A Trip To The Watershed
Dan Balz in the Washington Post notes that the Lieberman-Lamont face-off may have consequences for the Democrats. Maybe he should have been reading this blog, since we've been saying that for months now.
Should Lieberman lose, the full ramifications are far from certain. One may be to signal immediate problems for Bush and the Republicans in November, but another could be to push Democrats into a more partisan, antiwar posture, a prospect that is already adding powerful new fuel to a four-year-long intraparty debate over Iraq.
Strategists say the Connecticut race has rattled the Democratic establishment, which is virtually united behind the three-term incumbent's candidacy, and will force an uneasy accommodation with the newest, volatile power center within the party.
"This sends a message to all Democratic officeholders," said Robert L. Borosage of the liberal Campaign for America's Future. "You're going to have a much tougher Democratic Party."
That could be felt most acutely by Clinton, who polls show is the early front-runner for the 2008 nomination and who has drawn criticism from what are known as net-roots activists for opposing a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. Clinton appears to have gotten the message, as she demonstrated with sharp questioning of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld at a Senate hearing on Thursday.
The Connecticut race may be seen as an intensification of the partisan, polarized politics of the Bush era. Lieberman is paying a price for being an advocate of bipartisanship.
As a result, a loss on Tuesday could generate more demand for a strongly anti-Bush, antiwar candidate in the Democratic primaries. Several are ready to run, including Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), former senator John Edwards (N.C.) and Sen. Russell Feingold (Wis.), the only one of the three to vote against the war in 2002.
None, however, may be as attractive to the grass-roots activists as Gore. He has said he cannot conceive of circumstances that would put him in the race. But he may be coaxed to reconsider if the sentiment for him grows after the November midterm elections.
But the problem is, as it always has been since the 1970's, that the farther left the Democrats go, the less electable they are. The farther left, the less credible on defense they become. The absolute killer passage in this article, though:
But leaders of the net-roots activists, and some party strategists, argue that as antiwar sentiment spreads Democrats stand to gain politically by aggressively challenging Bush's war policies. Parallels to Vietnam are inaccurate, they say, because of the nature of an Iraq war that has become a low-level sectarian civil war.
The bar is actually moving visibly here. All along the left has been desperate to paint Iraq as Vietnam. They want it to be Vietnam. But when they stand to get that hung on them, they try as hard as they can to paddle away from it, knowing darn well that Vietnam also ruined the viability of the Democrats for many years.
