In the wake of the Lieberman/Lamont campaigns, past and future, there’s a renewed preoccupation across the progressive blogosphere about the nature of “bipartisanship.” The general story line is that corrupt and weak Democratic centrists, lusting for the approval of the Two David B.’s (Brooks and Broder), are determined to cave in to Bush and the GOP in the name of “bipartisanship.” This jogged my memory about a New Dem Dispatch back in January of 2001 about the likely trajectory of “bipartisanship” in the Bush era. Just for grins, and for the instruction of those who think the DLC is blind about Rovian partisanship, here it is again. Yes, it’s long, but the subject is important and complicated.DLC New Dem Daily January 9, 2001Ten Kinds of BipartisanshipGeorge W. Bush’s transition has been surrounded by a mist of unfocused talk about bipartisanship, which is said to be, along with an uncompromising commitment to his conservative campaign agenda, the most important principle guiding the first days of his administration. We thought it might be useful to bring a little clarity to the subject by outlining ten distinct types of bipartisan coalitions that have been put together over the years, and then considering which types we might see in the near future.1. The Base-In CoalitionThis strategy, pursued most successfully by President Ronald Reagan in his initial budget in 1981, involves uniting one party in Congress and then picking off sufficient members of the other to put together a majority.2. The Center-Out CoalitionAs the name suggests, this strategy begins with a bloc of like-minded moderates from both parties and gradually adds members from each side until a majority is achieved. The NAFTA, GATT and China PNTR trade bills during the Clinton Administration were enacted by center-out coalitions.3. The Outside-In CoalitionThis variety, typically used by incoming Presidents during their “honeymoon” period, involves the aggressive, direct stimulation of public opinion to push members of the opposing party, especially those from states or districts where the President is popular, to come across the line.4. The Inside-Out CoalitionBy contrast, the Inside-Out Coalition is put together through selective deal-making among members, and then sold to the public as a coherent product. Also known as “logrolling,” the Inside-Out strategy reached its zenith in the last highway reauthorization bill crafted by the King of Asphalt, the now-retiring Rep. Bud Shuster (R-PA).5. The Big Barbecue(Rare and messy.) This is a variation on the Inside-Out Coalition, but on a grand scale, involving horse trading among the leadership of both parties and aimed at a near-universal consensus. The infamous 1990 budget agreement, which led President George I to violate his no-new-taxes pledges, is an example of a Big Barbecue.6. The Emergency CoalitionThis coalition traditionally emerges in support of the President during military actions, or, occasionally, during economic emergencies. The budget summitry that briefly emerged after the 1987 stock market plunge is an example of the latter.7. The Ideological CoalitionThis strategy was the standard operating procedure in Congress during the period between the New Deal and the Great Society when there were large numbers of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, and ideology replaced party loyalty on many issues. Such coalitions still emerge on some issues, such as international trade, where coalitions of pro- and anti-trade Democrats and Republicans are common.8. The Regional CoalitionOn some issues, especially agriculture and energy policy, regional factors regularly trump party. There are some signs of regional fault lines on trade and technology policy as well.9. GridlockIt’s not common to think of it this way, but partisan stalemate represents a bipartisan decision to maintain the status quo until the electorate provides a decisive election and the clear governing majority — an event that the two parties have now been waiting for since 1980.10. Partisan “Bipartisanship”This strategy, which is not, of course, genuine bipartisanship, involves a sustained campaign to convince the public that the opposing party is the only obstacle to bipartisan progress, and that one’s own party has an agenda that represents the real interests of all Americans. President Clinton’s success in projecting his agenda as representing “progress, not partisanship,” was the key to his recurring victories over Congressional Republicans in budget showdowns. Which of these ten types of bipartisanship are likely to be pursued by the new Bush Administration?The answer isn’t yet clear, but it’s important to remember the defining dilemma the President-elect has posed for the Republican Party. From the moment he announced his candidacy, George W. Bush has tried to achieve the maximum feasible change in the image of the Republican Party through the minimum necessary change in its ideology and agenda. He campaigned to “change the tone in Washington,” to create a “different kind of Republican Party,” and to pursue a new ideology of “compassionate conservatism,” but was the unquestioned candidate of the conservative “base,” and embraced a platform that was mostly composed of the age-old demands of the conservative movement.Given that dilemma, you’d have to guess that he’d like to redeem his pledge to pursue bipartisanship as quickly and as cheaply as possible so that he can then pursue his orthodox conservative agenda. That means he will promote the types of bipartisanship that involve the fewest real concessions to the opposition: Base-In Coalitions to pick off a few Democrats; Outside-In Coalitions to bring public pressure on the opposition; perhaps Inside-Out Coalitions on the Texas model to cut Democrats in on legislative deals; and above all, the Partisan “Bipartisanship” of constantly claiming that he embodies the genuine interests of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans.If that’s the case, Democrats who are interested in real bipartisanship should refuse to accept the cheap variety, and raise the price for bipartisan cooperation. Then George W. Bush will finally be forced to choose between his rhetoric and his agenda, and we’ll find out how different the real Republican Party actually is. Considering that this was published before the true Rovian nature of Bush’s agenda became clear, and at a time when the mainstream media were assuming Bush would “go centrist” because of the nature of the 2000 election, I think this analysis was rather prescient, if I say so myself. But no matter what you think, it should be understood that Democratic “centrists” don’t miss the point of Rovian polarization and what that means for genuine “bipartisanship.” There are legitimate differences of opinion about how Democrats should respond to polarization, but no real argument that the word “bipartanship” has many meanings, some of them legitimate, some not so: at least ten.

