Mark Kurlansky tells one half of the story of the Nixon election and the Republican “Southern Strategy” that has flourished since, calling the Grand Old Party on its shameless appeals to racism as an electoral tactic. The story he doesn’t tell, however, is the simultaneous breakdown of the New Deal coalition and the agency of the Democrats in its collapse – a story that Democrats have too often obscured in working to expose the mendacious tactics of the right. It was four years earlier that the Democratic Convention sent the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party home.
Tag Archives: Democrats
This YDN piece sets forth the common – and accurate – wisdom that Tuesday’s election and September’s primary, in which the New Haven Democrats captured one seat each from the Greens and the Republicans, for a total of 28 out of 30 on the Board of Aldermen, and in which several critics of Mayor DeStefano were replaced with allies, represents a significant shift in the power on the board, and a consolidation of control behind DeStefano and his team. This has tremendous positive potential, as evidenced in DeStefano’s victory speech Tuesday night, in which he identified as his first two priorities domestic partnership and campaign finance reform – both areas in a which New Haven has the potential to pass progressive legislation matched by only perhaps a dozen other cities in the country. DeStefano’s shift to the left, however, has not happened in a vacuum – besides his growing commitment to running for Governor in 2006, DeStefano has been pushed by his critics from the left, including, as Paul Bass argued a couple weeks back, the Greens.
The one Green left on the Board, however – Joyce Chen – has gotten the most headlines of her term by vocally and visibly opposing domestic partnership. That stance, and her rhetoric in defending it, cost her the support of many of her constituents – myself and many progressive undergraduates included. The unions’ work in support of Joyce, who has a record of support for the social contract that labor and community movements have been pushing in this city, and the Democratic party’s work in support of Democrat Andre Nicole Baker, created an ugly scene between members of both camps at the polls, despite the co-operation of both in winning several wards for pro-labor progressive Democrats, among them Drew King in Ward 22, where most undergrads who aren’t in Ward 1 or 2 live. Drew beat Office of New Haven and State Affairs-supported incumbent Mae Ola Riddick’s write-in campaign, after having defeated her in the September primary and this summer at the Ward nominating committee.
Meanwhile, the YDN editorial board, which instituted an annual tradition of calling on Ward 28 Alderman Brian Jenkins to resign his post as leader of the Black and Latino Caucus after his minority address, is now worried that without him there’ll be fewer voices to keep DeStefano in check.
Dean has locked down the SEIU and AFSCME endorsements. As I noted before, I have my reservations about parts of Dean’s policy record, but out of the current crop of candidates he’s distinguished by full and unapologetic rejection of each of the major outrages of the Bush administration, his willingness, deftness, and passion in articulating an alternative vision for this country, and his capacity to organize effectively around it. And as Nathan Newman notes:
I’m left a bit stunned at what could be a consolidation quite early of Dean’s innovative online organizing with the powerhouse on-the-ground operations of SEIU and AFSCME (along with the other unions that will soon fall into place). Janitors and computer jockies organizing together is an amazingly powerful idea.
And we ain’t seen nothing yet. We are a year from Election Day, yet Dean is starting with an online organization of over 500,000 people, while the SEIU, for example, has already held multiple national meetings of thousands of their top activist organizers to be sent back into the field to mount the largest political mobilization in history. Thousands of SEIU members will be taking a one-year leave of absence to go organize in swing states on the payroll of the union’s political operations– a cross-state organizing effort that’s never been done and being started orders of magnitude earlier than any previous political year…
I really do like James Carville, even if he comes down significantly to my right. His We’re Right and They’re Wrong is a decent read, and he argues with a passion and wit too many in the Democratic party lack – or wouldn’t recognize if they saw them. But before he expects me to take him seriously when he sends me mail asking for money if I’m
…fed up with mushy moderates who think the best way to win elections is to act like warmed-over Republicans…
and
…believe the Democratic Party should fight for our principles without compromise or apology
and belong to what the late Senator Paul Wellstone called “the Democratic wing of the Democratic party”
