This Ned Lamont thing is no joke.
This new Quinnipiac poll shows that Joe Lieberman is beating Lamont by a 57% to 32% margin. That’s a huge lead. But a month ago it was 65% to 19%. And perhaps most revealing, among likely voters Lieberman’s margin drops down to 55% to 40%. Turn out can be a funny thing in a senate primary in August. So if the trend continues this thing could turn into a real race — as in, not just a test of disenchantment with Lieberman among Democrats but an actual threat to Lieberman’s reelection.
Mind you, I’ll be extremely surprised if Joe Lieberman isn’t in the senate next year. But when your opponent is pulling 40% of likely voters in the primary, that’s for real.
I’ve wanted for some time to comment on the Lamont/Lieberman race — basically on whether I think it’s a good idea, what it says about the direction of the Democratic party and so forth.
I have to confess that I find myself ambivalent. But it’s an ambivalence I’m not particularly impressed with. At some basic level, I have a hard time not liking Lieberman. I have friends who either used to work for him or remain in his orbit. And that probably has some effect on me. And it’s quite true that his actual voting record is far more solidly Democratic than the atmospherics surrounding him and his reputation.
But I’m not sure how much all that amounts to.
Last year, when I devoted most of this blog for several months to the Social Security story, Lieberman was one of most frustrating and inexplicable hold outs. I’m much more willing than others to let Democrats in marginal states and districts take positions suited to their constituencies rather than those embraced by Democrats nationally. To me that just makes sense on every level. The premise of my thinking on Social Security, however, was that there was just no political downside to supporting Social Security no matter how red a state you were from. Abortion rights or gay rights may stand principle against expediency or even political survival. But Social Security was just a gimme, a no-brainer.
Still, when we were going after some of these folks I could see that some of the resistance out of the Fainthearted Faction was based on ingrained habits of political survival and real disinclination to defy a Republican president who still seemed very popular and politically powerful.
But what was Lieberman’s excuse?
We went back and forth with him. I’d talk to his staffers and folks around him and work and work and work to get a straight answer, but just had the hardest time. It was always this statement or that that seemed to support Social Security but really left the door open to some compromise on phase out when you looked at it closely. On and on and on.
And what was the point of that? Certainly it wasn’t political, at least not in the narrow sense. Lieberman didn’t have anything to worry about in Connecticut. If it was ideological, what’s that about? It’s a core Democratic issue. Not a shibboleth or a sacred cow. But a core reason why most Democrats are Democrats.
In the end it just seemed like a desire to be in the mix for some illusory compromise or grand bargain, an ingrained disinclination to take a stand, even in a case when it really mattered. There’s some whiff of indifference to the great challenges of the age, even amidst the atmospherics of concern.
This of course doesn’t even get into everything on Iraq or the pussy-footing over running the Pentagon for President Bush.
I think the most generous read on Lieberman is that he’s just out of step with the parliamentary turn of recent American politics which I myself, Mark Schmitt and many others have discussed. But I think that’s too generous. The whining in Washington that it’s somehow an affront that Lieberman’s hold on his senate is being threatened is entirely misplaced, a good example of what’s wrong with DC’s permanent class.
I have to confess that I haven’t spent enough time yet finding out Lamont’s positions on various issues; and I’ll try to rectify that. And just between us, I’m happy every time I see him go higher in the polls.
