It feels great to win one and I’m very enthusiastic about the fall. But let’s keep one thing in mind: the Republicans aren’t Joe Lieberman even if Joe Lieberman is a Republican. They run really good campaigns. Indeed, it’s the only thing they do well. It is not going to be easy.
As for Joe, it looks like he might be getting some of that very special help:
Can Karl help Joe?
According to a close Lieberman adviser, the President’s political guru, Karl Rove, has reached out to the Lieberman camp with a message straight from the Oval Office: “The boss wants to help. Whatever we can do, we will do.”
But in a year where even some Republican candidates are running away from the President on the campaign trail, does this offer have any value to Lieberman? Still smarting from all that coverage of “the kiss” at last year’s State of the Union, the Lieberman camp isn’t looking for an explicit endorsement. That could create more problems than it solves.
The White House might help Lieberman by putting the kibosh on any move to replace the weak Republican candidate, Alan Schlesinger, with a stronger candidate.
And it might be able to convince Schlesinger to drop out of the race and endorse Lieberman in the final week or two, when it’s too late for another candidate to fill the GOP slot. A quiet White House effort to steer some money in Lieberman’s direction is another possibility.
This is a tricky dance for Lieberman. He needs to figure out a way to get the benefits of Bush support — some votes from loyal Republicans — without turning off the independents and moderate Democrats he needs to win. The safest course may be a polite “thanks but no thanks” to the White House offer.
I think it’s quite likely that Joe will publicly “reject” this “offer” as a way to prove his independent bonafides. But as far as I’m concerned, as long as Joe Lieberman remains in the race he is doing Karl Rove’s bidding anyway.
I also wouldn’t be surprised to see the Republicans try to help get Joe elected, either as a Republican outright or as an independent who will caucus with them. I don’t know how far gone Lieberman actually is but I think it’s at least possible he’d think about it. Last night he was more defiant than I’ve ever seen him. (Where, oh where was all that energy in 2000, I wonder? Of course, Joe kept his senate seat as a back-up so maybe he didn’t feel quite so passionately about fighting to the bitter end and he does now.)
But Lieberman is actually old news whatever he does from here on in. He’s left the Party and in a two party system that really means he’s jumped. As of today we are no longer waging a painful civil war, brother against brother. We are once again fighting the Republican Borg. Get ready for swift boating and race baiting and charges of being traitors and crazed, smelly “piewagons.” We’re back to dealing with the ruthless, feral GOP again. And they are dangerous, wounded beasts…
Congratulations to Ned Lamont. And let’s not forget: Every sentence written and read about Lieberman’s general election challenge is a distraction from the real issue
A U.S. Army helicopter crashed in Iraq’s western Anbar province, leaving two crew members missing and four injured, while hundreds of Iraqi and U.S. troops poured into the capital in a desperate bid to stem sectarian violence that is threatening to ignite a civil war.
In Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, four people were killed and 16 wounded in a U.S. airstrike late Tuesday, police said. There was no immediate comment from U.S. officials, but a mosque and nearby houses in the city were heavily damaged in the blast.
Four U.S. service members were injured when the UH60 Blackhawk helicopter crashed Tuesday with six people on board during a routine flight to survey the area, the U.S. command said in a statement Wednesday. The four injured troops were in stable condition, and it did not appear the crash was due to hostile fire, the U.S. said.
Of course not. It was just an accident. Who would be cynical enough to suggest the Pentagon would classify a shoot-down as an accident in order to keep the combat deaths stats artificially low? Not me.
A series of bombings and shootings killed at least 33 people Tuesday, most in the Baghdad area, as more American soldiers patrolled the streets of the capital in a make-or-break bid to quell sectarian violence.
Nearly 60 people were wounded in the blasts, police said. The explosions began when three bombs went off simultaneously near the Interior Ministry in central Baghdad, killing 10 people and wounding eight, police Lt. Bilal Ali Majid said.
Two more bombs ripped through the main Shurja market, also in central Baghdad, killing 10 more civilians and wounding 50, police Lt. Mohammed Kheyoun said.
At least 13 other people were killed or found dead Tuesday, most in the Baghdad area, where tension between Sunnis and Shiites runs the highest.
The violence underscores the security crisis facing Baghdad, which prompted American commanders to send more U.S. soldiers to the capital in a renewed bid to curb sectarian killings and kidnappings.