Now that virtually all of the votes are in, it’s clear that Joe Lieberman narrowly (52%-48%) lost to Ned Lamont in the Democratic primary in CT, and that Cynthia McKinney decisively lost her congressional seat (59%-41%) to Hank Johnson down in Georgia-4. Lieberman indicated he’d go on to compete for his seat in November, as an independent. While McKinney’s camp complained earlier tonight of supposed election machine irregularities, Johnson’s margin of victory makes any sort of challenge by the incumbent impractical.

I have no idea if anyone will be checking this blog tonight, but as of 9:30 p.m. EDT, the results from Connecticut and Georgia are showing that you don’t know nuthin’ if you don’t know where the votes are coming from.Ned Lamont has a narrow lead over Joe Lieberman in CT with a little over half the precincts reporting, but who knows exactly what that means? The CW in the Nutmeg State is that the urban precincts come in much later than the ‘burbs, which might mean Lieberman’s surge is yet to come. But I’m only guessing here.I have a much better idea about where the votes come from in GA, and I have to tell you, the early reports showing that Hank Johnson is demolishing Cynthia McKinney in Georgia-4 are very premature. Yes, he’s winning 3-1 with 18% of the precincts reporting, but every one of those precincts are low-vote, majority-white, Republican leaning precincts in Gwinnett and Rockdale Counties. Until boxes finally start coming in from Dekalb C0unty, where probably 95% of the votes in this runoff will be cast, there’s no way to know what’s really happening in this race.For those who care, the early returns from Georgia indicate that Jim Martin will almost certainly beat Greg Hecht for the Democratic nomination to run against Casey Cagle (the guy who beat Ralph Reed in a Republican primary) for Lieutenant Governor. Hecht’s whole campaign was based on trying to generate an anti-Atlanta vote against Atlantan Martin; but early returns show Martin winning in Savannah, Macon, Columbus, and a number of other south and central Georgia counties. And he’s winning easily in the north Atlanta suburbs as well.More later, if events justify it.

Well, August 8 is finally here, and no matter what happens in the Connecticut Democratic Senate primary, it will be nice to read about something else in the progressive blogosphere for a while. Apparently turnout is remarkably high, and it’s anybody’s guess who that favors, though Joe Lieberman’s campaign has repeatedly said its strategy depends on getting as many Democrats to the polls as possible. The polls will close in two and a half hours, so we’ll know sooon enough. But I will also be paying attention to the 4th congressional district Democratic runoff in Georgia, where the very latest poll had incumbent Cynthia McKinney still trailing challenger Hank Johnson 53-40. Turnout there seems to be light.