he’s going to have to renounce the warmed-over Republican he spent eight years helping to screw the Democratic wing of the Democratic party without apology…
Jason Maoz of The Jewish Press wastes a good deal of ink trying to figure out for David Horowitz’s readers why more Jews haven’t come around to the Republican ticket, but can offer only insulting, patronizing theories to the effect that those backwards semites (Maoz et al excepted) just don’t know what’s good for them:
…the arrival of the Eastern European Jews who crowded into the big cities at the turn of the century and quickly learned that their very livelihoods were dependent on the good will of those Tammany-like political machines, which were invariably Democratic and invariably corrupt…
…Jewish socialists and communists left a seemingly indelible stamp on the collective political identity of American Jew…
…Whether Roosevelt or Truman was deserving of such Jewish support is a question most Jews were reluctant even to ask…
…Adlai Stevenson, a one-term governor of Illinois whose persona of urbane intellectualism set a new standard for the type of candidate favored by Jewish liberals…
…Jews still feared that pulling the Republican lever would cause their right hands to lose their cunning…
…Official” Jewry – that dizzying network of committees, councils, conferences and leagues staffed by liberal flunkies whose Holy Writ is the platform of the Democratic Party and whose daily spiritual sustenance comes from New York Times editorials – was represented in the McGovern campaign…
…it was a combination of old habits and a religious-like devotion to dogmatic liberalism that drove the majority of Jewish voters, not any primary concern for Israel or narrowly defined Jewish interests…
…a conservative Republican, which for most Jews in 1980 (and to a somewhat lesser extent today) was akin to an alien life form: an altogether unfamiliar species…
…Jews were drawn to Mondale for a number of reasons – his Humphrey connection, his New Deal liberalism, and the simple fact that he wasn`t Reagan, to whom most American Jews never took a liking, despite a dramatic improvement in U.S-Israel relations since Mondale`s old boss had been thrown out of office…
…But Clinton would have defeated Bush and Dole even if each had sworn to immediately move the White House to Jerusalem, for the simple reason that Israel has never been the determining factor in how most Jews vote. If it were the determining factor, Nixon in 1972 and Reagan in 1980 and 1984 would have received a far greater share of the Jewish vote…
…a not inconsiderable number of Orthodox Jews found themselves to be just as susceptible as their secular brethren to the fatal Clinton Mystique…
There are a few basic premises here:
We Jews (besides Maoz) are easily swayed by personality, image, and kitschy references that make us feel important.
We Jews (like Maoz) would oppose attempts by the US government to pressure Israel to behave in the way dictated by Jewish values, or to undertake policies with any hope of bringing closer a just compromise – but (besides Maoz) fail to reward the hawks who are laboring to support the Likudniks because we’re too short-sighted to notice.
We Jews (like Maoz) are wealthy, and we validate that laissez-faire capitalism works, and so our support (contra Maoz) for government policies concerned with social justice must demonstrate some combination of confusion, conformity, pressure, and paranoia.
Starting from there, it’s not surprise that the intrepid reporter, after 7,000 words down and 70 years surveyed, is forced to conclude that
while each of the explanations we`ve cited may have its own degree of merit, and while taken together they may provide an interesting glimpse into the collective psyche of the American Jewish community, the Great Mystery of Jewish voting habits remains just that
At the beginning of his piece, Maoz throws out the idea that there’s resonance between liberalism and Jewish tradition, identity, or values, on the grounds that if that were true, Orthodox Jews – who everyone knows are the real ones – would be the most liberal. Perhaps if Maoz checked out Isaiah – or Exodus, or Jeremiah, or Genesis – he’d find something to at least offer a clue as to why, in his words,
the American Jewish community, the most affluent subgroup in the country, still votes as if it’s one step ahead of the bread lines and the evict notices.
Class traitors? It’d have to be one of the lighter insults we, as a people, have suffered. Could be that Jewish community and tradition offer – for some at least – an imperative to have a stake in being part of a just, free, and democratic community, and to work to build such a nation.
Or maybe it’s just those Jewish grandmothers kvelling when Bill Clinton says “mensch,” and worrying that if he doesn’t get their vote he’ll sick one of those Democratic Party Machines on them.
