‘Pro-war, You Get the Door’

Lieberman–who less than six years ago, as Al Gore’s running mate, came within one Supreme Court justice of being elected vice president–was about to be vindicated. The Democratic Leadership Council’s Marshall Wittmann (his entire family in tow on their way to look at colleges in Boston) had already coined a term to describe the feelings of Lieberman supporters, should their candidate prove triumphant. It was an allusion to Daily Kos, the most influential lefty blog and a rising force in Democratic politics. If Lamont lost, Wittmann said with a smile, Lieberman’s backers would all share some serious “Kosse-freude.” Wittmann seemed pleased at his neologism. Then he paused. “If only we can use it.”

As it turned out, they couldn’t. Lieberman’s television lead had been a mirage: A technical malfunction had reversed the results onscreen. In truth, Lamont was still ahead, as he would remain all evening.

A little after 11 P.M., Lieberman took the stage and told the crowd that he had called Lamont with his congratulations. His family surrounded him. Conspicuously absent were Lieberman’s Senate colleague, Chris Dodd, who had been hanging out in the hotel lobby hours before, and Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal, who had spent much of the evening greeting voters in the hotel atrium. In his speech, Lieberman conceded the Democratic primary, but vowed to run as an “independent Democrat.” He appeared fatigued and disappointed and more than a little angry. Which is hardly surprising. The Democratic party, to which he had devoted his life, had just purged him from its ranks.

Lamont’s victory was clear. In the end, he won 52 percent to 48 percent in a high-turnout primary election, the margin of victory a little more than 10,000 votes. According to Strategic Telemetry, a political research firm, Lamont won both of Connecticut’s major media markets, all but one of the state’s eight counties, and three-fourths of the state’s municipalities. In all, about 283,000 registered Democrats voted in the primary, which amounts to 43 percent of registered party members in Connecticut. In his post-mortem interviews, Lieberman repeatedly mentioned that only a tiny portion of the general electorate had repudiated him. While this was true, there was no gainsaying the significance of the primary. It took no time at all for the reverberations of Lamont’s triumph to be felt throughout the national Democratic party.

Within hours of Lieberman’s concession speech, Hillary Clinton’s political action committee, HILLPAC, cut Lamont a $5,000 check. One of Clinton’s more significant rivals in the upcoming 2008 Democratic presidential primary, John Edwards, was the first national politician to call Lamont and offer his congratulations. The Democratic election committee chairmen, Rahm Emanuel in the House and Charles Schumer in the Senate, heartily endorsed Lamont the next morning, as did the Democratic congressional leaders, Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Harry Reid.

Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, whose brother James had been an early advocate of Lamont’s candidacy, urged Lieberman to exit the race altogether. Also on August 9, the political action committee of one of the party’s most popular and promising figures, Sen. Barack Obama, sent Lamont a check for $5,000. Sen. Barbara Boxer, a Lieberman supporter, endorsed Lamont. At press time, about the only prominent Demo crats who still supported Lieberman were Sen. Ken Salazar of Colorado, Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, and a Clinton-era veteran, attorney Lanny Davis. Intriguingly, former President Clinton himself, though he has pledged to support the winner of the primary, was tight-lipped last week on the subject of Lamont’s victory.

There were local repercussions, too. On August 9, in the state Democratic party’s offices on the third floor of a run-down office building near the Hartford train station, Lamont appeared at a “unity” event alongside Connecticut’s Democratic officials, including Sen. Dodd and Attorney General Blumenthal. (At the press conference that followed, Dodd mentioned that he had not spoken to Lieberman since the previous evening.) Each of the Democrats pledged to support Lamont and gubernatorial candidate John DeStefano, the mayor of New Haven. Lamont seemed a little bewildered at all the attention. His eyes were wide. He stood toward the back of the assembled pols, often in someone else’s shadow, before taking his turn at the microphone. But when he spoke, he was, as usual, articulate, passionate, and friendly.