As a baby boomer, I have a lingering affection for The Rolling Stone, and not only because I read its music reviews obsessively back in the day. The Stone also gave Hunter S. Thompson a platform for his brilliant quasi-political ravings.Musical trends being what they are, I stopped reading Rolling Stone a good while ago, but after getting quoted briefly in a piece about MoveOn last year (an event that impressed my teenaged stepson more than all the NPR appearances imaginable), the DLC press office gave me a copy. What struck me most was the 10-1 ratio of upscale apparel ads to all the other content put together, but what the hell, somebody’s got to pay the bills.Still, I was moderately intrigued a few weeks back when my colleague Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, told me he had taken a call originally intended for me, from a Matt Taibbi, who was writing a piece for the Rolling Stone.”Jesus, Will,” I replied. “Don’t you remember Matt Taibbi? He’s the guy who did the New York Press piece a while back exposing you as the author of the ‘loathsome’ NewDonkey blog. You know, that fine bit of reportage accompanied by the crude grade-school drawing of Marshall Wittmann being sodomized by a moose.””Wish I had remembered his name,” said Will. “I’ve done hundreds of interviews with hostile reporters over the years, but nothing like this. The guy apparently just wanted to shriek at me; he already knew the answers to all his questions.”Taibbi’s piece, which appeared last week, was about what you’d expect from a guy who knows all the answers before he asks the questions. The crux of his “analysis” was a lurid interpretation of the use of the terms “liberal fundamentalism”and “purge” in a New Dem Dispatch (which I drafted as editor of the NDD, but which, as always, reflected an institutional take, not necessarily my own) about the national campaign against Joe Lieberman. Check this out:

Let’s be clear about what we’re dealing with here. These people are professional communicators. They don’t repeatedly use words like “purge”and “fundamentalist” — terms obviously associated with communism and Islamic terrorism — by accident. They know exactly what they’re doing. It’s an authoritarian tactic and it should piss you off. It pissed me off.

Aside from the fact that Taibbi appears to be perpetually P.O.’d without any particular encouragement, his “reasoning” on this point is a classic example of a smear posing as the exposure of a smear. As the NDD in question explicitly noted, the DLC started warning about the perils of “liberal fundamentalism” back in the 1980s, when nobody outside the CIA had ever heard of Osama bin Laden; then as now, “fundamentalism” refers to any set of intolerant, self-righteous beliefs. And I don’t know where Matt Taibbi gets the idea that the word “purge” is any more associated with communism than with any other political movement. I probably know as much as any blogger in Christendom (with the exception of my colleague The Moose) about the history of communism, and I sure as hell don’t “obviously associate” the term with Reds of any hue.But nevermind. Taibbi’s shrewd explanation of my nefarious intentions was the necessary windup to the mighty anathema that concludes his piece:

The DLC are the lowest kind of scum; we’re talking about people who are paid by the likes of Eli Lilly and Union Carbide to go on television and call suburban moms and college kids who happen to be against the war commies and jihadists.

The fact that nobody at the DLC has ever actually “gone on television” to say anything like that is inconvenient to Taibbi’s “analysis,” and thus not worth researching, much less modifying or discarding. As for the tedious “corporate paymasters” crap, Taibbi does not bother to find out, much less explain, why an organization “paid by the likes of Eli Lilly” opposed its top legislative priority of the last decade, the Medicare Rx drug bill. Or why us “paid agents of the commercial interests” have loudly, consistently, and repeatedly opposed Bush’s economic policies, most especially each and every one of his tax cuts. Or why the “organization founded to help big business have a say in the Democratic platform” practically invented the term “corporate welfare,” and has endlessly and redundantly called for ridding the federal budget and tax code of corporate subsidies.But why bother with such complications when you already know what the DLC is up to?Maybe the editors at The Rolling Stone, or some of its readers, think of people like Matt Taibbi as successors to the explicitly non-objective political commentary of Hunter Thompson. And to be sure, HST was capable of prophetic abuse like no one else. But he generally relied on his own interpretation of actual facts, not just his prejudices, and was more than capable of non-predictable positions, like his early support for Jimmy Carter’s nomination for president in1976 (a position that would, if extrapolated to today’s inter-progressive politics, undoubtedly be excoriated as support for Holy Jimmy, a reactionary corporate-backed warmongering southerner).Matt Taibbi’s style of gonzo journalism, if that’s what he’s trying to practice, is more reminiscent of The Doctor’s sad declining years, when he could still write the abusive catch-phrases, but forgot how to give them life, or a sense of decency and truth. Taibbi’s sophomoric jibes are only ha-larious to people who already agree with him, and aren’t particularly interested in any sort of nuance or persuasion. And the cheerleading for his piece in various segments of the progressive blogosphere is far more discouraging than all the fact-based DLC- or Lieberman-bashing past, present or future.