Back in New Haven for the year, and ready to bring some light and some truth to the Yale Corporation. Two and a half days until the strike deadline, and there’s little in the way of signs of movement on Yale’s end. Tomorrow morning at 10:30 will be a press conference calling on Yale to settle or submit to binding arbitration to avert a strike; it’ll be headlined by Connecticut’s own Joe Lieberman. I’ve never wasted many kind words on Joe Lieberman – I think his political record overall demonstrates a lack of courage masked in the rhetoric of bipartisanship and a disturbing conservatism masquerading as “moral clarity.” One of my first posts on this site was a somewhat rambling but earnest criticism of Joe as he prepared to announce his candidacy for President of the United States. One of hte few virtues of a (happily, quite unlikely) Lieberman primary win would be a tremendous organizing spike for the Green party; it would, however, represent the final kiss and death for the Democratic party’s organizing among its base (read: everyone to the left of the DLC), which – as much as some posts here might suggest otherwise – is not something I want to see. All of that said, it should be noted to Lieberman’s credit that while he pursues an agenda in Congress generally deaf to the interests of the American people – including those of us in the Connecticut – he’s frequently lended his symbolic support to much more progressive initiatives here on the local level. Damning by faint praise? Yes (also damning by harsh but deserved criticism). But Lieberman’s support for David Lee’s Yale Corporation candidacy, ECCO’s sustainable housing work, and organized labor in New Haven – while deeply inadequate on the scale of the damage done by his work on the national level – should be noted among the few progessive moves for which he can be credited. Not coincidentally, these symbolic moves at home cost him very little with his neoconservative/ neoliberal sponsors and supporters on the national level.
Michael Gecan of the IAF has a searing, sobering piece in the latest Village Voice on the Democratic and Republican elites and the Americans left behind:
They are angry, and they are driven. They are profoundly and passionately clear on what and whom they are against. They intend to vanquish the upstart elite, the progressive establishment. It’s not Osama, Dead or Alive. It’s Dean, Dead or Alive. It’s Clinton, Dead or Alive. They have only one major problem: They don’t know what in the world—in the bigger, broader world where most moderate Americans live and work, play and pray, and try to raise their kids—they are for. Their relationship with their base is better than the Democrats’, but still terribly thin. It is not rooted in the interests of families struggling to survive in a service economy, with few or no benefits, in schools that continue to stumble and decline. It is not based on a foundation of respect for the working American, the struggling American, the vast majority of Americans who lack wealth. Not at all. Like the upstart elite, the new Republicans could care less about these matters. No, their newfound commitment to building a base is an instrument and offshoot of their tribal war with the progressive left. It is as clinical and cynical as the attitudes of some of the anti-war student leaders of the ’60s.
The Democrats lack this depth of passion and focused clarity. They aren’t as heated or as hardworking as the Republicans. They still sip sparkling water and make smug little jokes about Bush’s malaprops. They keep telling themselves how much smarter and slicker they are than the boobs on the right and the bohunks in the middle. They still think that getting straight A’s and appearing on television and having famous friends will dazzle the hoi polloi.
Both parties are led by women and men who believe it’s their God-given right to make more messes—from the Yale Commons, to blighted cities, to White House sleeping arrangements, to failed health reform, to bankrupt companies, to gutted industries, to post-war Iraq. They count on a wide and appreciative following in the media to report their antics and a silent servant class to clean up the wreckage.
The Times on the scene of the election building on the deadline to file to run in the CA recall:
There was the 100-year-old woman from Long Beach who was sponsored by the 99-cent store chain; the busty pornographic film star; the cross-dresser in pink; the soul food restaurateur; the angry car salesman; the techno geek; the student too young for whiskers; and the structural engineer worried about earthquakes.
It’s strange how many anti-populist conservatives have had a convenient change of heart just in time to herald the recall as the epitomy of the democratic process. This election is, in many ways, the strongest case for instant run-off voting. For those who don’t know, instant run-off voting essentially allows each voter to rank their preferences among several candidates. In the first round, every voter’s vote is counted towards his/her first choice. The candidate receiving the lowest votes is eliminated, and in the second round, everyone who voted for him/her has their vote counted for their second choice. The process continues, eliminating one candidate each round and counting each voter’s vote for their preferred candidate of those remaining each round, until only two candidates remain, and the one of the two who’s preferred by the majority of the voters wins.
