I guess at this point that I don’t think Joe Lieberman is going to respond well to attacks from his left. I’m betting that the more he gets attacked from the left, the more comfortable he gets representing the right. I don’t know if he plans on running for reelection in 2012, but I can’t see him possibly winning the Democratic nomination. So, his reelection plan would appear to be to create a repeat of 2006, where the Republican Party offered only a token candidate in opposition to Lieberman and the Democratic nominee, and they let it be known to the base that they wanted Lieberman to win.
If I’m right, then Lieberman really needs to be more concerned about keeping the right happy than the left. And if he is going to retire in 2012, then the only way to influence him at all is to appeal to his vanity. He will want to be remembered as someone of substance who accomplished big things. I don’t think he can be convinced that he’ll get credit for being a great senator by caving into liberal attack ads. But he might get warm in his pants if he thinks he can get credit for being the deciding vote on climate change legislation or something. Obama probably did the right thing by appealing to the grandeur of the moment rather than asking Holy Joe to do the right thing on the public option. Lieberman wants revenge, but he also wants to be seen as relevant. Well…he’s relevant. So relevant, in fact, that I doubt he will respond well to being poked with a liberal stick.
I’m sick of him.
He is an ass hole and I regret not telling him personally when I ran into him at Georgetown movie theater last year.
I understand that Lieberman is what he is and the Senate leadership is frustrated with him as well. But I think a lot of the anxiety on the left would be assuaged if there was some signal that Holy Joe was paying a price for his positions. Has Reid ever threatened him with losing his chairmanship? To put things in perspective and underscore how different the parties are right now, Olympia Snowe is threatened by her party with losing her MINORITY ranking membership on committees for simply doing what senators typically do: negotiate with the other party to extract concessions. In our party, Lieberman is rewarded/not punished for threatening to not vote for cloture on legislation the president campaigned on and promised.
I think i can live with HCR passing without the public option if there’s consequences for each and every senator who stood against the party. otherwise, i’m going to join the movement in the netroots to sit on our hands in 2010 and support the handful of incumbents and challengers who are committed to change. Inevitably we’ll have less numbers after 2010, but a stronger, more disciplined caucus. Seems like the purge the traitors strategy has worked tremendously well for the GOP, whether they are in the majority or minority- they remain very powerful.
The problem: contemptible as so many of them are, Dems are not the corrupt robots that the Reps are. In spite of everything, I still want congresspeople who can think. The Dems are the only source from which such a creature can emerge.
I suspect Lieberman has been threatened with loss of his privileges — otherwise he’d be even more gollumish than he is now. I don’t see that making public threats is the smart way to go about this, gratifying as it would be to see. However, if Lieberman does manage to nuke HCR, it is absolutely a line in the sand that he be kicked out of the caucus and savaged to the max so he’s no longer worth anything to the Reps or the lobbyists or anybody else. If the Dems let him destroy their signature legislative initiative without destroying him in the process, it’s time for a scorched earth intra-party power struggle, whatever the consequences.
I think you can exempt Max Baucus and Mary Landreiu from that statement.
Ok, put it another way — not part of the corrupt robot army the Reps are.
I wonder if they’re trying to avoid the narrative of Lieberman being the Democratic equivalent to Jim Jeffords. If not then they ought to boot him from the caucus if he won’t comply.
I hope he runs because I would like to see him suffer an utterly humiliating, crushing defeat, which he almost certainly would at this point. As vain as he is, even he probably realizes how real that possibility is, so my guess is he’ll retire and become an overt insurance industry operative rather than a covert one. That way, Aetna can pay him straight up instead of on the down-low.
Perhaps we should hope that a teabagger candidate runs for Senate in Connecticut and siphons off votes from Joe’s right-wing base.