Having just praised a Kevin Drum post, I have to register a dissent from another one. Reacting to a blogospheric colloquoy, extending to Matt Yglesias and Noam Scheiber, about generational differences in perceptions among Dems that I seem to have sparked with a recent post or two about Lieberman, Kevin scolds us old folks for worrying about the influence of the Left in the Democratic Party at a time when we should all be focused on the opposition:

Why should anyone even moderately left of center spend more than a few minutes a week worrying about a barely detectable liberal drift in the Democratic Party? Will the tut-tutters not be happy until CEOs make 1000x the average wage instead of the mere 400x they make now and the 200x they made during the Reagan years? How much farther to the right do they want Dems to go?….Worrying about lefties in the Democratic Party when the GOP is led by a guy named George Bush is like worrying about the Michigan Militia when a guy named Osama is driving airplanes into your buildings. The fogies need to get real.

Let’s put aside the slur about “fogies” wanting Democrats to move “farther to the right.” I sure as hell don’t, and I don’t think the quite young Noam Scheiber does, either. And I plead innocent as well to the charge, made by Kevin elsewhere in his rather angry post, that Democrats whose formative experiences were in the 1980s and early 1990s are obsessed with the need to play off lefty excesses to establish their mainstream credibility. Maybe Mickey Kaus feels that way; clearly my colleague The Moose–who is not, for the record, even a Democrat–thinks that’s what Democrats should do. But I don’t. And let’s remember why we are having this conversation. It’s not because hysterical centrists are scouring the political landscape looking for lefties to demonize or expel; it’s because there is a large and vocal body of opinion in the Democratic Party, some of it ideologically driven, some of it just partisan, that is deeply wedded to a particular interpretation of how the two parties got to their current condition. This interpretation heavily relies on the belief that in the 1990s and the early years of this century, a centrist, Clintonian Establishment sold out progressive principles, refused to fight against a disciplined Right, happily gave up Congress and a majority of the states, and essentially conceded defeat, in the pursuit of power and comfort, and the praise of David Brooks and David Broder. This is, indeed, a narrative widely shared in the netroots, and it has helped energize netizens to enlist in a conscientious effort to cleanse the Democratic Party of the centrist malefactors who let this happen.To the extent that this narrative is based on “facts” that some of us old fogies find to be empirically wrong, I don’t think we should be blamed for pointing that out. Because in the end, this is really and truly a debate among Democrats about how–not whether–to drive Republicans from power in Washington and elsewhere. I’m happy to “get real” about that, but reality does involve an honest discussion of how we got where we are today.

Props to Kevin Drum of Political Animal for noticing that the GOP’s minimum wage-estate tax abomination increases (to $10 million) and then indexes for inflation the exemption from the estate tax, but does not index the mimimum wage at all. I guess that’s not surprising, since most GOPers want to kill the estate tax altogether, and many would be happy if the minimum wage went away as well. Still, it’s an interesting contrast: it’s okay to let the value of the minimum wage continuously erode, affecting the most vulnerable working Americans, but not okay to let inflation snag a few wealthy families into paying the estate tax each year. I’m reminded of the term used by the character Jones in A Confederacy of Dunces for the statutory floor set on his earnings as a janitor at a New Orleans strip-joint: “the minimal wage.” That’s what it is, all right, and where it will remain if Republicans get their way.

