Nedrenaline and the netroots

Ned Lamont's 33.5% showing at Connecticut's Democratic Party convention on Friday is a shot across the bow at the Democratic hackocracy. Whether Lamont can actually beat an entrenched incumbent like Joe Lieberman remains to be seen, but what does NOT remain to be seen is that this is a race that the netroots will be using as a test case to wield its muscle.

It's disheartening that the Democratic Party would view a group of people, many of them young, who have enthusiasm for the political process, as pesky flies to be swatted out of the way. But that's exactly what's happening, as the established hacks cling to the commission-based consultants who have done nothing but lose them elections. As reported at firedoglake, this clubbiness is so strong that Chuck Schumer, head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, won't commit to supporting Lamont over Lieberman if the former wins the primary and the latter decides to run as an independent:

Question: I’m curious: Is the DSCC taking a position where it will unconditionally support the eventual nominee of the Connecticut Democratic Party?

Schumer: We haven’t taken a position on that yet. . . (interrupted by crosstalk with staff over timing for a vote). What we do is. . . we are an organization of incumbents, and while we certainly find challengers who go up against incumbents, we support incumbents, so I know I didn’t answer your question, but we are supporting Lieberman at this point. Our general rule, and I don’t think there’s been an exception, is that we support the Democrat against the Republicans. We expect Lieberman will win, but if he doesn’t and Ned wins, my guess is we will support him. We haven’t taken a position on that but we’ve almost never deviated. I do not know of a time that the Democrats have deviated and not supported the Democrat.

Question: Would that hold if Senator Lieberman decided to run as an Independent?

Schumer: I think we’ll have to, you know, cross that bridge when we come to it, because it hasn’t happened. Will Senator Lieberman be pledging to vote for Harry Reid for Leader? Will he be running as a Democrat but on a different line? I don’t know; I’d have to give it. . . If it’s a Democrat versus a Republican, there’s no complicating factor. We’d, you know, almost always vote for the Democrat. In this situation we expect Lieberman to win. I don’t think. . . So, you know, we’ll have to weigh that when we come (sic). Our goal is first and foremost to elect a Democratic Senate. We think there’s a moral imperative there, given everything else, and I suppose that would guide our decision.

Question: So Senator, there’s a possibility that if Senator Lieberman runs as an Independent, and there’s another Democratic nominee, that the DSCC would be supporting the Independent?

Schumer: I’m not saying that there is a possibility. I’m saying we haven’t even begun to look at it yet.

Question: I hate to harp on this, but this is something that is big in the blogosphere. If the race does tighten, and Ned Lamont does make it a race, how committed is the DSCC to committing resources to Senator Lieberman since Senator Lieberman hasn’t committed to running as a Democrat?

Schumer: I think Senator Lieberman has committed to running as a Democrat to us. That’s me, and he has to Senator Reid.

For the Democrats, it's about the club; it's not about leadership or about building a party. This is why, instead of a resurgent Democratic Party built during eight years of a popular Democratic presidency, we had a party in ruins, unable to articulate a stand on anything, with no bank from which to draw when the 9/11 attacks blindsided the hacktocracy and forced it to march in lockstep with whatever the Bush Administration wanted to do; something Joe Lieberman continues to do even now that the Administration has been largely discredited.

Krugman, today:

Mr. Lieberman isn't the only nationally known Democrat who still supports the Iraq war. But he isn't just an unrepentant hawk, he has joined the Bush administration by insisting on an upbeat picture of the situation in Iraq that is increasingly delusional.

Moreover, Mr. Lieberman has supported the attempt to label questions about why we invaded Iraq and criticism of the administration's policies since the invasion as unpatriotic. How else is one to interpret his warning, late last year, that "it is time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be Commander-in-Chief for three more critical years, and that in matters of war we undermine Presidential credibility at our nation's peril"?

And it's not just Iraq. A letter sent by Hillary Clinton to Connecticut Democrats credited Mr. Lieberman with defending Social Security "tooth and nail." Well, I watched last year's Social Security debate pretty closely, and that's not what happened.

In fact, Mr. Lieberman repeatedly supported the administration's scare tactics. "Every year we wait to come up with a solution to the Social Security problem," he declared in March 2005, "costs our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren $600 billion more."

