Some good stuff to read: Letter from an American in Ramallah and Tom Hayden’s Democrats Pull Down Party Pillar Supporting Iraq War. But I am going to concentrate on E.J. Dionne’s A Primary Lesson for Lieberman.
Dionne starts out by recalling a scene from 1980. Sen. Jacob Javits, was in primary fight with an ideological firebrand named Al D’Amato. Nine Republican Senators came to New York to try to help save Javits career. It didn’t work. Taking out a fixture of the Senate like Javits was a triumph for the right-wing of the Republican Party. Dionne sees the same process taking place in Connecticut, but this time in the other party.
Ideologically based primary challenges to important incumbents almost always signal major changes in the political winds. That’s as true of Lamont’s strong campaign against Lieberman as it was of D’Amato’s victory, following as it did the primary defeats of two other liberal Republican senators — Clifford Case of New Jersey in 1978 and Thomas Kuchel of California 10 years earlier — at the hands of conservatives.
The upstarts who beat Case and Kuchel later lost the fall elections. But their cleansing of progressives from Republican ranks was part of a long conservative march that culminated in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory and the hold that conservatives now have on the elected branches of the federal government.
The opposition to Lieberman is motivated by an effort to reverse the trend to the right. It’s true that Lamont’s campaign has been energized by widespread opposition to the Iraq war and the fact that Lieberman has been one of the most loyal Democratic defenders of President Bush’s Middle East policies.
But Lieberman’s troubles are, even more, about a new aggressiveness in the Democratic Party called forth by disgust with the Bush presidency — an energy comparable to the vigor that a loathing for liberalism brought to the Republican right in the 1970s and ’80s.
Like the earlier generation of conservatives, today’s Democratic activists are impatient with accommodating the powers that be. They demand that Democrats stop trying to chase a “center” that has veered ever rightward since 1980. Instead, they want to haul that center back to more progressive terrain. That’s why so much of the political energy in Connecticut seems to be with Lamont. [emphasis mine]
I am hoping that Dionne is right. I think he has a better finger on the pulse of this campaign than other Beltway reporters. Some of the blog movement doesn’t care about moving the center, but just winning. But the majority of are hoping to move the center far back to the left and totally discredit the Republican movement as it has evolved since 1980. That doesn’t mean we want to go back to the 1970’s. It means we want to beat the Republicans so badly that they will have to find a new coalition and a more socially moderate agenda. We have a two-party system. We can’t afford to have one party hopelessly corrupt and in the thralls of religious fundamentalists. It’s dangerous and bad for our country. Maybe Ned Lamont is the canary in the coal mine. Maybe we are about to start the long march back to power.