At TAPPED, Matt Yglesias wrote a typically acute reaction to my post about the very different perceptions among Democrats of Joe Lieberman, the “D.C. Democratic Establishment,” and the Clinton legacy. Matt thinks the disconnect is primarily generational.I agree in part. It has certainly occurred to me before that people coming of political age in recent years have experienced a truly weird series of events: (a) the first impeachment of an American president since 1867; (b) the first presidential election to go into overtime since 1876; (c) the first quasi-military attack on the continental U.S. since 1812; (d) the first successful presidential candidacy since 1948 wherein the winner eschewed the political center and appealed mainly to his ideological base; (e) two consecutive midterm elections that broke all the rules about the performance of presidential parties; (f) the first unsuccessful major U.S. military engagement since Vietnam; and of course, (g) the rise of a whole host of hyper-partisan media outlets, from Fox News to the blogosphere.But I have to dissent in part as well. It’s not the reaction to recent events that gives me pause about the netroots interpretation of political life; it’s the ex post facto take on much older political developments. There are two tenets held fiercely in the netroots that are particularly suspect: (a) the development of the “right-wing noise machine” of conservative think tanks and media outlets was the primary reason for the conservative ascendancy associated with the rise of George W. Bush; and (b) Clintonian “centrism” was primarily responsible for the loss of congressional and state-level Democratic majorities in the 1990s.This is not the time or place to supply a systematic smack-down of these two premises, beyond the observations that (a) both the rise of the GOP and the decline of the Democratic Party in the 1990s were rooted in an ideological realignment of the two parties that favored the Right, and (b) the pre-Clinton Democratic orthodoxy had much more to do with the decline of down-ballot Donkey fortunes than anything Clinton did or did not do.But the big point is that even if you think us old guys don’t get it in terms of the current political climate (as a consistent chronicler of GOP responsibility for polarization, I plead nolo contendere), when it comes to the netroots pre-history of how Democrats got to where they are today, my g-g-g-eneration deserves a hearing.

The psychodrama involving Mel Gibson’s admitted anti-Semitic and sexist outbursts during a DUI arrest is one of those few occasions wherein celebrity antics reveal something a bit deeper than the fatuousness of Celebrity Culture generally.Gibson has owned up to what he said to arresting officers during the bust, including a plenary indictment of Jews for being “responsible for all the the wars in the world,” and at least one nasty comment about a female officer on the scene. He’s abjectly apologized and all. But his suggestion that his bigoted remarks were attributable to Demon Rum, and to a “struggle with alcoholism,” are a bit strange, and represent an appeal to the Therapeutic Culture in whichno one is responsible for what they say or do Under the Influence of anything.It’s a well-established truism, based on millennia of human experience with hootch, that the kiss o’ the hops tends to peel back inhibitions and expose the true feelings of inebriants. Some would even say that up to a point (and Gibson’s blood-alcohol rating during the bust did not indicate black-out levels of drunkenness at all), inebriation tends to cultivate a certain clarity and honesty about Life in the Big Picture. So it’s not at all clear to me how taking the cure for booze-o-holia is going to cure Gibson of atavistic attitudes towards Jews or women.The whole issue, of course, stems from the well-founded concerns of Jews and Christians alike that Gibson’s self-proclaimed cinematic masterpiece, The Passion of the Christ, played into anti-Semitic stereotypes of the relationship between Jesus Christ and his fellow Jews–the very sterotypes that fed many centuries of Christian persecution of Jews, culminating in the Holocaust.It wouldn’t surprise anyone if Gibson decided to interpret the rejection of The Passion of the Christ by mainstream Hollywood as motivated by Jewish hostility to the lurid associations reinforced by his film. But given the vast profits he made, and the pervasive influence he’s had on the conservative Christians who flocked to the cineplexes to see the flick and held showings in their sanctuaries, he’s hardly in a position to pose as a victim.So: fine, let’s all accept Gibson’s apologies for what he said, and give him a chance to make amends. But it would be nice if ol’ Mel would stop blaming John Barleycorn for his issues, and maybe admit his ongoing complicity in the most ancient and horrific of Christian heresies: anti-Semitism. It comes out of an entirely un-Christlike heart, not out of a bottle.

