Alex Isenstadt asks Why Are Bloggers Opposing Joe Lieberman? He gets it mostly right. I think the Lamont bloggers have achieved something that would have been impossible a few years ago. Everytime some big time Washington Insider tries to paint Lamont’s supporters as far-left fringe radicals, they are being contradicted by a host of regular Democrats. And reporters are actually telling both sides of the story in a fairly balanced way.
Those who see the Lieberman-Lamont contest as a liberal inquisition or a battle for the soul of the Democratic party tend to forget one thing: that outside of this particular race, the left-wing blogosphere this election cycle has often been more concerned about winning races against Republicans than battling over ideology — which perhaps shouldn’t be surprising given that Democrats don’t control either chamber of Congress and haven’t won the last two presidential elections.
“There’s more pragmatism among the bloggers than they get credit for,” says Chuck Todd, editor-in-chief of The Hotline, a nonpartisan political newsletter.
Case in point: the much-hyped Senate race in Pennsylvania, where liberals have embraced Democrat Bob Casey, despite his conservative views on abortion and gun rights. The reason why is because Casey has a very good chance of defeating an archenemy to liberals, conservative Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa. “Like it or not, Casey has the clearest path to victory of any Dem Senate challenger this cycle,” wrote liberal blogger and founder of the Daily Kos blog, Markos Moulitsas, after Casey came out in support of then-Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito. “We need this seat.”
It concerns me that Daily Kos and Markos are consistently the measure of the entire blogosphere. But, what’s more important right now is that he is offered the opportunity to respond and set the record straight. And, they print what he has to say.
Daily Kos really is about winning and not about ideology. And their opposition to Lieberman really does revolve around the fact that taking down Lieberman is unlikely to turn a blue Senate seat red. Ben Nelson is largely left alone, not because he votes the way we want, but because he represents Nebraska, a state Bush won in 2004 by 66%-33%. Kerry won Connecticut by 54%-44%. I’d also like to point out that Ben Nelson is not a media hog and he doesn’t go out of his way to stomp all over the Democratic message. Any fair assessment of Lieberman’s woes must take into account his ubiquitous presence on (often right-wing) cable news and syndicated radio.
The Lieberman flacks, though, insist there is something more going on.
Not everyone, however, views the bloggers on the left as political pragmatists. Marshall Wittmann, a senior fellow at the centrist Democratic Leadership Council who supports Lieberman in the primary, says that the Casey, Webb, and Nelson examples are exceptions — and that the liberals are far more concerned with ideology than electability. Wittmann believes that these bloggers want to cleanse the party of any trace of centrism and move the party leftward. “The ramifications of this race extend far beyond the borders of Connecticut,” he says.
Now I think Wittman is coming closer to describing me than he is Markos. Although it is not accurate to say that I want to cleanse the party of any trace of centrism, it is true that I want to challenge centrist candidates in the primaries and let the best candidate win.
Kind of like the Darien News Review recommends.