Lieberman's Loss

Well, the Democratic Party spoke last night in Connecticut. I think John Podhertz has it right...

Yes, I know polls have said for two years now that Democratic voters are overwhelmingly opposed to the war. Yes, I know Democratic politicians - with the exception of Joe Lieberman - never miss an opportunity to go after President Bush for his decision to go into Iraq and for his handling of the war.

But the weird little secret of the past couple of years is that when push comes to shove, Democrats in Washington have assented to the continuation of the war on Bush's terms. They have voted to fund it.

House Democrats voted against an immediate withdrawal. Senate Democrats even voted against a set timetable for withdrawal.

That's over now. The Democratic Party officially became the antiwar party last night.

The revolution won't be immediately apparent, because there's a midterm election in November and there are close races where Democratic politicians may need the flexibility to continue to talk like peaceniks and vote more hawkishly.

But that will be that. Democratic voters have now made it clear that there will be severe electoral consequences for anyone who doesn't toe the anti-war line, and toe the anti-war line they will.

That's bad enough for the party and the country -- recall that the Democrats' slide from majority status to being affiliated with Jimmy Carter came within a span of a dozen years. Carter's 1976 victory was the only time the Democrats controlled the White House between 1969 and 1993, and it only came about because Nixon got caught in Watergate (and even then, the peanut farmer barely held off Gerald Ford).

What happened? The Democrats became obsessed with being a peacenik anti-war party, and the public lacked any faith in their ability to handle external threats in a time when national security is important. The party was brought back from the brink by Bill Clinton after the Cold War ended and national security was no longer accorded the same importance, but this was after losing a large group of voters outside the Northeast who used to like voting for people in the same party as John Kennedy and suddenly decided they didn't like pulling levers for the people in the same party as Ted Kennedy. This is why the GOP has had control of Congress for the last dozen years.

Keep in mind that nutroots moonbats supporting and pushing Lamont are basically demanding a withdrawal from Iraq, many of them opposed invading Afghanistan and lack anything approaching a coherent position on Iran, North Korea and the global war on terror, except that they oppose any and all measures taken by President Bush (if Karl Rove really wanted to screw with them, Bush would come out and ask Congress to gut the Patriot Act, just to screw with the folks on the left). Somehow, I'm not sure the American populace will find it comforting that we have an entire party that wants to give up, go home, and rely on the U.N. to make sure we're not attacked again.

I mentioned this to a colleague this morning -- maybe Karl Rove does have control over the minds of Democrats. GOP voters are pretty unhappy with Congress, and the best weapon Rove could offer was the horrifying vision of Nancy Pelosi in the Speaker's chair. This will make even the most angry Republicans sit up and take notice.

Unfortunately, what's good for the GOP's electoral prospects (and they should keep their mouths shut, because letting the other party set fire to their own home is smart politics) isn't good for the country. I don't agree with Joe Lieberman on a whole hell of a lot, but I like and respect him as a politician and a human being, and I admire his integrity and honesty if not his views. I imagine a lot of moderate Democrats feel terrible this morning -- and if Brendan Loy is any example, the Democratic Party will rue the day they did this...

I am no longer a Democrat.

I’ve been calling myself a Democrat since I was ten years old, when I marched around the schoolyard in fifth grade chanting “Jerry Brown! Jerry Brown!” and, later, played the part of Bill Clinton in a sixth-grade mock debate. At the age of 13, I threw my hands up in dismay when the GOP took over Congress. When I turned 18, I registered without hesitation as a Democrat. I proudly cast my ballot for Al Gore in 2000, and — somewhat less proudly — for John Kerry in 2004. In recent years, I’ve seen the “base” of the Democratic Party drifting away from sense and sanity, and at the same time, I’ve felt my own ideological compass pulled somewhat to the right by world events. Yet I remain profoundly uncomfortable with the Republican Party for a variety of reasons, and I’ve never much liked the idea of being an “independent,” considering it — with all due respect to those who wear the label proudly — something of a cop-out in many cases.