Over at MyDD, Matt Stoller poses one of the first interesting questions I’ve read in weeks amidst the hourly torrent of abuse towards Joe Lieberman. Prompted by a Josh Marshall post depicting Lieberman’s current political travails as “tragic,” Matt wants to know, basically, why anybody out there ever thought highly of Lieberman:

To me, Lieberman’s vicious and reactionary nature seems quite clear and consistent. Everything from his right-wing culture warring against Hollywood to his sandbagging of Clinton’s health care initiative in 1994 to his fights with Arthur Levitt at the SEC to ensure that accounting loopholes could remain to his preening about Lewinsky to his undermining of Gore in 2000 indicate that he was never the stalwart and principled man his supporters imagine. I hated each of these events separately, though I never put them together until 2001, when I really started paying attention to politics. I just sort of thought, even as a kid, who are those putzes on TV grilling carnival freak Dee Snyder? I hated the culture war nonsense, I always thought it was fake pandering.The thing is, there are too many folks I respect who say he was once a great and likeable man to just discount these opinions. What’s going on here? I’m honestly curious. Why was Lieberman ever considered a good man? Was it just that our moral universe is totally different now because of Bush’s extremism? If you have insight on this, please let me know.

Now I have no particular reason to believe Matt Stoller respects me, so maybe I’m responding to a question posed to others. But the question itself reflects a whole lot of the dialogue of the deaf–not just about Lieberman, but about his record, the nature of progressivism, and the political history of the Democratic Party in the 1990s–surrounding this primary.I will take seriously the claim, reflected in Matt’s post, that hostility to Lieberman is not just about his position on Iraq–which I strongly disagree with myself. So let’s take a look at the broader indictment of Lieberman as a politician who has always embodied the qualities so hated by the netroots.To take the easy stuff first, the caricature of Joe Lieberman as a typical, egomaniacal Washington blowhard is really hard to accept if you’ve ever spent any time around the man. He is routinely self-deprecating in a city, and an institution (the U.S. Senate) where this quality is seen as a sign of weakness. He is notorious within the Senate itself primarily for his civility to colleagues, and his entirely atypical decent treatment of his own staff (he stands at one end of the spectrum that ranges across stern indifference and routine abuse to the ultimate Washington Boss from Hell, Arlen Specter). And while I don’t have any real knowledge about the quality of Lieberman’s constituent services operation, I do know that during the five-plus years he was DLC chairman, he and his staff were vigilant about any DLC pronouncement that compromised Connecticut interests.No, I’m not saying any of this is an important reason for supporting Joe Lieberman in the August 8 primary; but it is germane to Matt’s question about why anyone should like the guy at all, and to the general netroots take on Joe as some sort of avatar of the Washington Establishment.Matt’s recitation of Lieberman’s ancient sins against progressive orthodoxy is almost as easy to swat down. This is the first time I’ve read anywhere that Lieberman was a serious obstacle to the Clinton Health Plan in 1994. Lord a’mighty, much of the Senate Democratic Caucus, most notably the chairman of the committee of jurisdiction, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, presented a far bigger obstacle. And the Plan itself, and particularly its marketing, were bigger problems than anything any Democratic senator said or did.The slam about Lieberman’s “preening about Lewinsky” reflects another odd anti-Lieberman talking point: the idea that Joe Lieberman stabbed Bill Clinton in the back by making a speech suggesting that the Big He had done something blameworthy. At the time, Joe’s “Lewinsky speech,” while hardly pleasant to the White House, was considered an effort to pave the way to a censure resolution in place of impeachment. And that’s of course what happened. Clinton’s own endorsement of, and campaign appearance with, Lieberman should lay this slur to rest.And the stuff about Lieberman “undermining Gore” is really bizarre. I will never forget watching the Lieberman-Cheney debate, and literally scratching the TV screen in frustration that Joe wasn’t hammering Cheney on this or that point. But I also knew that this approach was totally scripted by the Gore high command, which erroneously expected Cheney to do his Darth Vadar routine instead of playing the avuncular grandfather. Point B in the “Joe undermines Al” case generally revolves around the small incident during the Florida recount saga when Lieberman disclaimed any intention of challenging overseas military ballots. Again, Joe was totally doing what the Gore campaign told him to do; some of Gore’s lawyers dissented from the decision, and later said so, but it wasn’t Lieberman’s fault. And more importantly, Gore clearly would not have been in the position to lose the election in overtime had Lieberman not been on the ballot; Joe’s incredible popularity in South Florida gave the ticket its surprising strength in that state in the first place. Gore’s inability to carry his own home state was a much bigger problem than anything Joe Lieberman did or did not do.The larger point raised by Matt’s post is perhaps the biggest disconnect between Lieberman’s supporters and detractors:

Josh isn’t the only one talking as if Lieberman were once Ghandi; it’s a trend among men I know that are in their thirties or above, and had a strong connection to the political establishment prior to 2001.

