Fighting For Your Life

by digby

Ezra has an original take on the blogosphere’s role in the Connecticut race:

The phase of this race bearing significant implications for the Democratic Party already happened, and whether Lamont wins or loses tomorrow is almost entirely immaterial to the political triumph of the netroots. Their scalp was claimed, mounted, and hung on July 7th, the day Joe Lieberman, an affable, popular incumbent who’d been his party’s celebrated vice-presidential candidate only six years earlier, was forced to mount a stage against some nobody named Ned Lamont and defensively debate his right to call himself a Democrat. Or maybe the seminal instant occurred four days earlier, on July 3rd, when Lieberman admitted that he would gather signatures to enable an independent run, a sign he feared defeat in the primary. Either way, the point is the same: The netroots won the moment Joe Lieberman felt fear.

With the netroots having proved they can generate an existential challenge to a safe-seeming incumbent, actually defeating Lieberman would be little beyond icing on the cake. Moving forward, a Lieberman victory would do nothing to blur the traumatic memory of his near-loss. And that gives the netroots an extraordinary amount of power, vaulting them into a rarified realm occupied by only the strongest interest groups.

Now the netroots will join that category. But, as evidenced by their choice of target — Dianne Feinstein and Herb Kohl, while war supporters, face no primary challenges — they will demand something altogether different. Rather than requiring submission to a certain set of policy initiatives, they’ll demand unity in certain moments of partisan showdown. What so rankled about Lieberman was his willingness to abandon ship when steady hands were most necessary — he was always the first to compromise on judicial nominees, or flirt with Social Security privatization, or scold critics of the Iraq War. His current plight is evidence that such opportunistic betrayals will not, in the future, go unpunished. On July 7th, being the Democrat who criticizes Democrats ceased being safe.

I think one of the things that few observers recognize is the lesson many of us took when the Democrats stuck together on the social security debate (no thanks to Joe Lieberman.) They shut down the Karl Rove juggernaut in no uncertain terms simply by hanging together and not allowing the GOP to claim any kind of bipartisan cover. It’s the most successful thing the Democrats did during the Bush administration and the netroots pressure of both the blogosphere and groups like Move-on were instrumental. It gave us hope that these people could be defeated if we stuck together.

Party unity does not mean orthodoxy. It is simply a recognition that when you are dealing with the modern Republican Party it is almost always a zero sum game. That’s how they see politics. If that’s going to change it’s going to have to come from them. They are the ones who have institutionalized excessive partisanship and they are going to have to wring it out of their political culture before they can be trusted to keep their word.

Dealing with these fanatical people (and the bizarre inability of the press to properly report it) has undoubtedly been difficult:

The party’s skittishness, Mike Tomasky has argued, was analogous to the legendary “learned helplessness” experiments where dogs “were administered electrical shocks from which they could escape, but from which, after a while, they didn’t even try to, instead crouching in the corner in resignation and fear.” The media, the pollsters, the consultants, and, occasionally, the voters seemed to punish the very act of being a Democrat, just as the researchers had turned on the shocks for the very act of being a dog. The result was a Democratic Party filled with cowering corner-dwellers.

The netroots have deployed Pavlov’s principles in the opposite direction. Call it learned aggressiveness — they’ve rewarded Democratic backbone (Howard Dean, Ned Lamont) and attacked its absence (Henry Cuellar, Joe Lieberman). And just as the researchers didn’t need to kill the dogs to teach the lesson, neither do the netroots need to defeat Joe Lieberman to make their point. The only question for tomorrow is whether the voters of Connecticut feel differently.

I would say that aggressiveness is what naturally happens to normal people when they realize they are fighting for their lives. At some point, the shocks became lethal — I suspect it was the 2000 election, although others may differ. But in 2006, it is a matter of life and death for the Democratic party to fight back. The other side is ruthless and dishonorable and they want to reduce the Democratic party to a symbolic opposition for them to run against and rail against while ensuring they have no real influence on politics. They have been remarkably successful at this considering they have never had even close to a national mandate. They are now in the inevitable process of blaming their failures on us. We aren’t going to let it happen this time.

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