“Sectarian killings and kidnappings” is just Newspeak for “civil war,” of course.
Well, you can’t fault Iraq for disobeying Crawford’s Own Churchill. As His Eminence commanded, they’re bringing it on. Big time.
Following up: A senior Republican official in Washington confirms that the party might encourage Republicans and others to support Sen. Lieberman if he runs as an independent. There’s no sense, just yet, about what those signs and signals might look like. Says the GOP official: “I just think there will be folks who want to support – regardless of what we think. And, we don’t think that’s a bad thing.” And Kevin F. Rennie reports that some GOPers in CT are thinking about ways to financially support Lieberman’s independent bid…
Fine with me. Take Marty Peretz and Lanny Davis with you, Joe.
I’m kind of excited about taking on the Republicans, aren’t you? Bring it on.
84% 87% of precincts reporting, Lamont ahead 52-48. Keep tabs if you wish at tigre’s place. Her first link does the job. Lieberman’s fate should be known about ninety minutes from now, if not sooner.(Note: FDL seems to be down; I’m sure Jane’s corner of the ever-expanding blog Universe came to visit her all at once.)UPDATE: Turn out the lights, the party’s over!
“Who Fucking Cares?” by poputonian “Who fucking cares?” better describes the President, because “What, me worry?” is just too playful and harmless.Froomkin today:
A vacationing President Bush briefly suited up and faced the media hordes yesterday morning to outline his administration’s vision for an eventual cessation of hostilities in Lebanon. Then he high-tailed it back to his sprawling country home, leaving Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to do the heavy lifting.
Bush was generous with the familiar talking points (see yesterday’s column ), but didn’t exactly give the impression of someone who feels any sense of personal urgency to stop the killing.
A few weeks ago I wrote about the Bush administration’s foreign policy of culture conquest. This passage from Norman Mailer’s Why Are We At War? threads nicely with that notion, but says it much more eloquently than I did, and perhaps even allows for some benefit of the doubt with regard to the administration’s intent. Mailer delivered these comments in a speech to The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, just days before the Bush Tribe launched its invasion of Iraq.
Because democracy is noble, it is always endangered. Nobility, indeed, is always in danger. Democracy is perishable. I think the natural government for most people, given the uglier depths of human nature, is fascism. Fascism is more of a natural state than democracy. To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home and abroad. Democracy is a state of grace attained only by those countries that have a host of individuals not only ready to enjoy freedom but to undergo the heavy labor of maintaining it.
The need for powerful theory can fall into many an abyss of error. One could, for example, be wrong about the unspoken motives of the administration. Perhaps they are not interested in Empire so much as trying in good faith to save the world. We can be certain at least that Bush and his Bushites believe this. By the time they are in church each Sunday, they believe it so powerfully, tears come to their eyes. Of course, it is the actions of men and not their sentiments that make history. Our sentiments can be flooded with love within, but our actions can produce the opposite. Perversity is always looking to consort with the best motives in human nature.
David Frum, who was a speechwriter for Bush (he coined the phrase “axis of evil”), recounts in The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush what happened at a meeting in the Oval Office last September [2002]. The President, when talking to a group of reverends from the major denominations, told them,
You know, I had a drinking problem. Right now, I should be in a bar in Texas, not the Oval Office. There is only one reason that I am in the Oval Office and not in a bar: I found faith. I found God. I am here because of the power of prayer.
That is a dangerous remark. As Kierkegaard was the first to suggest, we can never know where our prayers are likely to go nor from whom the answers will come. When we think we are nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.
“Our war with terror,” says Bush, “begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end … until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.” But, asks Eric Alterman in The Nation, what if America ends up alienating the whole world in the process?
Mailer continues with the money quote from Bush and notes the very special conservative tool who vouched for its accuracy:
“At some point, we may be the only ones left,” Bush told his closest advisers, according to an administration member who leaked the story to Bob Woodward. “That’s okay with me. We are American.”
Yeah, who fucking cares? We’re Americans. May the best men win. Heh-heh-heh-heh … Now, watch me bike!