The suggestion here is that anyone defending Lieberman’s past, as well as his present, record, is blinded by “a strong connection to the political establishment.” And the planted axiom is that Lieberman has always been the embodiment of “the political establishment.”I don’t know if Matt Stoller can understand or accept this, but Joe’s popularity among Clintonites in the 1990s was precisely a function of the belief that he did not represent “the political establishment.” While he had a strong progressive record dating back decades, he was not a slave to party discipline. He was willing to innovate left and right on policy issues, just like Bill Clinton. He was willing to engage in what Matt calls “culture warring on Hollywood” because he wasn’t willing to give the avaricious multinational corporations of the entertainment industry a pass on accountability for their products, any more than oil companies or HMOs. Joe Lieberman, like Bobby Kennedy, was not afraid to defy the elites in his own party in the pursuit of a broader progressive vision. And putting aside the Lewinsky Speech, Lieberman was without question the most resolute and consistent supporter of Bill Clinton’s vision and agenda in the national party, at a time when “the political establishment” still viewed Clinton as a triangulating heretic.Maybe he was right, and maybe he was wrong, but the idea that Joe Lieberman has always been some sort of lifelong quasi-Republican just isn’t factual. And the contradictory idea that Lieberman is the American Beauty Rose of the DC Democratic Establishment is equally off-target.The moment in the current campaign that most raised this particular issue was the sudden appearance of California Rep. Maxine Waters in Connecticut to stump for Lamont. For anyone with a political memory, this was striking: when Al Gore chose Joe Lieberman as his running-mate, the main trap that had to be run was Maxine Water’s objection to Joe’s mildly expressed view that maybe class-based affirmative action should ultimately replace race-based affirmative action. Lieberman was forced to kowtow to Waters personally and publicly,
and the ultimate sign that Joe was acceptable to the entire party was his widely circulated photo kissing Maxine just before the Convention.That “kiss” has been forgotten in all the furor over Lieberman’s “kiss” from Bush.So who represented the “party establishment” in 2000 and who represents it now? Joe Lieberman or Maxine Waters?I pose this as a real question, not as a rhetorical question. From one point of view, Lieberman represents a DC Democratic establishment that is addicted to bipartisanship, obsessed with power in Washington, and disinterested in progressive policymaking. From another point of view, Lieberman represents a progressive tradition that needs to be modernized, not abandoned–against the perpetual opposition of entrenched Democratic incumbents in Washington like Maxine Waters, who never face electoral opposition and set themselves up as guardians of this program or that. This disconnect represents a broader disagreement between those who think of the Gore and Kerry campaigns as the disastrous denouement of Clintonism, and those who think these campaigns were crippled by the older Democratic orthodoxy of interest-group liberalism.I frankly do not agree with either side of the Lieberman-Lamont fight in their contention that this is some sort of Democratic Gotterdammarung that will perpetually resolve every intraparty dispute. Much as I stubbornly admire Joe Lieberman, it’s clear he is a clumsy politician who lives in the pre-Karl-Rove atmosphere that permitted genuine bipartisanship. The Clinton New Democrat tradition in the party would survive his defeat.But I also think the savaging of Lieberman as “vicious and reactionary” is a terrible sign of the defection of many progressives from reality-based politics. And to respond specifically to Matt Stoller’s questions, the idea that Joe is the epitome of the “Democratic establishment” is a krazy-kat reflection of the false belief that Clintonism completely conquered Washington, and is the source of every D.C. establishment vice. If you took a straw poll of the consultants, the DNC types, and safe-seat House Members who surely represent an important part of the D.C. Democratic Establishment, I doubt you’d find anything like majority support for Joe Lieberman. He’s only the embodiment of the Establishment when viewed through the looking glass of those who view all their friends as brave insurgents, and all their enemies as The Man.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey