Lieberman’s
Defeat And
The State Of American Politics
By Barry Grey
10 August 2006
World
Socialist Web
The
response of Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman and the Democratic
Party leadership to Lieberman’s defeat in Tuesday’s Democratic
primary election says a great deal about the politics of the Democratic
Party and the state of American politics as a whole.
Lieberman, a three-term senator
and the Democratic vice presidential candidate in 2000, lost by a 52
to 48 percent margin to Ned Lamont, an heir to the Lamont family fortune
and multi-millionaire businessman, who ran as an opponent of the war
in Iraq.
Lamont, a political unknown
when he announced his decision to oppose Lieberman’s bid for a
fourth term last February, made the war the central issue in his campaign
and tapped into the overwhelming anti-war sentiment of Democratic voters,
as well as their anger over Lieberman’s vocal defense of the war
and the policies of the Bush administration more generally.
The World Socialist Web Site
will, in ensuing articles, examine in some detail the politics of Ned
Lamont, which are firmly rooted in the defense of American capitalism
and its imperialist interests around the world, notwithstanding his
criticisms of the Bush administration’s disastrous adventure in
Iraq. These criticisms, it should be pointed out, reflect the views
of a significant section of the American foreign policy establishment,
which has come to see the invasion and occupation of Iraq as a foreign
policy blunder of immense proportions.
There is no doubt, however,
that Lamont’s challenge to Lieberman was a crack in the bipartisan
pro-war front of the US political establishment through which popular
opposition to the war could be registered in the electoral arena. Tuesday’s
Connecticut primary was an unambiguous repudiation by Connecticut Democrats
of the war and the war’s most prominent and strident Democratic
supporter.
Lieberman’s response
was to announce, in his concession speech Tuesday night, his intention
to oppose Lamont in the November election by running as an independent.
With this declaration, Lieberman expressed his contempt for the democratic
will of the voters within his own party. Even if someone in Lieberman’s
position had managed to win the primary, one would have expected him
to at least give the appearance of being chastened and to make some
acknowledgment of the deep and sincere opposition to his policies.
Instead, he ignored entirely
the issue which was pivotal in his defeat—the war in Iraq—and
cast Lamont’s victory as a triumph of “the old politics
of partisan polarization.” Implicitly dismissing as illegitimate
any opposition to the war, he denounced his opponent for employing “insults
instead of ideas.”
“For the sake of our
state, our country and my party, I cannot and will not let that result
stand,” he declared. No “the people have spoken” here!
One is reminded of the ironic aphorism of Bertolt Brecht: When the people
make the wrong choice, it is necessary to elect a new people.
The thrust of Lieberman’s
remarks was an appeal to Republican voters. In the course of a brief
speech he denounced “partisan politics” and political “polarization”
at least five times. Presenting an upside-down view of Washington politics—where
Democratic prostration before Bush and the Republicans is omnipresent—he
spoke of the “partisan politics that has assailed Washington today.”
Having conceded defeat to an opponent who attacked him for rubber-stamping
the policies of the Bush administration, he made the absurd claim that
“People are fed up with the petty partisanship and angry vitriol
in Washington.”
He called for a “new
politics of unity and purpose,” and just in case his message was
not sufficiently clear, he added, “I will never hesitate to work
with members of the other party if it helps me achieve solutions”
and said his campaign would aim to “unite the people of Connecticut—Team
Connecticut—Democrats, Republicans and Independents so we can
go forward together...”
This is the man who was supported
by the entire Democratic Party leadership. Former president Bill Clinton
campaigned for him against Lamont, and the leadership of the Democratic
Party in Congress backed him, including supposed war critics like Senator
Barbara Boxer of California.
To take the measure of Lieberman
and the Democratic Party as a whole, one need only compare the senator’s
defiance of Connecticut’s Democratic voters with his cowardice
and indifference to the theft of the 2000 election. Then, as the vice
presidential candidate, he could barely manage a whimper in the face
of an open, illegal and ruthless campaign by the Bush campaign and the
Republican Party to block the counting of votes in Florida.
Lieberman had, by that point,
already demonstrated his inveterate spinelessness before the Republican
right with a fawning performance in his vice presidential debate with
Dick Cheney. And when the Republicans sought to witch-hunt the Gore-Lieberman
ticket and incite the military brass against it in the midst of the
legal wrangling in Florida by demanding that illegal absentee military
ballots be counted, Lieberman appeared on national television to support
the Republican demand.
Lieberman today refuses to
accept the verdict of the voters in his own party, but six years ago
he accepted without protest the verdict of a Republican majority on
the Supreme Court to halt the counting of votes and hand the election
to George W. Bush.
No less significant was the
response of the Democratic leadership in Congress to Lieberman’s
defeat. On Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and Charles
Schumer, the chairman of the Senatorial Campaign Committee, issued a
joint statement formally supporting Lamont in the November election.
They called the Connecticut primary election a referendum on George
Bush, but failed even to mention the issue on which the election turned—the
war in Iraq.
Similarly, Representative
Rahm Emanuel, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign
Committee, said the election was a “referendum about being a rubber
stamp” for the Bush administration. It showed that voters “want
change, they want a new direction,” he declared. But again, he
avoided any mention of the war.
Emanuel even suggested that
Connecticut voters had unfairly judged Lieberman to be in the pocket
of the Bush White House, and made the improbable claim that Lieberman’s
decision to run as an independent would help the Democrats by bringing
more voters to the polls.
None of these party leaders
denounced Lieberman for defying the will of Democratic voters and running
against the party’s senatorial candidate in Connecticut. When
asked if he would call on Lieberman to drop out of the race, Emanuel
said the decision was Lieberman’s.
These statements of official
backing for Lamont only underscore the central fact that the Democratic
Party leadership supports the war in Iraq and wants to exclude this
single most critical issue facing the American people from the November
elections.