Chuck Schumer tries to strongarm Ned Lamont

If you'll recall, NY Sen. Chuck Schumer was successful in getting Paul Hackett to bow out of the Ohio Senate race against Mike DeWine in favor of Rep. Sherrod Brown.

Now Schumer has decided to run what is essentially an incumbency protection racket by trying to do the same to Ned Lamont.

David Sirota reports:

Schumer, a consummate Washington insider, is now using his position as head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to try to crush his own party's activists in Connecticut. According to Time Magazine, Schumer has pressed Senate candidate Ned Lamont (D) to abandon his run against Sen. Joe Lieberman (D) - the Democratic incumbent who has repeatedly and destructively undermined the Democratic Party for years. Schumer has also said he would consider backing Lieberman's bid for re-election even if Lieberman leaves the Democratic Party.

None of this is surprising. Schumer's been a Washington politician for decades - and grassroots energy frightens people like him. But what is surprising is how Schumer has become so desperate, he is now flinging out wild stories to justify his actions. Time reports that "Schumer has told colleagues he thinks that if Lieberman lost the primary, it would send a bad signal to moderate voters and might hurt the party's chances of winning Senate seats in places like Montana and Missouri in November."

One of two things explains this comment - either Schumer is even more out of touch with American politics than previously thought, or he's so desperate he's resorted to fabricating patently laughable stories to justify his nauseating behavior. It is definitely possible Schumer is totally and completely out of touch - he's made similar comments in the past that expose him as having positively no understanding of anything that goes on outside his insulated world in Washington.  And self-important politicians and political operatives in our nation's capital do have a tendency to believe ordinary voters are super keyed into the minutia of politics - often making these insiders look particularly stupid and more out of touch.

But I believe Schumer's just desperate, and thus resorting to open dishonesty - because I just can't believe he could be so intellectually impaired that he actually believes Joe Lieberman losing would imperil Democrats chances in states thousands of miles away from Connecticut, with totally different political dynamics. The idea that a voter in, say, the critical swing area of Yellowstone County here in Montana is going to vote against Jon Tester in November because Joe Lieberman was defeated in a Democratic primary in August is beyond the scope of what can even be called "totally absurd" - it's an out and out lie, and one that could only be mouthed with a straight face in a place as sadly comical as Washington, D.C. is today.

Here's the deal: what's going on in Connecticut is good for the Democratic Party and good for democracy. No politician - not Joe Lieberman, not Chuck Schumer - owns a congressional seat. We the people do, and thankfully, at least some courageous Democrats like Sen. Russ Feingold (D) understand that and are willing to use their position to give voice to that truism. When incumbents get challenged by courageous people like Ned Lamont because those incumbents are selling out America, that's democracy in action. And any politician or political operative who tries to thwart that contest shows an ugly contempt for the democratic tradition our country was built on.

Schumer claims to be concerned with winning elections - but what he's really concerned about is maintaining his and his insulated colleagues' increasingly weakening hold on power. What will help Democrats win elections will be a surge in grassroots energy and a reengaged corps of activists who are working to take their party and country back - energy like we are seeing in Connecticut. What will hurt Democrats ability to win elections is New York Senators sitting in their comfortable offices in Washington, D.C. embarrassing themselves by making statements that show their isolation from America's heartland and using their quickly fading power to try to depress the grassroots energy that makes all the difference at the ballot box.

What Schumer's devotion to the power of incumbency means, combined with David Brooks' hysterical frothings yesterday which tried to elevate Markos Moulitsas Zúniga to the level of a kind of dweeby Oz the Great and Terrible, is that the Axis of Evil that the party apparatchiks and the press have become during the last five years, in their race to see who can fellate the Bush Administration harder, is becoming concerned about their ability to maintain power.

The Lamont/Lieberman race is a watershed moment in Democratic politics. If Lieberman manages to prevail, it slows, but does not stop, the growing influence of grassroots and netroots organizing. If Lamont should manage to score the upset against the entrenched Bush apologist that Joementum has become, it still doesn't mean that the netroots has scored a touchdown, for there is still November, Karl Rove, and Diebold to take into account. But a Lamont primary victory would force Schumer to show his hand, and that hand is that Schumer, like most Democratic leaders even down to the local level here in Bergen County, New Jersey, is not about democracy or leadership or policy -- it's about protecting the status quo at all costs. Schumer has indicated that he would support Lieberman if the latter should run as an independent. Even Russ Feingold, who supports Lamont, said on Press the Meat yesterday that he would support the Democratic nominee, even if that nominee is Lieberman; though he made clear that he would not be actively campaigning in Connecticut either way.

The 2004 primary race showed just how entrenched the status quo is, and how difficult it's going to be to topple it. Brooks' column yesterday has him putting on the progressive hat and essentially claiming that Kos has sold out. Far be it for me to defend the alpha dogs in Blogtopia (™ Skippy), but I'm not sure I can blame Kos for not adhering to the same scorched earth policy that I do in my vow to never again vote for a candidate that the party apparatchiks try to shove down my throat when that candidate doesn't stand for what I do.

I understand the "need to take back the House" from the Republicans, but here in the NJ Fifth District, I've just been through a campaign that saw a guy nominated by my party for Congress who doesn't even live in the district; a guy who thinks that asking him how he reconciles a terse statement in favor of net neutrality with having Mike McCurry as a shill is a "personal attack"; a guy who is perhaps the worst example of hack politics I've ever seen in this most hackish of states. Paul Aronsohn is the living embodiment of everything that is cynical, self-serving, and odious about New Jersey Democratic politics, and I'm not going to vote for him under any circumstances. Of course, I don't have children, and even if I manage to stay on this level of reality as long as my grandmothers did, that gives me about another 40 years -- and maybe we can manage to keep something together long enough for me to get done and check out.

But for those less cynical than I, I'm not sure I can fault them for trying, however futile that effort might be, to split the difference in the hope, vain as it might be, that something can be salvaged from the wreckage of the United States in the waning years of the Bush reign.