Lanny Davis, the latest “Democrat” to take to op-ed swamp of the Wall Street Journal quotes a handful of obscure anti-semitic blog commenters and indicts the whole blogosphere for McCarthyism. Par for the course. But this is beyond ironic:
A friend of mine just returned from Connecticut, where he had spoken on several occasions on behalf of Joe Lieberman. He happens to be a liberal antiwar Democrat, just as I am. He is also a lawyer. He told me that within a day of a Lamont event–where he asked the candidate some critical questions–some of his clients were blitzed with emails attacking him and threatening boycotts of their products if they did not drop him as their attorney. He has actually decided not to return to Connecticut for the primary today; he is fearful for his physical safety.
First of all, poor little Richard Goodstein (who this obviously is) has no reason to be in fear for his physical safety but I guess portraying him on the pages of the macho WSJ editorial page as a whimpering little baby is something his friend thought was useful. Hey, if Dick doesn’t mind, then I guess I shouldn’t. But really, he should be a man and go back to Connecticut. Republicans are laughing at him.
But that’s not what’s astonishing about this piece. It’s that Richard Goodstein came to the attention of journalists and observers in Connecticut during the Ted’s Burger joint stunt where a bunch of Lieberman supporters ambushed Lamont in a small restaurant. What made Goodstein stand out was that he was screaming “Are you a Sharpton Democrat or a Clinton Democrat” over and over again. That’s called race baiting, folks.
But he wasn’t alone. This was a campaign talking point.Lieberman himself said it. You have rich white guys from Washington in white Connecticut neighborhoods saying there’s a difference between an “Al Sharpton Democrat and a Bill Clinton Democrat” and demanding to know which side Lamont was on. There’s only one reason to use Sharpton rather than, say — Michael Moore, and we know what that is, don’t we? (Lamont, to his credit, said “I’m both.”)
This was cheap racial politics especially after Lieberman played such a martyr over the blackface graphic that called him out for being two-faced on race — a fact which he then had his pal Richard Goodstein go out and demonstrate with no sense of self-awareness at all.
The blogs later found out that Goodstein was a DC lobbyist, but they weren’t the ones who made him famous. It was the local press who happened to be at the event and quoted Goodstein on the front page the next morning.
“It was supposed to be a laid-back event and (they) ruined it.” “We’re just using our right. We’re just exercising our rights to enjoy a burger,” said Lieberman supporter Alex Hoffman of Boston. Supporters of each candidate debated outside on the sidewalk while many Lieberman supporters continued to badger Lamont, who acknowledged most questions. Richard Goodstein, one of the most vocal Lieberman supporters, repeatedly shouted, “Are you a Bill Clinton Democrat or an Al Sharpton Democrat?” Lamont calmly said he supported both.
This particular line seemed to be Goodstein’s specialty, since he showed up at a rally the next day with a sign that said “Lieberman = Clinton, Lamont Weicker = Sharpton.” He was taped giving an interview to the local press in which he said “Lieberman has the support of Bill Clinton who speaks for inclusion and Ned Lamont has the support of Al Sharpton who speaks for divisiveness.”
You’ll notice there was not a bit of irony in his voice, by the way. Nor did it seem to occur to him that Joe’s black constituents might just find such a statement a tad provocative since it was given to an all white crowd. It would seem that at this point, Lieberman either must have given up the african american vote or he assumed that no black person would see this white middle aged jerk publicly dissing Sharpton like he was Willie Horton. Either way, the man was playing a low-down game.
As for Lanny, well, nobody takes him seriously. He was the single most inept Clinton defender ever. When he would show up on Fox or MSNBC back in the Lewinsky days I would cringe knowing that whatever blond former prosecutor harpy they had on would rip him to shreds. (I swear, he must have uttered the words “deplorable” and “reprehensible” at least 15,000 times.) I knew they hired him for just that purpose and I have heard that there is no love lost between him and the Clintonistas, which doesn’t surprise me. He’s still at it. In the course of his usual ineffectual non-defense he’s managed to make both his friends Joe and Dick look like hanky wringing losers which is fine by me.
And, make no mistake, Lanny Davis is a Bush fan, just like Joe. He’s a frat brother who, just days after the recount was settled, wrote an opportunistic brown nosing op-ed in the NY Times attesting to Bush’s good character. (Talk about rubbing salt in the wound. I’ll never forgive him for that.)
I, for one, am thrilled to finally have him pitching for a different team than mine. I hope the WSJ gives him a regular spot in the rotation. He only hurts the ball club.
