Posted on 07/11/2006 5:30:48 PM PDT by NutCrackerBoy
Eyes do not wander from the race in Connecticut, kicked off by a debate between the incumbent, Senator Joseph Lieberman, and the challenger, Ned Lamont. Commenting on the race, David Brooks, a seer and a columnist for the New York Times, has ventured that it foretells what may be a remarkable divide. If Lamont beats Lieberman, the message to voters across the United States, will be that the Democratic tent is on an exclusivist roll. None may feel at home in it who tolerated, let alone encouraged, the war in Iraq over which President Bush has presided. It challenges the imagination to wonder productively what will be the political declamations at the Democratic convention in 2008 if the Democrats are to be the party that kicked out sitting Senator Joe Lieberman six years after he was named their vice presidential candidate, notwithstanding that 90 percent of his Senate votes have been with his party, opposing President Bush.
A close study of the transcript of the July 6 encounter brings to mind the sad state of debate between candidates of the same party. Here they were, together for one hour, and divided, really, on only the single issue of whether our military venture in Iraq a) should be terminated by fixed schedule, and b) was worthwhile to begin with. The challenger, Lamont, didn't spend much time on how we should never have got into Iraq to begin with. This was so because manifestly he didn't want to appear a statue of indifference while Lieberman went on about life under Saddam Hussein. Lamont’s refrain is about Getting Out, not about how We Should Not Have Got In. In 1972, the Democrats were in terrible shape. The Vietnam War was visibly just about done, but retrospective regret that it had ever been undertaken could not be expressed except as regret that Lyndon Johnson had been president of the United States during the years in which the pursuit of a free Vietnam had been U.S. policy. What happened politically was a Republican victory in 49 states. If Ned Lamont succeeds in discharging Joe Lieberman as an unacceptable Democrat, voters by the millions will think of themselves as disfranchised.
When Lieberman got into his peroration at the debate he said about himself what a debate coach might have counseled him to say. He gave evidence of his institutional qualifications to continue in office. Look who has supported me! "The AFL-CIO wouldn't have supported me if they didn't think I would fight for jobs in this state." (Was he saying the unions preferred jobs for Connecticut as against jobs for New York?) "Planned Parenthood wouldn't have supported me if they weren't confident that I was for women's reproductive rights." (In Connecticut, all Democrats are on the side of abortion.) "The League of Conservation Voters wouldn't have supported me if they didn't appreciate my strong, strong record on environmental protection." (Nobody in Connecticut opposes environmental protection. Senator Lieberman might as well have said, No motorist would have backed me if I hadn't supported a speed limit.) And, "The Human Rights Campaign political action committee wouldn't have supported me if I had been fighting [other than to] protect people from discrimination based on sexual orientation." Does that do it? The big tent, model 2006, for the Democratic party?
Mr. Lieberman resents the high price of oil. So does Mr. Lamont. Who resents it more? Waal, they can fight over that one. Mr. Lieberman can say that there were parts of the energy bill he didn't approve of, and he's trying to pull them back up for a revised vote. Oh yes, he is "cosponsoring [that] legislation with John Kerry." Apropos of the high cost of oil, he has introduced "excess profits legislation, which would tax the oil companies and give it back to consumers for their outrageous rip-off of consumers." Has it been established that there is U.S. extortion or monopoly pricing in oil? Did the Republicans invent OPEC?
The Republicans have tactical and strategic interests in the Lieberman race. If Lamont wins the primary and a Democratic seat is forfeited, that's a tactical victory: one more Republican vote in the Senate. But if the correlation is a dramatic shrinkage in the Democratic vote nationwide—a million Democrats unable to squeeze into the narrower tent—then that would be a strategic result that would imperil the two party system.
bump
Lieberman is a far left socialist. He votes with the socialists all the time. Don't waste sympathy on this Rat who is being eaten by the other Rats.
If that happens, then no, it imperils nothing, it means Republicans win, Democrats lose, and the Dems will be forced to change their positions to win elective office. That's not a danger, it's how it works.
The Kos Kidz are attempting a putsch, but this is the beginning of the end for them. No CT poll shows Lieberman losing this primary to Lamont, and plenty of them show Lieberman kicking Lamont's butt in November even if he does end up having to run as an independent. Either way, the far-left plank of the Democratic Party is about to find themselves out in the cold.
Although Mrs. Clinton has stated that she would not support Mr. Lieberman should he lose the Democrat primary, she has the most to lose by his defeat. Mr. Lieberman's defeat will signal the national party that it cannot nominate someone who has supported the war (no matter how cooly).
It's karma after that jackass Perot handed the election to slick willie.
Someone should remind Mr. Buckley that we can have a two party system (or a multi-party system for that matter) even if the DemocRATs fold up their tent as the Whigs did about 150 years ago.
He promised and then reneged on a campaign appearance with LIEberman.
These lice are praying for the war to go badly.
But if the correlation is a dramatic shrinkage in the Democratic vote nationwide—a million Democrats unable to squeeze into the narrower tent—then that would be a strategic result that would imperil the two party system.
He talks like that would be a bad thing.
Oh, I wouldn't want to see just one party but it's time
the democrats spent 40 years in the wilderness, while
we undo the social havoc they have wreaked since FDR.
I disagree with Buckley on this. History shows that when one of the two major American parties collapses, another one comes along to take its place more or less immediately. I think the worst-case scenario is that the MoveOn.org types will attempt to break apart from the Dems and launch their own party. Such an attempt will, of course, be a spectacular failure, and after a single election cycle everyone involved with the breakaway party will either crawl back to the DNC with their tails between their legs, give up on politics altogether (fine by me) or literally die (all the evidence shows that most of these people are not idealistic young adults, but aging baby boomers that see a second chance at fulfilling all their failed '60s utopian dreams).
Not to mention that old Joe has never worked day in his life in the private sector. His conscience of the senate thing is way overblown except for the one time in his life he stood up for something being the war. He might just turn into something if he really loses.
Yes, Lieberman is a far-left socialist. But old-school far-left socialists, unlike their multiculturalist replacements on the far-left, still breath the air of Western civilization.
Lieberman, Hitchins, and a handful of others 'get it': we're in a war for civilization which transcends in importance even the divide between socialists and free-marketeers and (at a this-worldly level) the divide between Christians and Western secular humanists. All of us, unlike the Mohammedans, have regard for the 'high anthropology' of the West, whether considered in Judeo-Christian terms "Come let us make Man in our image and likeness" or pagan terms "Man is the measure of all things."
The multiculturalists in their zeal to tear down Christendom would sell us out to the Mohammedans, despite the enemy's opposing everything the left supposedly stands for.
On this one--not Iraq, but the whole war--Lieberman is on our side, and until it's over, this is the issue that really matters.
That said, I'd rather pick up a Republican in the Senate, but far better Lieberman than Lamont.
Kos-folks may not quite disbelieve we are fighting a war, they just approach it in ways that are both silly and unpopular with most Americans.
It challenges the imagination to wonder productively what will be the political declamations at the Democratic convention in 2008 if the Democrats are to be the party that kicked out sitting Senator Joe Lieberman six years after he was named their vice presidential candidate, notwithstanding that 90 percent of his Senate votes have been with his party, opposing President Bush.
This would be like kicking rock-solid, conservative Mitch McConnell of Kentucky out of the Senate for his vote recently against a flag burning amendment.
"that would be a strategic result that would imperil the two party system."
Maybe it's time. When Peggy Noonan writes that Republicans and Dems alike increasingly hate their respective bases, something has to give.
Best thing about this article is the turning of the knife near the end where Bill Buckley raising the specter of the RAT party shriking itself into oblivion.
But there is one silver lining bolstering the spirits of all RATS. Their most realiable and always steadfast constiuency is still growing: the deceased.
Maybe so, but compared to the DNC, Senator L looks far right, socialist that he is.
The mainstream Dems thus have fallen off the scale to the Left.
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