Not long after Ned Lamont’s stunning 52 percent to 48 percent defeat of well-funded incumbent Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman in last week’s Democratic primary, the mythmaking commenced.
As somebody who followed this race closely and was on the ground in Connecticut for the final days of the campaign, I’m wary of the perils of revisionist history morphing into fact — especially since Lieberman’s independent candidacy in the general election will depend on his ability to perpetuate several convenient fictions about why he lost. Before these well-spun distortions take hold, let’s debunk a few of them.
The first and most ridiculous of the bogus storylines is that somehow Lieberman is a victim. If so, Lieberman has only himself to blame because almost all of the political damage he suffered was self-inflicted.
It was Lieberman who lost contact with his constituents, taking their support for granted while Holy Joe lectured and condescended to them from on high in Washington. It was Lieberman who ignored the seriousness of Lamont’s threat until it was too late to build a proper field campaign to fend off that threat. And it was Lieberman who undermined his partisan credibility four weeks before the primary by announcing that he would run in the general election as an independent if he lost to Lamont.
It’s true that Lieberman’s stubborn support for the Iraq war sparked the political fire which ultimately consumed him. But the three-term senator and former vice presidential candidate provided ample kindling, and it was he who fanned the flames.
A second myth is that Lieberman’s war critics are wild-eyed radicals on the political fringe who brought down a sober, mainstream senator espousing majoritarian viewpoints.
This is simply untrue. Forget that Lieberman represents one of the bluest of America’s blue states: At a time when three of every five Americans want us to start pulling troops out of Iraq, it is Lieberman’s view, not his critics’, which are far outside the mainstream.
Yet hand-wringing apologists like third-way proponent Joe Klein, cheered on by conservatives ranging from Karl Rove to the crowd at National Review, tell us that the majority somehow espouses a radical, minority view. These are the sad delusions of a political elite bent on believing its own rhetoric of infallibility. Lieberman’s wake-up call should be their own.
A final fiction being peddled by midterm-minded Republicans is that Lieberman’s loss proves that self-destructing Democrats are held hostage by McGovernite bogeymen who brook no dissent on the war.
Really? Aren’t these the same voices who chirp incessantly that national Democrats have staked out so many different positions on the war that there’s no party consensus? Note the glaring internal inconsistency again operating here: The Democrats have a variety of conflicting positions on Iraq but are also paralyzed by an anti-war mindset.
Meanwhile, few hollered when the Republican national chairman went on national television Sunday to declare that the administration’s war policy is not to “stay the course” but “adapt to win.” Polls show that self-identified Republicans are more evenly split over the war than self-identified Democrats (who are now about 4-to-1 against staying in Iraq), which means that Republican congressmen, the vast majority of whom have affirmed President Bush’s dead-end war policy, are the partisans out of sync with their own supporters.
But don’t expect to hear too much about how a radical cadre of national Republicans has become unmoored from the voters who elected them. Storylines like that require a cease-fire in the coordinated attacks on Lamont and other Democrats presently being orchestrated by a desperate president and Congress hoping to shift blame to anyone but themselves.
Thomas F. Schaller is an associate political science professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