I know the chatterers are all atwitter at the prospect of Democratic voters “purging” a Senator who doesn’t represent their views by voting against him in an election. Many seem particularly upset at what they perceive as a doctrinaire leftist demand for ideological purity and a rigid view about the Iraq war.
The Heritage Foundation has never been known as an intellectually adventurous place. For decades, its policy briefs and studies have closely tracked Republican talking points. So did the opinions of the think tank’s senior foreign policy analyst, John Hulsman. In his Washington Times op-eds and Fox News appearances, he cheerfully whacked Howard Dean, John Kerry, the French, and other enemies of the cause.
But all these years of fidelity to the conservative cause couldn’t spare Hulsman from suffering the wrath of his comrades. On July 7, his boss, Kim Holmes, sent a note to the Heritage staff wishing Hulsman “the very best in his continuing career.” No one at Heritage was fooled by Holmes’s euphemistic send-off–least of all Hulsman. “After getting fired,” he says, “I was a walking corpse.”
Following Holmes’s lead, the official line from Heritage is that Hulsman left his $90,000-a-year job of his own volition. Indeed, two Heritage spokespeople initially denied to me that Hulsman was shown the door. When I pressed them, both then told me that the think tank doesn’t discuss its “human resources policies.” The reasons for Hulsman’s departure, however, are perfectly evident. “At Heritage,” says Chris Preble of the Cato Institute, “anything that smacks of criticism of Bush will not be tolerated.” And, as the Iraq war faltered, Hulsman grew increasingly bold in criticizing the administration’s foreign policy in essays and conversations with reporters. In September, he will co-publish a book with the New American Foundation’s Anatol Lieven titled Ethical Realism, a scathing indictment of the neoconservative worldview. With his firing, Hulsman joins Bruce Bartlett, the economist who was dismissed from a right-wing think tank for his criticisms of Bush, in the ranks of the conservative purged.
And in the coming months, their ranks will likely grow even larger. Conservative recriminations over Iraq are igniting all across Washington, with opponents of the war loudly assaulting its leading champions (see Francis Fukuyama v. Charles Krauthammer and George Will v. William Kristol.) But what the Hulsman incident reveals is that the war’s supporters aren’t about to passively absorb criticism and issue public apologies. They are going to fight back against their critics–and an ugly debate will become much uglier.
[…]
“If the midterms go badly, the civil war in the GOP starts the day after,” Hulsman says. “The neocons and Kristol will say that Bush is incompetent and the neocons are not to blame.” Maybe then it’ll be Hulsman who leads the next purge.
Oh my goodness, it sounds like this whole “war” thing might just be a little bit more politically complicated than Cokie and her pals are letting on, doesn’t it? And here I thought this was all about George Mcgovern and the summer of love. What gives?
Jonathan Schwarz alerts me to yet another rightwing neurosis: irrational fear of coffee cups. I don’t see how these people can leave the house in the morning.
Schwarz writes:
I guess what I’m saying here is, I’m perfectly happy to let Ms. Nunez put whatever quotes she wants on Starbucks coffee, if in return she will cede me control of corporate America, the media, the military, and all three branches of the US government.
Sounds like a good Republican-style bipartisan compromise to me.
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.
Glenn Greenwald wrote an interesting piece yesterday about neoconservaitsm in which he posits that a real political realignment is taking place. And he asks an important question:
The idea that Lieberman is some sort of “centrist Democrat” and that the effort to defeat him is driven by radical leftists who hate bipartisanship is nothing short of inane. Why would Sean Hannity and Bill Kristol be so eager to keep a “centrist Democrat” in the Senate? Lincoln Chafee is a “centrist Republican.” Are there any Democrats or liberals who care if Lincoln Chafee wins his primary? Do leftist ideologues run around praising and defending and working for the re-election of Olympia Snowe or Chris Shays or other Republican “centrists”? Do Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity love other Democratic “centrists,” such as, say, Mary Landrieu or Joe Biden? The answer to all of those questions is plainly “no”.
The love which right-wing extremists have for Joe Lieberman isn’t based on the fact that he’s a “centrist.” If Lieberman were a “centrist,” extremists would not care about him. They would not be vigorously urging his re-election, or praising his potential appointment as Bush Defense Secretary, or touting him as a Vice-Presidential running mate for George Allen. They do that because he is one of them — a neoconservative extremist who is with them on virtually every major issue of the day.
