Scooping out the Democrats

“Many Democratic activists and bloggers have concluded that some of the party’s most visible scars are self-inflicted. When prominent Democrats regularly capitulate to Republicans, they undermine the rationale for an opposition party. Lieberman is seen as the serial offender.”
—Ari Melber, Democratic political activist, as quoted in today’s New York Times

Senator Joseph Lieberman’s 2006 campaign is exposing the battle being fought over the soul of the Democratic Party. As the above quotation indicates, there are many within the party who feel Lieberman’s voting record and public stances are too conservative; for others, Lieberman’s haughty incumbency and defiance in the face of a grass-roots effort to unseat him are grounds for dismissal; and for still others, Lieberman is a decent, conciliatory centrist in the mold of former Democratic Senators Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Eugene McCarthy, and Scoop Jackson.

One of the prominent battlefields for this conflict is the pages of The New York Times. Today’s article attempts to present both sides of the conflict; last week, in an op-ed, token conservative David Brooks called the campaign to oust Lieberman a “liberal inquisition,” which brought in some feisty responses in the paper’s mailbag. In sum, The Times’ search engine returns no fewer than 30 hits for Lieberman over the past thirty days. Outside of the so-called mainstream media, the left side of the blogosphere’s brain has been working overtime analyzing the campaign, and while there have been supporters of Lieberman online, the grass-roots insurgency in many cases has been a product of bloggers, many of whom do not reside in Connecticut. It is clear that the Connecticut primary is as close to a ‘national’ race as we will have this mid-term.

One of the questions of national importance to be discussed during the primary season, and on into the general elections this November, is what kind of party the Democrats will choose be. The answer will obviously have important implications for the 2008 Presidential election, and the Lieberman campaign will serve, for better or worse, as a barometer concerning what the answer is. A Lieberman loss in the primary will be seen as the farther leftward drift of the Democratic party; a Lieberman victory will be perceived as a party attempting to occupy more of the center of the political spectrum. Of course, the truth of these assertions and causal connections are tenuous, but this is the spin imparted to events.

For example, in the neighboring state of Rhode Island, Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee likewise is dealing with a troublesome, grass-roots rebellion, but his uprising is from the far right. Chafee, an avowed centrist and independent-minded Republican, will have to expend precious funds to see off challenger Stephen Laffey. Most view the challenge as significant, but not threatening, and have Chafee winning handedly. A Times archive search of Chafee produced one-tenth the hits of the Lieberman search in the last 30 days, and clearly, the left-center New York Times is more concerned with the hotter—and more interesting—Connecticut race. But taken together, the embattled status of centrists Lieberman and Chafee indicate the widening rift in American politics.

The Republican Liberty Caucus, a PAC affiliated with the Republican Party, has published a ‘Liberty Index’ every year since 1991. On its face, without allowing for changes in methodology or any one year’s legislative agenda, the Index over time demonstrates the faltering center of American politics. In 1991-92, the red and blue plot points tend to cluster in the center of the chart. Over time, as one reviews each year’s Index, the plot points begin to separate into their respective ends of the political spectrum.

It is amid such rancorous partisan sentiment that Joe Lieberman seeks to maintain the center. A devout Jew and a believer in centrism for its own sake, Lieberman is clearly out of touch with the left-liberal blogosphere, but is he out of touch with his own constituents? A recent graphic in The New York Times showed that, over that past 12 years, Lieberman has voted with the majority of his party in any given year no less than 75 percent of the time. Such an alignment of votes on the floor clearly shows that Lieberman is not a Southern-style ‘blue dog’ Democrat. In fact, the Democrats would be lucky to enforce such discipline upon another Democratic Senate hopeful, Harold Ford, Jr. of Tennessee, who has demonstrated a penchant for leaning to the right during his service in the US House of Representatives. Yet it is in the service of Mr. Ford that Democratic senators have gushed with enthusiasm, leading the likes of Charles Schumer to utter inanities such as, “Anyone who thinks the South in 2006 is the same as the South in 2004 is mistaken.” These are the same Democratic senators who have put distance between themselves and Mr. Lieberman. Notably, the bloggers have been largely silent on Mr. Ford’s voting record. This is likely out of expediency—most Democrats realize that their chances of retaking the Senate may well rely upon Mr. Ford’s ability to take Tennessee.

Such a comparison, however, leads one to believe that conservative—or even just centrist—Democrats are a political species that is merely tolerated by the national Democratic machine; the same relationship exists between liberal/centrist Republicans vis-à-vis the Republican National Committee. One need only to go back to the 2000 Republican primaries to see how the Republican machine completely dismantled John McCain’s presidential candidacy. Indeed, that species of Republican, such as Lincoln Chafee’s father John (upon whose 1999 death President Clinton famously said, “He embodied the decent center which has carried America from triumph to triumph for over 200 years.”), is all but extinct. Democrats of the same ilk, men like Moynihan, Jackson, McCarthy, and Stenholm, are similarly in short supply these days in Washington.