For the party representing tolerance, the Democrats did some serious purging of late. I won’t focus on Rep. Cynthia McKinney, who lost her Democratic primary last week, because the similar loss of Lieberman is better-known — and a better example.
Last Tuesday, Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman lost his Democratic primary to anti-war candidate Ned Lamont, a former Greenwich councilman who brought bundles of his own money and the clout of anti-Bush bloggers to the race.
Despite his incumbency, Lieberman was rejected as too Republican for the Democrats, his traitorous visage immortalized on tens of thousands of Lamont campaign pins showing him kissing George W. Bush. (This piece d’art was called “The Kiss,” and they sell on eBay in packs of five.)
The upstart Lamont campaign picked up steam through the spring and summer by hurling a specific sort of accusation at Lieberman: the Benedict Arnold charge. Lieberman represented “turncoat politics.” He “betrayed his party.”
And yet, this senator who has betrayed the Democrats supports raising taxes to reform health care, reforming campaign finance laws, extending amnesty to illegal immigrants, propping up Social Security and a whole host of other traditionally liberal stances.
It’s true Lieberman has rankled toe-the-line Democrats on and off throughout his three-term tenure: Against the Clinton administration’s first instincts, he campaigned to use force in Bosnia and Kosovo — a tactic that administration eventually, and grudgingly, embraced. In difficult moments for the caucus, Lieberman’s uncool denunciation of violent video games and his opinion on Terri Schiavo have surely drifted to the forefront of many Democrats’ bitterest daydreams.
But Lieberman’s final double-cross — his Judas kiss — was, and is, his staunch support of the Iraq war. But hoping that this war would accomplish critical goals, though that hope may now look more and more unrealistic, is not black and white — it’s not like racism, a sin requiring excommunication from the Democratic Party.
Nevertheless, as Democratic politicos march on towards a hoped-for win in November, we’ll continue to see the unruly shouters, sometime-deserters and stragglers fall away as the Democrats’ stride comes to look more and more like a goose-step. Isn’t this perfect unity of message what we wanted? Ever since Kerry’s loss, liberals have fetishized unity of message as the missing element keeping them from winning elections. But many things we think we want — a Jumbo Slice after a night in Adams Morgan, another term of Marion Barry — don’t look as good when they actually arrive.
The sacrifice of Lieberman, a smart, headstrong, and effective senator, on the altar of unity doesn’t look as good when it replaces him with an inexperienced prince whose crown was pressed onto him by greedy kingmakers.
Will Lamont the senator be able to follow his principles, even if they don’t always align with the forces that put him in power? I doubt it. Is this closing of the ranks really valuable for the Democrats? I doubt that, too, for two reasons: The modern Democrats claim to allow — promote, even — heterodoxy of belief, and revealing this to be hypocrisy within their own leadership isn’t worth one midterm victory.
And closing the ranks around an anti-war position isn’t appropriately farsighted; unlike, say, a Great Society program, it merely reacts against the Republicans.
One commenter on an article written by my colleague at The New Republic, Ryan Lizza, nicely sums up the sentiment that defeated Lieberman: “There is a two-party system. Democrats are in opposition, so Democrats oppose!” The logic here is just as kindergarten as it sounds.
Eve Fairbanks is a reporter-researcher at The New Republic.