This is more than simple ideology, although there’s plenty of that at work. I suspect that some of the support for Joe on the right comes from the shared neurotic sense of beseigement the conservatives have developed as their cultural identity.
Listen to conservatives now, and they’re still in the catacombs. “Just because a rock song is about faith doesn’t mean that it’s conservative,” National Review explains of U2’s “Gloria.” “But what about a rock song that’s about faith and whose chorus is in Latin? That’s beautifully reactionary.” Note the tone of sturdy defiance: So few bold souls, these days, are brave enough to publicly profess that underground faith, Christianity.
The liberal colossus is somehow still just as colossal, despite the fact that Republicans have controlled Congress and the White House and shifted the news media’s center of gravity to the right for several years. I have one 2005 book–forworded by Steve Forbes and blurbed by Evans, Buckley, and former Senator Jesse Helms–called Free Choice for Workers: A History of the Right to Work Movement. The flap proposes: “George C. Leef chronicles the thrilling ‘David and Goliath’ struggle between the bosses of Big Labor and the American citizens who oppose their lust for coercive power.” Somehow, the conservatives have even pulled off making Wal-Mart sound like the little guy.
There’s a precedent for acting beleaguered even in victory. In 1964, the Goldwater faction had just won a party presidential nomination. Folk Songs to Bug the Liberals was part of an avalanche of Goldwater kitsch–the more ostentatious the better–that loyalists lined up to purchase at campaign events: gold Goldwater pins, Goldwater cowboy hats, books, pamphlets, and magazines galore to pass on to your liberal neighbors. It was only one part proselytizing. It also proved the bearer’s stout-heartedness. Its meaning relied on Goldwater remaining unpopular in an overwhelmingly “liberal” culture.
That is why, now that conservatives own the government, conservatives are still stuck in their past: Their marginal self-identity is who they are. The trick is inventing new ways to soak in one’s marginalization.
I think this is an extension of a tribal impulse that goes back even farther than Goldwater — that’s just modern conservatism’s manifestation. Perhaps long-time readers of this blog will remember this:
It’s clear to me that during the first 70 years of the country’s existence, the old South and the slave territories that came later (as defined in that famous map from 1860) created a culture based largely on their sense of the rest of the country’s, and the world’s, disapprobation. Within it grew what Michael Lind describes as its “cavalier” culture, which created an outsized sense of masculine ego and “fighting” mentality (along with an exaggerated caricature of male and female social roles.) Resentment was a foundation of the culture as slavery was hotly debated from the very inception and the division was based on what was always perceived by many as a moral issue. The character and morality of the south had always had to be defended. Hence a defensive culture was born.
The civil war and Jim Crow deepened it and the Lost Cause mythology romanticized it. The civil rights movement crystallized it. A two hundred year old resentment has created a permanent cultural divide.
Why a bunch of cosmopolitans from New York adopted this is subject for another post, but the neoconservatives have certainly joined the party.
The latest example of this comes from none other than Martin Peretz in today’s Wall Street Journal, who in one short diatribe demontrates the conservative sense of beseigement and class consciousness, the irrational fear of hippies, the contempt for uppity blacks and the habit of making dire prognostications that Democrats are writing their death warrant by listening to any of that riff-raff that forms the base of their party. (I wonder what that’s supposed to mean in 2006, exactly — that we will be an even smaller minority party?)
Like most establishment elites, Peretz believes it’s still groundhog day, 1968:
We have been here before. Left-wing Democrats are once again fielding single-issue “peace candidates,” and the one in Connecticut, like several in the 1970s, is a middle-aged patrician, seeking office de haut en bas, and almost entirely because he can. It’s really quite remarkable how someone like Ned Lamont, from the stock of Morgan partner Thomas Lamont and that most high-born American Stalinist, Corliss Lamont, still sends a chill of “having arrived” up the spines of his suburban supporters simply by asking them to support him. Superficially, one may think of those who thought they were already middle class just by being enthusiasts of Franklin Roosevelt, who descended from the Hudson River Dutch aristocracy. But when FDR ran for, and was elected, president in 1932, he had already been a state senator, assistant secretary of the Navy and governor of New York. He had demonstrated abilities.