Lamont has real political talent. He has kept his composure while being thrust into a strange position. He’s been treated as a symbol. Political commentary last week resembled nothing so much as a semiotics lecture of the sort that Lamont might have attended at Harvard, as every political junkie in the country tried to interpret the meaning of the man’s victory. The Connecticut primary was the most overanalyzed contest this election cycle. Interpretations ran from the self-congratulatory (on Daily Kos, principal blogger Markos Moulitsas wrote that the “winners” were “democracy and the people of Connecticut”) to the turgid, as in this post on the pro-Lamont site Firedoglake:

There were overly general interpretations of the election, such as this from Sen. Edward Kennedy: “Connecticut voters turned out yesterday in record numbers to change a failed policy in Iraq, to call for health care for all Americans, to fight for a truly independent judiciary, and much more.” And there were the widely disparate and somewhat contradictory explanations proffered by the pundit class, which viewed the election, in light of the August 8 primary defeats of Georgia Democrat Cynthia McKinney and Michigan Republican Joe Schwarz, as an early indicator of brewing “anti-incumbent sentiment.” But others read Lieberman’s defeat as a sign that the nation–not just 146,576 Connecticut Democrats–has embraced antiwar politics. In one view, Lieberman’s defeat revealed how the public has soured on George W. Bush. “This shows what blind loyalty to Bush and being his love child means,” Rep. Emanuel told the New York Times.

It was left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore who most dramatically summarized the feelings of the antiwar left about their new champion, the multimillionaire father of three from Greenwich, Connecticut. “Let the resounding defeat of Senator Joe Lieberman send a cold shiver down the spine of every Democrat who supported the invasion of Iraq,” Moore wrote in an open letter, “and who continues to support, in any way, this senseless, immoral, unwinnable war.” This was a sentiment echoed, albeit more succinctly, by the blogger “Dadhusker,” commenting on Firedoglake: “Pro-war, You get the door!” Sometimes the simplest explanation is best.

Senator Dodd was right when he told reporters at the “unity” event in Hartford that the previous night’s primary was “about the people we seek to represent,” and that politicians “have an obligation to the voters of the state” to represent them as fully as possible. Simply put, the voters in Connecticut are antiwar. Three-fourths of Connecticut residents, regardless of political identification, think the Iraq war was a mistake. According to the New York Times/CBS News exit poll, 61 percent of all Democratic primary voters “strongly” disapproved of the war in Iraq, with 69 percent supporting a with drawal “soon.”

Among Lamont voters, 43 percent said the main reason they voted for the challenger was his opposition to the war. Another 24 percent said their main reason was that Lamont “would oppose Bush.” In Democratic circles, the idea that the Iraq war is a “disaster” has become axiomatic, like the assertion that the sky is blue. At the Lieberman party on election night, I met several people who opposed the war but still voted for Lieberman. “He’s done a lot of good things,” one man, who claimed to have “known Joe” for more than two decades, said. “So he does one bad thing? Waddaya gonna do?”

For many Connecticut Democrats, Lieberman’s perceived closeness to Bush on the war in Iraq was the one bad thing that could not be forgiven. But it was not the only bad thing. The senator has been increasingly at odds with a newly energized sort of Democrat. Exit polling data reveal that Lieberman and Lamont drew on different party constituencies. Fifty-five percent of the primary voters surveyed described themselves as either “very” or “somewhat” liberal. Those liberals voted for Lamont, while Lieberman won among “conservative” Democrats. And the split was not simply ideological.

As others have pointed out, voting patterns broke along education and class lines. Fifty-five percent of Lamont voters had at least a college degree, while 59 percent of Lieberman voters described their education level as “high school or less.” A majority of Lamont voters had incomes of $100,000 or more, while a majority of Lieberman voters had incomes under $50,000. Looking at the geographic results, researchers at Strategic Telemetry found that support for Lamont was strongest in places with high median incomes, high house prices and high percentages of owner-occupied housing, white-collar workers, and children in private schools.

