10 Aug What Lieberman’s Defeat Means for the Democrats
This post by Suzanne Nossel and David Greenberg at Democracy Arsenal is a pretty accurate take on what Senator Joe Lieberman’s defeat to Ned Lamont in Tuesday’s primary means for the national security strategy of the Democratic party. Neither the “security-minded” liberals — who fear that Lieberman’s defeat represents proof the party has been captured by the isolationist left — nor the left-wing bloggers — who see the defeat as proof of their own populist power — got it right. Lieberman lost not because he voted for the war, but because he refused to acknowledge what many conservatives and other Democrats who have supported the war have long recognized: “that the war has gone badly wrong and that a radical change of course is needed.”
Lieberman didn’t lose because he voted for the war or because he opposes an immediate pull-out from Iraq. Plenty of other liberals hold those positions yet remain popular—including, notably, Senator Hillary Clinton, who also faces a primary challenge from an antiwar leftist yet is coasting toward reelection.
In fact, liberals, like other Americans, hold a wide range of views about what to do about Iraq. If a city gets built based on years of faulty plans and flawed construction, even the best engineers may not be able to agree on how to fix it. But liberals —and mounting numbers of independents and conservatives—have come to agree
This new consensus took time to gel. Many liberals started off supporting the war and believed for years that American efforts would somehow conjure a stable democracy out of Iraq’s hot and violent recesses. It took years of bloody photos on the front pages, bleak assessments from generals, and rising regional instability before doubt and fear hardened into distrust and frustration. But for nearly a year now, more than 60 percent of the public has disapproved of President Bush’s handling of the Iraq war.
Yet as the public mood changed, Lieberman stood still. While professing unhappiness with what he called a handful of “mistakes,” he held fast to his basic support of Bush’s policies. He offered no proposals to stabilize Iraq, reduce anti-American hostility worldwide, or spare the lives of more soldiers. Even his “last ditch” speech on Sunday aimed to shore up wobbly voters understated the gravity of the Iraq debacle. He showed no inclination to rethink the administration’s false framework of either “stay the course” or “cut and run.”
Though Lieberman’s piety and stern talk of principles have always played well with pundits who celebrate centrism and bipartisanship as ends in themselves, they came to strike Connecticut voters as arrogance. Lieberman’s stubborn consistency fed the impression not of a brave maverick but of a moralist too smug and proud of his cross-party ties to contemplate change, even in the face of America’s worst foreign policy debacle in decades. As a result, other long-standing grievances against him tumbled forth from voters.
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