Just as an aside, Lamont’s political pedigree goes back further than FDR, which I didn’t know until I read this by Sara at The Next Hurrah. But that, of course, is Peretz’s gripe. The “limousine liberal” is second only to the “hippie protester” as an iconic boogeyman for political insiders of a certain age — although the class resentment and red-baiting on display in this piece would make even Richard Nixon blush.
Then, here come the commie hippies (also known as “peaceniks”):
But he does have one issue, and it is Iraq. He grasps little of the complexities of his issue, but then this, too, is true of the genus of the peace candidate. Peace candidates know only one thing, and that is why people vote for them. I know the type well. I was present at its creation. I was there, a partisan, as a graduate student at the beginning, in 1962, when the eminent Harvard historian H. Stuart Hughes (grandson of Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes) ran for the U.S. Senate as an independent against George Cabot Lodge and the victor, Ted Kennedy, a trio of what in the Ivies is, somewhat derisively, called “legacies.” Hughes’s platform fixed on President John F. Kennedy’s belligerent policy towards Cuba, which had been crystallized in the “Bay of Pigs” fiasco. The campaign ended, however, with Hughes winning a dreary 1% of the vote when Krushchev capitulated to JFK just before the election and brought the missile crisis to an end, leaving Fidel Castro in power as an annoyance (which he is still, though maybe not much longer), but not as a threat.
Later peace candidates did better. Some were even elected. Vietnam was their card. One was even nominated for president in 1972. George McGovern, a morally imperious isolationist with fellow-traveling habits, never could shake the altogether accurate analogies with Henry Wallace. (Wallace was the slightly dopey vice president, dropped from the ticket by FDR in 1944, who ran for president on the Progressive Party ticket, a creation of Stalin’s agents in the U.S.) Mr. McGovern’s trouncing by Richard Nixon, a reprobate president if we ever had one, augured the recessional–if not quite the collapse–of such Democratic politics, which insisted our enemy in the Cold War was not the Soviets but us.
I’ll leave it to the historians to deconstruct that odd rendering of disparate events. But I think we can see within those two paragraphs that in the person of Martin Peretz exists the perfect synthesis of the right’s dark Nixonian impulse and neoconservatism.
Finally our hero steps forth:
It was then that people like Joe Lieberman emerged, muscular on defense, assertive in foreign policy, genuinely liberal on social and economic matters, but not doctrinaire on regulatory issues. He had marched for civil rights and is committed to an equal opportunity agenda with equal opportunity results. He has qualms about affirmative action. But who, in his hearts of hearts, does not? He is appalled by the abysmal standards of our popular culture and our public discourse. Who really loves our popular culture–or, at least, which parent? He is thoroughly a Democrat. But Mr. Lieberman believes that, in an age of communal and global stress, one would do well to speak with the president (even, on rare occasion, speak well of him) and compromise with him on urgent matters of practical law.
Thoroughly a Democrat? This is the very definition of neoconservatism.
U.S. political movement. It originated in the 1960s among conservatives and some liberals who were repelled by or disillusioned with what they viewed as the political and cultural trends of the time, including leftist political radicalism, lack of respect for authority and tradition, and hedonistic and immoral lifestyles. Neoconservatives generally advocate a free-market economy with minimum taxation and government economic regulation; strict limits on government-provided social-welfare programs; and a strong military supported by large defense budgets. Neoconservatives also believe that government policy should respect the importance of traditional institutions such as religion and the family. Unlike most conservatives of earlier generations, neoconservatives maintain that the United States should take an active role in world affairs, though they are generally suspicious of international institutions, such as the United Nations and the World Court, whose authority could intrude upon American sovereignty or limit the country’s freedom to act in its own interests.
For a more nuanced definition, see Irving Kristol’s from 2003. Note that he explicitly affiliates neoconservatism with the Republican Party, which is probably the most succinct explanation as to why Joe Lieberman is having difficulties in a Democratic primary. He’s a living oxymoron — a Democratic neoconservative.