This claim echoed a Bush administration talking point, and President Bush wasted little time citing Mr. Lieberman's statement as vindication. But the talking point was simply false, so Mr. Lieberman was providing cover for an administration lie.

There's more. Mr. Lieberman supported Congressional intervention in the Terri Schiavo affair, back when Republican leaders were trying to manufacture a "values" issue out of thin air.

And let's not forget that Mr. Lieberman showed far more outrage over Bill Clinton's personal life than he has ever shown over Mr. Bush's catastrophic failures as commander in chief.

On each of these issues Mr. Lieberman, who is often described as a "centrist," is or was very much at odds not just with the Democratic base but with public opinion as a whole. According to the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, only 40 percent of the public believes that we were right to go to war with Iraq.

Mr. Lieberman's tender concern for the president's credibility comes far too late: according to a USA Today/Gallup poll, only 41 percent of Americans consider Mr. Bush honest and trustworthy. By huge margins, the public believed that Congress should have stayed out of the Schiavo case. And so on.

Mr. Lieberman's defenders would have you believe that his increasingly unpopular positions reflect his principles. But his Bushlike inability to face reality on Iraq looks less like a stand on principle than the behavior of a narcissist who can't admit error. And the common theme in Mr. Lieberman's positions seems to be this: In each case he has taken the stand that is most likely to get him on TV.

You see, the talking-head circuit loves centrists. But a centrist, as defined inside the Beltway, doesn't mean someone whose views are actually in the center, as judged by public opinion.

Instead, a Democrat is considered centrist to the extent that he does what Mr. Lieberman does: lends his support to Republican talking points, even if those talking points don't correspond at all to what most of the public wants or believes.

It's no accident that whenever you see a Democrat on the Sabbath Gasbag shows, it's always either Joe Biden or Joe Lieberman. Biden is a constant guest because he's a publicity hound and his tendency to make grand pronouncements that make no sense means he makes for good television, and Lieberman can be relied on to not rock the boat.

I'm seeing here in the 5th District of New Jersey what happens when upstarts dare to buck the party machine. Here, the county Democratic organization brought in a Clintonista from outside the district, rented him an apartment in which to hang his hat, and pushed the 2004 candidate out of the race. My own guess is that since Paul Aronsohn is not just a Clintonista with access to Clintonista cash but a former PR flack for a major pharmaceutical company in the state, the party sees him as a cash cow for the machine. But when said party apparatus is throwing county candidates off the party line in 20 towns in the district because they did not outright endorse the party boss' Designated Guy, it's clear that something in the system is very, very broken.

We've already seen the same situation in Ohio, where a dynamic, charismatic candidate, Paul Hackett, was forced out of the race against the Republican incumbent, Mike DeWine, by the aforementioned Chuck Schumer, so that the hacktocracy's guy, Sherrod Brown, could run virtually unopposed -- as if giving primary voters a choice were a BAD thing. Meanwhile, according to the latest Rasmussen poll, Brown has a hair-thin 44/41 lead in the latest Rasmussen poll -- hardly enough of a margin to win, especially when the kind of electoral shenanigans for which Ohio is now famous are taken into account. My guess is that when the votes are counted (or not counted, as is more likely, given Secretary of State Ken Blackwell's reputation), Mike DeWine will retain his Ohio Senate seat.

This is why the Lamont/Lieberman race is so important. A Lamont win in the primary
against arguably the most entrenched of entrenched incumbents would signal that if the old nexus of corporate cash and hack politicians isn't dead, its days are numbered.

The one caveat in this high-stakes race is that Lamont is from an old-money guy, and so is able to use his own funds to compete with the hacktocracy's unholy alliance with lobbyist cash; something a guy like Paul Hackett, or Camille Abate here in the NJ 5th, is unable to do without help.

I'm not convinced that the walls of Jericho surrounding the Do-Nothing Democrats are ready to fall yet, but provided the Republic lasts long enough (which is already in doubt, given the Administration's beleaguered state and dictatorial leanings), I do think we will ultimately prevail and throw every last fucking one of them out and replace them with people who have not forgotten that the job of our representatives in Washington is to serve the voters, not their own political ambitions.

This is exactly the kind of situation the netroots seeks to fix in supporting candidates like Ned Lamont.