Let’s say, for example, that the eight candidates above are the only ones on the ballot, and my preferences are:
1st: Cross-dresser in pink
2nd: Soul food restaurateur
3rd: 100-year-old woman from Long Beach
4th: Student too young for whiskers
5th: Busty pornographic film star
6th: Structural engineer worried about earthquakes
7th: Techno geek
8th: Angry car salesman
In the first round, my vote is counted towards the cross-dresser, and the angry car salesman (apologies to any angry car salesmen who are reading this site…), who was the first preference of the fewest voters, is eliminated. In the second and third rounds, my vote is still counted for the cross-dresser, and the student too young for whiskers and the 100 year-old woman are eliminated for being the favorite (out of the remaining candidates) of the fewest voters in the second and third rounds respectively. In the fourth round, the votes that had been going to the angry car salesman (in the 1st round), the student too young for whiskers (in the 2nd), and/or the 100 year-old woman (in the 3rd), spread mostly between the structural engineer, the techno geek, and the busty pornographic film star, and the soul food restaurateur has a strong base because of his outstanding corn bread, but the cross-dresser, who automatically receives my vote as long as he’s in the race, is the preference of the fewest voters and is eliminated. In the fifth round, my vote goes automatically to the soul food restaurateur because he was my second choice, and the techno geek receives the fewest votes and is eliminated. The sixth round thus pits the soul food restaurateur, the busty pornographic film star, and the structural engineer against each other. Most of the voters whose votes had been going to the techno geek had marked the porn star as their next choice (thought it would be the structural engineer, didn’t you?), and the soul food restaurateur has a strong enough base to come in second, eliminating the structural engineer, who hopefully will continue to worry about earthquakes in some not-gubernatorial capacity. In the last round, thus, every voter’s vote is counted either towards the restaurateur or towards the porn star. Someone who rated the restaurateur 7th and the porn star 6th, for example, is now automatically voting for the porn star. In this final round, while my vote goes to the restaurateur – an unreconstructed liberal Democrat whose politics are my favorite second only to the more radical cross-dresser – more people are drawn to the, well, platform of the busty pornographic film star, and she emerges the winner of the gubernatorial race.
The advantages of this system are clear. It demonstrates the actual level of support for various candidates by allowing everyone to rank them based purely on how much they’d like to see them in office. It eliminates the fear of hurting your second – (or maybe eleventh-) choice candidate’s chances by supporting your first-choice. Unlike the California recall, instant run-off voting is a sustainable, viable measure which would increase the democracy of our republic – and, not coincidentally, rock the casbah that is the two-party system. That’s why it’s been part of the platform of the Green party for years, and is part of the platform of its candidate in the recall, Peter Camoje, who I would likely vote for first in an instant run-off election, followed by Arianna Huffington, then likely Cruz Bustamante. That’s why you don’t hear a lot about it from the Democrats – who came up with progressive reforms like the recall election and now are suing to to have it stopped – or the Republicans – who become populists overnight when it means embarassing the Democrats.
But finding a politician willing to talk about fundamental reform of America’s education system beyond the president’s anemic Education Act is harder than locating a flat chest — or a real one — at the Playboy mansion.
– Arianna Huffington, April 4, 2002
Van Jones, quoted in Marc Cooper’s column in today’s LA Weekly, sets forth succinctly and resonantly the bind in which California progressives find themselves:
“We can’t afford another three years of these state budgets,” says the 35-year-old Yale Law School graduate and director of the Oakland-based Ella Baker Human Rights Center. “In my town we’ve got classrooms of 30 kids who have to share six books. We’ve got classrooms without chalk. We’ve got a state where prison spending has risen 650 percent in 20 years. We’ve got a prison guards union that, in the midst of this budget crisis, is getting a 7 and a half percent pay raise. California has become the biggest incarcerator in the world. From our point of view this recall election is a survival struggle. We’re disgusted and appalled by Gray Davis, and we’re afraid of the Republicans. We need another choice.”