And now for more paranoid Nixonian red-baiting and hints of treason:
Yes, Mr. Lieberman sometimes sounds a bit treacly. He certainly is preachy, and advertises his sense of his own righteousness. But he has also been brave, and bravery is a rare trait in politicians, especially in states that are really true-blue or, for that matter, really true-red. The blogosphere Democrats, whose victory Mr. Lamont’s will be if Mr. Lamont wins, have made Iraq the litmus test for incumbents. There are many reasonable, and even correct, reproofs that one may have for the conduct of the war. They are, to be sure, all retrospective. But one fault cannot be attributed to the U.S., and that is that we are on the wrong side. We are at war in a just cause, to protect the vulnerable masses of the country from the helter-skelter ideological and religious mass-murderers in their midst. Our enemies are not progressive peasants as was imagined three and four decades ago.
If Mr. Lieberman goes down, the thought-enforcers of the left will target other centrists as if the center was the locus of a terrible heresy, an emphasis on national strength.
Ann Coulter says it with much more flair, don’t you think?
Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America. They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America’s self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant.
Of course a piece like this couldn’t be complete without at least a passing reference to Neville Chamberlain:
Finally, the contest in Connecticut tomorrow is about two views of the world. Mr. Lamont’s view is that there are very few antagonists whom we cannot mollify or conciliate. Let’s call this process by its correct name: appeasement. The Greenwich entrepreneur might call it “incentivization.” Mr. Lieberman’s view is that there are actually enemies who, intoxicated by millennial delusions, are not open to rational and reciprocal arbitration. Why should they be? After all, they inhabit a universe of inevitability, rather like Nazis and communists, but with a religious overgloss. Such armed doctrines, in Mr. Lieberman’s view, need to be confronted and overwhelmed.
Man, I’ll bet Joe’s consultants were just thrilled when they read that part. Even far right Republicans are getting antsy about the megalomaniacal, war of the worlds thing. But hey, in for a penny, in for a pound. Put Joe not just to the right of the entire Democratic party, but to the right of everybody in the country but Bill Kristol and Michael Savage. With friends like Peretz making the case for him, Lieberman might find he’s too wacky even for the Bush administration.
And finally we get to the race baiting. No complaints about the Democratic party would be complete without it. After all, when you get down to it, those uppity negroes are what ruined the party for nice people way back in …you guessed it … 1968:
The Lamont ascendancy, if that is what it is, means nothing other than that the left is trying, and in places succeeding, to take back the Democratic Party. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Maxine Waters have stumped for Mr. Lamont. As I say, we have been here before. Ned Lamont is Karl Rove’s dream come true. If he, and others of his stripe, carry the day, the Democratic party will lose the future, and deservedly.
Now where have I heard something like that recently? Oh yes, that’s right: “Ned Lamont can have Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton,” Liebermen said. “I’m proud to have had Bill Clinton, Senator Dodd, Senator Inouye, Senator Salazar and a lot of other great Democrats.”
Now who’s pulling the flaps down on the big tent again? The limousine, hippie negroes of Connecticut who want a Senator who represents them or the political elites whose bigotry comes quickly to the fore when threatened by small-d democracy?
Whether it’s overly sensitive Democrats who have been traumatized by decades of “bug the liberal” taunts or just mainstream members of the old resentment tribe like Peret, those who feel such terror and revulsion at passionate liberalism are obviously in the grip of some sort of emotional tidal wave. I don’t think there is any hope for the latter; they are a permanent fixture in American politics. But the first need to start questioning their assumptions if they want to keep up. Their knee jerk evocations of 1968 are no less anachronistic than are Peretz’s throwbacks to McCarthyism. This is psychology at work not political analysis and the chattering classes need to take a good hard look in the mirror and recognize that.
You really can’t read this histrionic classist, racist, red-baiting tirade without wondering why Peretz maintains the fiction that he is a Democrat — or why Democrats should henceforth concern themselves with his opinion any more than they worry about William Kristol’s. Is it possible that we’ve finally seen the overdue conversion? I certainly hope so. Clarity is bracing and good for the body politic at times like these. Go ahead and jump Marty — and take Joe with you. You’ll feel better and so will we.
Update: A reader just sent me the following quote from Peretz circa 1971:
Source: Fred Dutton, Changing Sources of Power, p. 61 (1971), speaking on Vietnam: “These are times of moral enormity, when cool reasonableness is a more pathological and unrealistic state than hysteria.”
If I had ever said anything half so idiotic–just like if I’d aided and abetted a Black Panther murder like D-Ho–I’d devote my life to living it down, too.
True. But the hysteria itself — as with D Ho — remains.
