I argued in my previous post that the Democrats were better off not presenting a coherent alternative to the Republicans. The best chance the opposition party has of winning is if the voters don't have to think much about who would replace the Republicans. It probably isn't helping that some Democrats have decided to purge Joe Lieberman from the ranks of their elected officials. Lieberman, once a handful of pregnant chads away from the office of Vice President is facing a serious primary challenge from one Ned Lamont. Lamont is Howard Dean without the scream. Lieberman's sin is that he continues to support the Gulf War. Rich Lowery at National Review notes how unusual Joe's steadfastness is.
As the poet once said, you don’t have to be a weatherman to tell which way the wind is blowing. You only have to be a weather-vane politician sticking his (or her) finger in the wind. John Edwards has repudiated the war and lurched left since his 2004 vice-presidential run. He leads in presidential polls in Iowa. John Kerry regrets his prior support of the war and wants a deadline, any deadline, for exiting Iraq. Even the cautious Hillary Clinton just turned her back on Lieberman by saying she would support Lamont if he wins the primary.
It's possible, of course, that voters unhappy with the war (that would be most of them) will vote for anyone who opposes it, regardless of what his or her position was in the past, or who muddled it has been. But a shift in time still makes one look, well, rather shifty. Lowery points out the difficulties if the moderates in the Democratic Party collapse.
After the 2004 election, then-New Republic editor Peter Beinart wrote an influential article calling on liberal hawks basically to purge the antiwar zealots from the party. Instead, the antiwar zealots are conducting a purge of the liberal hawks, and why not? They are a majority within the party, and events have done more to vindicate than to discredit their opposition to the Iraq war — so much so that even erstwhile purger Beinart has called his support for it a mistake. . . .
[But] if Lieberman does lose, it will be a sign that Clinton herself is vulnerable to a challenge from the left in the 2008 presidential primaries. Then, she will be under enormous pressure to walk away from her support of the war, too.
If she does so, she will look like another weather-vane, and her party will come more to resemble the party of Cindy Sheehan. It will also mean the defeat of what her husband's presidency once stood for. Lowery comments on the implications of a Lamont win:
Lamont is a straight Deaniac, not just in his opposition to the war, but in his demographic profile: white, well-off and highly educated. These are the same people who backed the successful peacenik insurrection of George McGovern in 1972, and now they are bidding to make their control of their party all the more complete. Democratic commentator Marshall Wittmann calls the left-wing bloggers “McGovernites with modems.”
Their main issue is the war, but they also represent a general repudiation of the one hiccup in the post-1972 McGovernite dominance of the party, the Clinton administration circa 1994-1998. Clinton was pro-growth, pro-free trade, tonally moderate and willing to use force abroad. Al Gore spurned this winning centrist formula in 2000, but he felt compelled to make a bow to it by picking the moderate Lieberman as his running mate. Now, the Democratic party is on the verge of saying a Lieberman-style hawkish-centrism is utterly anathema.
Maybe McGovern's time has finally come. But if so, it will be the first time.
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