That third choice, Van Jones – and a more sceptical Marc Cooper as well – see personified in Republican-Congressman’s-Trendy-and-Witty-Wife turned Trendy-and-Witty-Leftist-Populist-Divorcee Arianna Huffington. As David Brock describes her in Blinded by the Right:
The leading social light in the new GOP power structure in Washington was Arianna Huffington…The indefagitable Huffington, whose failure to comply with the laws governing household help probably cost her husband the election, returned to Washington determined to reinvent herself as the godmother of the Gingrich Revolution. Since her debut as the first woman member of the Cambridge Union student debating society, the witty, articulate Greek-born beauty had set out, with brio, to conquer her world. In the 1970s, she took London by storm, writing a famous antifeminist manifesto at the height of the women’s movement, and carrying on a high-profile affair with the British intellectual Bernard Levin. Moving on to New York in the Reagan years, she hosted the likes of Brooke Astor and Barbara Walters at glittering dinner parties…
With Arianna honing the campaign’s conservative message and even standing in for Michael in candidate debates, Huffington confounded political experts and won the seat. THe only discernible theme through it all was Arianna’s boundless ambition. “The Sir Edmund Hillary of all social climbers,” as Los Angeles magazine put it. Arianna drew the attention of Newt Gingrich during Michael’s first congressional term, when she published a book called The Fourth Instinct, in which she argued that the welfare state should be replaced by reviving the concept of tithing, or charitable giving…
Nearly ten years after the period Brock is describing, Cooper writes:
For anyone who knew Arianna in her past life as a “compassionate conservative,” the meeting of that informal committee at her sprawling Brentwood home last Sunday afternoon would have seemed unimaginable. Van Jones, environmentalists, leaders of the anti-war movement and some of the most effective advocates against the drug war crowded onto Arianna’s sofas and divans to hear her come just short of a formal announcement. The several dozen activists included an ex-president of LULAC (the leading Latino civil rights organization); Marge Tabankin, who once ran the Hollywood Women’s Political Committee; Salon.com founder and editor David Talbot; producer and liberal activist Lynda Obst; Lara Bergthold, from Norman Lear’s operation; the radical educator and former Crossroads School president Paul Cummins; former RTD official and onetime mayoral candidate Nick Patsaouras; Jerry Brown’s former campaign manager and current Code Pink organizer Jodie Evans; and civil rights attorney Connie Rice.
Huffington, who has another week at most to decide whether to run on the recall ballot but says she’s leaning towards it, has several factors running against her. As Cooper puts it:
And as someone who had publicly encouraged Arianna to consider the run, let me be among the first to openly acknowledge the scope of the challenges her candidacy would face, beyond that mountain of $10 million or so. In an extraordinarily compressed campaign window between today and the October 7 vote, Arianna needs to craft an understandable and coherent program that offers serious alternatives to both Republicans and Democrats yet retains mainstream appeal; she must convince voters that, if elected, she has the executive oomph both to manage the current crisis and to effect real policy reform in Sacramento. And she must be effective in blunting what will be the inevitable attempts by the media and other candidates to marginalize and trivialize her independent run.
What Huffington does have, however, is the freedom as a non-Democrat to aggressively promote herself and run against the ugly record of the New Democrat Davis, the potential as an independant to mobilize progressive (or merely exasperated) Democrats with a suspicion of organized third parties, and the combination of wit and charisma responsible for her quick rise first on the right and then on the left. It’s hard not to feel some affinity for a woman who would do televised election-night debate as a Republican in pajamas sharing a bed with Al Franken, and fund commercials as an independant suggesting that, contrary to the government line, it’s your oil habit and not your drug habit that’s funding international terrorism.
The founders of http://www.runariannarun.com, including Van Jones, argue Huffington has a strong shot under three conditions:
1) The Democrats offer up only Davis, and refuse to list any credible, marquee Democrat as one of his potential replacements;
(2) The GOP fields three or four major candidates at the same time;
(3) Liberals and progressives field only one, big-name populist like Arianna as a potential replacement for Davis.
It may be, as has been widely speculated, that the Democrats will draft someone other than Davis at the last minute for the ballot, figuring that the embarrassment of breaking ranks is less than the potential embarrassment of losing the governorship of the largest – and one of the leftest – state in the Union. But pronouncements like Terry McAuliffe’s recent one seem to make such a move more and more costly for them. Meanwhile the chance of the GOP uniting behind one candidate seems infeasible if not impossible – Issa’s spent much too much of his car alarm fortune (plus whatever he made off of those cars he broke into before that) on recruiting petitioners from around to country not to see his name on the ballot; Riordan and Schwarzenagger seem adamant that one or the other will run in an appeal to the libertarians that are convinced Davis is a big spender but would be scared off by the socially conservative Issa; and Bill Simon hasn’t yet figured out how to dig up. Finally, Camejo’s suggestion that he and the Green Party would drop out of the race and throw their support behind Huffington eliminates a crucial competitor.
