With Friends of Joe dominating mainstream media coverage of "Holy Joe" Lieberman's struggle for survival, Harold Meyerson sounds a note of sense
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A welcome contribution to the mainstream media's eerie "Friends of Joe" miscoverage of the Lieberman primary challenge is Harold Meyerson's column in today's Washington Post, "Lieberman's Real Problem." He writes in part:
"No great mystery enshrouds the challenge to Lieberman, nor is the campaign of his challenger, Ned Lamont, a jihad of crazed nit-pickers. Lieberman has simply and rightly been caught up in the fundamental dynamics of Politics 2006, in which Democrats are doing their damnedest to unseat all the president's enablers in this year's elections. As well, Lieberman's broader politics are at odds with those of his fellow Northeastern Democrats. He is not being opposed because he doesn't reflect the views of his Democratic constituents 100 percent of the time. He is being opposed because he leads causes many of them find repugnant."Eventually Meyerson gets around to the all but universally ignored point that opposition to Lieberman isn't confined to his Bush-licking over Iraq:
"The issue here isn't that Lieberman is not 100 percent. It's that his positions—not just on foreign policy but on trade, Social Security and other key issues—are often out of sync with those of Democrats in his part of the country. To expect his region's voters to dump the area's moderate Republicans but back Lieberman is to expect that they will adopt a double standard in this year's elections."
posted by KenInNY @ 9:20 AM
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Making similar points in today's NY OBSERVER, Joe Conason writes that "whenever Senator Joseph Lieberman complains that he is the target of a 'single-issue' challenge by upstart millionaire Ned Lamont, the three-term incumbent proves he doesn’t quite get what is happening to him. It is true that the Lamont campaign began as a protest against his slavish support of the war in Iraq. It is untrue that growing anti-war sentiment is the sole reason for his peril in next month’s Democratic primary. That he would dismiss the disastrous occupation as merely 'one issue' suggests how remote he is from his constituent-- the great majority of whom now view the war as a costly strategic and moral error that should be concluded as soon as possible. He sounds equally detached from that failed policy’s awful reality when he proclaims that 'the situation in Iraq is a lot better' than a year ago. Connecticut’s voters are not obliged to prove their 'moderation' by ratifying his bad judgment. Yet the war issue alone probably would not have threatened him, as anyone who listened carefully to his critics might learn. After 18 years in the Senate, his fervent insistence that he is a lifelong devotee of 'progressive causes' and his endorsement by major liberal organizations only seem to mask his accommodation with Washington's conservative status quo."
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