The Lesson of Lamont

There are two news items about the Lieberman/Lamont Senate race in Connecticut that are interesting enough to contrast and compare.

The first is an editorial in the Philadelphia Enquirer.

"How did Lieberman go from the Democratic national ticket to trailing a primary opponent who quit his nearly all-white country club just before entering the race? In a word: Iraq.

Antiwar activists in the blogosphere and in Democratic Party councils seem intent on purging from the party anyone who doesn't share their viewpoint and rhetoric on this fiasco of a war.

Lieberman has no divine right to be a senator from Connecticut, a truth that seems only lately to have dawned on him. Iraq is as urgent an issue as there is, and if primary voters want a candidate who is more aligned with antiwar views, they have every right.

What's lamentable about the campaign against Lieberman is that it has gone beyond a debate on Iraq to an attack on the very ideas of bipartisan compromise and divergent voices within a party.

If that point of view triumphs in the Democratic Party, it will court permanent minority status."

The trouble with this editorial is that Lieberman was not a bipartisan Democrat. He was a rubber stamp for a criminal administration. And it is in part because Democrats like Joe Lieberman did not stand up to this president that the Iraq war became the fiasco that it is today.

And since when has this administration, and this Republican dominated Congress, been at all interested in bipartisanship and compromise? The idea is a joke to them. They'll use puppets like Lieberman to their advantage when it's convenient, but in general they just push through their agenda any way they can (as with the recess appointment of John Bolton to the UN and all the so-called "signing statements" that Bush has made regarding legislation that he has no intention of upholding) and to hell with anyone who disagrees with them.

So for the Enquirer to say that Democrats repudiating Lieberman is the death of bipartisanship in Washington is disingenuous at best and at worst deeply stupid.

I have to say, though, that I love all this hand-wringing over the terrifying power of the "blogosphere" and the dreaded "antiwar activists." What are they so afraid of? People who have blogs are just people with opinions who have found a new and exponentially more effective means of disseminating them. That's the way it's supposed to be in a democracy. Ideas and power shouldn't flow from the top down --they're supposed to come from the bottom up. Blogs are the essence of democracy: they represent one person's free, unfettered opinion, untainted by any special interest. That's so terrifying?

I guess if you have a vested interest in the status quo, it is.

The second piece of hand-wringing comes from the Washington Post:

"A victory by businessman Ned Lamont on Tuesday would confirm the growing strength of the grass-roots and Internet activists who first emerged in Howard Dean's presidential campaign. Driven by intense anger at President Bush and fierce opposition to the Iraq war, they are on the brink of claiming their most significant political triumph, one that will reverberate far beyond the borders here if Lieberman loses."

The story of Tuesday, assuming that Lieberman loses (which he may not -- according to various news reports there are an awful lot of stealth activists trying to get out the vote for Lieberman who are actually Republicans), is not about bloggers or "antiwar activists" but about one man with the money to take on an entrenched politician when the entire political establishment told him not to, and who had the guts to put his money where his mouth was.

If Ned Lamont wins on Tuesday it will be his victory, and no one else's.

The Post piece goes on to say:

"An upset by Lamont would affect the political calculations of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), who like Lieberman supported giving Bush authority to wage the Iraq war, and could excite interest in a comeback by former vice president Al Gore, who warned in 2002 that the war could be a grave strategic error. For at least the next year, any Democrat hoping to play on the 2008 stage would need to reckon with the implications of Lieberman's repudiation."

This is true. If Lieberman loses on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton will have to do some serious thinking about how to position herself in the Democratic Party in a post-Lieberman environment. Will she have to (or, better yet, be able to) tack left to appease party activists in Iowa and New Hampshire without seeming like a flip-flopper or an opportunist? She has the time to reinvent herself yet again -- but will it stick with the people she needs to win over to get the nomination?

The Post piece continues:

"Republicans are already seeking to exploit a possible victory by Lamont as a sign that Democrats are moving too far to the left on national security issues. "They want retreat -- under the guise of 'reducing the U.S. footprint in Iraq,' " William Kristol writes in the latest issue of the Weekly Standard."

Bill Kristol, it would seem, never met a war he didn't like -- provided, of course, that he didn't have to fight it himself. First he agitates for war in Iraq, and now that that's turned out to be a total debacle, he wants us to take on Iran. What's next, Bill? Should we attack North Korea and its million man army? Any more countries you feel like invading?

The disgusting hypocrisy of the neo-neanderthal chickenhawks notwithstanding, the fact is that there is no good solution to the problem of Iraq. As I've said before in this blog, we're screwed if we leave and we're screwed if we stay. But what is patently obvious to anyone with a brain (a category that does not, in my opinion, include Bill Kristol) is that the people who got us into this mess are not the people who should be entrusted with the responsibility of getting us out.

After all, you don't ask an arsonist to head the team of firefighters to put out the blaze they started.

The lesson of Lamont is that "staying the course" is an excuse and a crutch, not a strategy. The future needs some new and hard thinking, and it's entirely possible if not likely that said thinking will have to be done by new people.

People who aren't the ones responsible for the mess we're in now. Like Joe Lieberman.

Tom Moran