Premptive Post Mortem

EJ Dionne paints us a nice, conventional wisdom based tale of primary election history. He whips out the 1980 primary in New York in which Alphonse D'Amato successfully unseated the long-serving Jacob Javits. You see, its supposed to be instructive as to what will presumably be the outcome in Connecticut with Joe Lieberman's primary against Ned Lamont.

 On Sept. 6, 1980, a group of nine Republican senators descended on New York state to help Sen. Jacob Javits, the liberal Republican running in a primary against a conservative named Alfonse D'Amato. Among them was Sen. Alan K. Simpson of Wyoming, who called Javits "an example to us, our counselor, our father confessor."

The comparison is flattering to Lieberman, given Javits's stature in the Senate, but it's not reassuring. D'Amato defeated Javits in that primary and went on to serve 18 years in the Senate.

Ideologically based primary challenges to important incumbents almost always signal major changes in the political winds. That's as true of Lamont's strong campaign against Lieberman as it was of D'Amato's victory, following as it did the primary defeats of two other liberal Republican senators — Clifford Case of New Jersey in 1978 and Thomas Kuchel of California 10 years earlier — at the hands of conservatives.

The upstarts who beat Case and Kuchel later lost the fall elections. But their cleansing of progressives from Republican ranks was part of a long conservative march that culminated in Ronald Reagan's 1980 victory and the hold that conservatives now have on the elected branches of the federal government.

The opposition to Lieberman is motivated by an effort to reverse the trend to the right. It's true that Lamont's campaign has been energized by widespread opposition to the Iraq war and the fact that Lieberman has been one of the most loyal Democratic defenders of President Bush's Middle East policies.

But Lieberman's troubles are, even more, about a new aggressiveness in the Democratic Party called forth by disgust with the Bush presidency — an energy comparable to the vigor that a loathing for liberalism brought to the Republican right in the 1970s and '80s

So there you have it, Dionne's handy-dandy guide to all that troubles the world. A sea-change, a political loathing, etc. etc. There is only one teeny little problem with the "Conventional Wisdom" (CW), however. It's not true in this case.

Were people roundly sick of a lot of things in 1980? You bet. The Carter presidency had drained the country and people wanted a change - Reagan had a mighty big set of coat tails. But something much more important - and tragic - defeated Javits. His diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. That was the weakness D'Amato exploited. And D'Amato really wasn't being cruel, just realistic - there were real doubts as to whether Javits could complete a term. (Javits died in 1986). That, as I recall, was a bigger issue back then than the rightward drift of the party with Reagan leading. That is also why he could not win running on the Liberal ticket. The CW parallel is false.

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