his mind if he had read actus’s comments here first.
I used to think it would be a Good Thing for the two parties to be more ideological, and hence more internally consistent, than they then were. Now that we pretty much have that, I’m not so sure. The movement of Reagan Democrats and Henry Jackson hawkish Democrats to the Republicans has been mirrored by the movement of rich, well-educated, socially liberal suburbanites and both isolationist and “world opinion” Republicans to the Democrats. With that in mind, purging Lieberman and Liebermanites would represent no great change.
“actus has vociferously disagreed, here and on previous posts, with my point that the lefty Dems want to “purge” not only Lieberman but Democratic voters who agree with him.”
Oh. I agree that people want to get rid of lieberman. I don’t agree that people wish that lieberman voters would go away. I think they want them to vote for their candidate, not lieberman.
To wit: IIRC, Lamont has pledged to back the winner of hte primary, to support the lieberman and lamont voters who picked the primary winner. Lieberman has not made that pledge — in fact he’s working against that.