That is not all that Lamont supporters share. Conversations with left-wing bloggers and other pro-Lamont activists reveal a suspicion of orthodox or evangelical religion, a curious fetishization of science and technology, opposition to the war in Iraq, of course, but also suspicion of the Bush administration’s conduct of the war on terrorism in general, a preference for “merit” over “privilege,” and a habit of self-affirmation that borders on the parodic. “Our well-informed and highly educated electorate,” state Democratic party chair Nancy DiNardo told reporters in Hartford last week, “has once again proved themselves by nominating Ned Lamont to be the Democratic candidate for Senate.”

If all this sounds familiar, it is because the people supporting Lamont closely resemble those who supported Howard Dean. Lamont may be only the most recent iteration of Deanism, but so far he is also the most successful, and he might turn out to be more successful still. What makes the Lamont victory significant is not its effect on the 2006 election. It signals the emergence, or reemergence, of a political bloc of highly sophisticated, educated, and polarized voters. And this voting bloc wishes nothing less than to assert control over the Democratic party.

Because Lieberman decided to run in the general election as an independent, much in this contest has been left unsettled. One thing that has been settled is that the senator ran a sorry primary campaign. He misjudged the seriousness of Lamont’s challenge until it was too late; he signaled that he would run as an independent more than a month before primary day; his team handled the press poorly. The campaign let it be known that it was backing down from its Get Out The Vote efforts the weekend before August 8, then said that wasn’t quite true. It suddenly cancelled Lieberman’s last two events. I showed up at Anthony Jack’s restaurant in Southington expecting the Joe-mentum bus to show up, only to find that the restaurant was closed for the day.

Lieberman has sought to correct those mistakes. He has brought on a new team, including veteran aide Dan Gerstein. He plans to run a national-security campaign that contrasts the two candidates’ approaches to the war on terror. The new activist group Vets for Freedom will weigh in on Lieberman’s behalf to highlight the cost of withdrawal from Iraq and timidity in the war on terror. The group will place a full-page ad in support of Lieberman, in the August 14 Hartford Courant.

Lieberman’s effort will stress the dangers of dovishness. He should have plenty of material from which to draw. Like clockwork, less than 24 hours after Lamont’s victory, British authorities announced the break-up of a massive plot to bomb commercial airliners traveling to the United States. Lieberman will only be helped if he makes use of what some of Lamont’s supporters had to say about the plot. Here, for example, is blogger and former Miss America contestant Taylor Marsh, a frequent contributor to the liberal-left Huffington Post, on her own website:

The netroots helped Lamont in the Democratic primary, but they could come back to haunt him. There have been signs of this in recent weeks. One is the doctored image of Lieberman in blackface posted on the Huffington Post by movie producer and blogger Jane Hamsher. The Lamont campaign was forced to distance itself from Hamsher, a longtime supporter. Another occurred in the hours leading up to the primary, when Lieberman’s website crashed. The Lieberman campaign blamed Lamont-supporting hackers. Lamont offered to repair the website and said that any attempt to hold his campaign responsible was guilt by association. Others called it a case of being judged by the company one keeps.

In the end, none of this may matter. While independent candidates have won in Connecticut before, there is little precedent for a candidate winning after losing his party’s primary. It may also be, as Eli Pariser, the executive director of the left-wing MoveOn Political Action Committee, wrote in the August 10 Washington Post, that the era of “triangulation” is over: No more Democratic politics that seeks to co-opt conservative issues.

“The policy of seizing the political middle ground no longer makes sense in an era when any attempt at bipartisanship is understood as a sign of Democratic weakness and exploited accordingly,” Pariser wrote. “With triangulation passing, a new era of bolder, principle-driven politics can begin.” Later in the piece, Pariser concluded: “People don’t want Democratic politicians whose grotesquely nuanced positions on issues make their utterances incomprehensible or meaningless or both. They want a new direction.” What is by no means certain is that this new direction leads to victory.

Matthew Continetti is an associate editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.