So I’ve continued to cling to the label of Democrat, and to the hope that the party would somehow save itself from the tired orthodoxies of its interest groups and the execrable excesses of its far-left wing. I’ve shaken my head at the irrational policies and irresponsible rhetoric coming from so many corners of the party, comforting myself with the thought that while Dennis Kucinich may be a nutjob and Al Sharpton may be a charlatan and Howard Dean may be an idiot and Dick Durbin may be, well, a dick, at least there’s still Joe Lieberman.

Lieberman stood for just about everything good in the Democratic Party, while shunning most of the bad. He was — he is — an honest, decent and rational progressive, a moral but not overly moralistic man, a loyal but not blindly loyal Democrat. He agreed with the party most of the time, but he was willing to disagree when he felt his collegues were wrong. He was also willing to challenge liberal orthodoxies when they needed to be challenged, a rare and crucial trait. Mind you, I don’t worship the man, and I haven’t always agreed with him. He was wrong on Terri Schiavo, for instance, and in his views on the entertainment industry he sometimes tiptoes uncomfortably far toward the line separating criticism from censorship (though, to his credit, he never actually crosses it). But he was — he is — usually right, especially on the big issues, particularly the global war on terrorism and the conflict in Iraq.

Perhaps, I told myself, despite the ascendancy of Nancy Pelosi, the Deaniacs and the Kos Kidz, perhaps Lieberman’s side could still somehow win the struggle for the party’s soul. As long as that hope remained viable, I could continue to be a Democrat. A “Lieberman Democrat,” I called myself, and I was proud.

But now the voters have spoken. Lieberman may still consider himself a Democrat — he says that, if elected as an independent, he’ll vote to organize with the Dems, and I believe him — but the Democrats don’t consider Lieberman a Democrat anymore.

...Well, if there’s no room in the Democratic Party for Joe Lieberman, then there’s no room in it for me.

So I’m done. I’m out. See ya later. Sayonara.

This might seem like an overreaction to a single primary result in a single state, but really, it’s just the straw that broke the donkey’s back. As I said, the Democratic Party and I have been drifting apart for some time now. I believe it began on a Tuesday morning in the fall of 2001; I can’t exactly remember the date, but let’s just say a certain catastrophic event happened which changed the world in the eyes of most people — but not of many liberals and Democrats. Oh, they were sad and mad, just like everybody else. But as the weeks and months wore on, I learned to my dismay that the far left didn’t see 9/11 as a world-changing event or a paradigm shift, but rather, just a minor historical blip that didn’t require any adjustments whatsoever to their worldview or their policy ideas. And as the months turned to years, I watched with even greater dismay as the Democratic Party establishment concluded that the best way to win elections was to drift ever closer to the poisonous views of the far left. When Dick Durbin compared American soldiers to Nazis back in 2005, I almost bid adieu to the party of FDR and JFK… almost. I started drafting a blog post much like this one, declaring that “I am no longer a Democrat,” but then thought better of it. There was still hope for the Democrats, still a possibility that the party would save itself. After all, there was still Joe Lieberman.

Well, I don’t see the point is holding out hope anymore. It’s official now: the Democrats have jumped off the cliff, and are in free fall toward a richly deserved oblivion.

(hat tip: Instapundit) Hey, if you're a moderate Dem, feel free to stay with the party. Just remember that you get to hang out with Michael Moore....

Let the resounding defeat of Senator Joe Lieberman send a cold shiver down the spine of every Democrat who supported the invasion of Iraq and who continues to support, in any way, this senseless, immoral, unwinnable war. Make no mistake about it: We, the majority of Americans, want this war ended — and we will actively work to defeat each and every one of you who does not support an immediate end to this war.

For the Dems who remain in the party, the voters in Connecticut have decided that there will be fewer people like Joe Lieberman and Brendan Loy and more people like Ned Lamont and Michael Moore. That seems like a bad idea, not just for Connecticut and the Democratic Party, but for the whole country.