Where does this leave us? A Huffington candidacy would be, if nothing else, an interesting prospect which would facilitate the articulation of a real progressive agenda and leftist vision during a period in which a conservative Democrat is somewhat successfully being portrayed as a left-wing radical – and could potentially garner competitive support. Meanwhile, check out her writing on SUVS, the drug war, economic justice, and democracy.
Speaking of prospects (the twisted, sensational, voyeuristic kind specifically), while I suppose it’s good news that Michael Huffington has gone back on his earlier suggestion that he too might enter the race, if a deal were cut where the Governor’s race were a one-on-one between Michael and Arianna, with nightly televised debates, I might be convinced to rethink my stance on the merits of the recall…
Picture it:
Michael: Your view of America is as cold as your lovemaking.
Arianna: Your economic plan is as potent as, well –
Michael: You know, for someone who never had time for her children, you sure put a lot of time into bastardizing the political discourse.
Arianna: Michael, let’s not bring your mother into this.
“It’s a pathetic thing that I’m considered the most progressive
candidate…” – Howard Dean, in an interview with the Progressive
Noam Scheiber on Howard Dean in The New Republic:
In an interview yesterday with The New York Times, Howard Dean complained that, “This is the most fiscally irresponsible president since Herbert Hoover. Republicans don’t balance budgets anymore. Democrats do.”
Huh? If memory serves, the reason Herbert Hoover was such a colossal failure as president was that he elevated the balanced budget to the level of fetish–insisting upon raising taxes and slashing spending even as the nation teetered on the edge of one of the worst economic disasters in history. So dogmatic was Hoover’s commitment to budget balance that even in June of 1932, near the depths of the Depression, he complained bitterly about the wastefulness of two bills adopted by Congress to provide unemployment relief, largely by funding public works projects…If Herbert Hoover was fiscally irresponsible, I’d hate to see Howard Dean’s idea of fiscal responsibility.
Indeed. Rhetoric like this is troubling from Dean precisely because as Governor his passion for balancing budgets so often outpaced his passion for social justice – it’s not a fluke that 10% of Vermont voted for a Progressive Party candidate to his left. I’d like to believe that Dean recognizes that Hoover’s devotion to balancing the budget was profoundly irresponsible national, social, and indeed fiscal policy. He likely does. But he’s yet to lay an ideological groundwork for why. This should give pause to those progressives – myself included – who would like very much to see Dean as the fierce critic, coherent alternative, and tested progressive he so often paints himself to be.
The good news: Tom Daschle, proud appeaser and occasional whipping-boy, the man who promised Bush sixteen months ago that “he can depend on us,” and is yet to sustain serious opposition to anything on George’s wishlist – be it corpulent tax cuts for the rich, largesse and reward for oil companies drilling into our future, or the rush for devastating and unjust war – will not be running against him for President. Besides thinning the field and removing the prospect of a Daschle-Bush race, the decision carries with it the possibility – however hazy – of Daschle using his role in the Senate to construct something that could actually be construed as an opposition party. Too soon to tell. But given how little liberals have learned to expect from him, Daschle’s coupling of his decision not to run with a strongly-worded attack on the Bush “stimulus” plan as one that would damage our ability to face our challenges as a nation was, at the very least, progress.
The bad news: Can’t say this one is any kind of surprise, or even news really. But (speaking of appeasers) brace yourself for that bastion of bipartisanship, Joe Lieberman, to announce his candidacy Monday. Our most recent reminder of Lieberman’s political style came when Bill Frist, who, besides having belonged to an all-white club and joked that poor Black kids would stab him with pencils, is connected to the largest government fraud suit in US history, filed against a for-profit hospital firm whose agenda runs directly counter to those of the patients whose interests, as an MD, he’s supposedly uniquely equipped to represent, was named to the Majority Leader post. What did Joe have to offer? Nothing but praise for Frist, excitement to work with him, and concern that “these kinds of positions” often become “more partisan” than necessary. God forbid (we know Joe likes talk about God) party leadership should be partisan. In other words, perhaps Bill Frist would like to follow the model of Tom Daschle.
If anyone were to accuse Lieberman of being partisan, it certainly wouldn’t be of being a partisan Democrat. This is the man who wants the government to monitor rap music for obscenity and academia for dissent, who said that the moral degradation of our society could be measured by the height of the wall between church and state, the darling of the DLC, the poster-child for the jingoism and double-standards which claim the ironic title of “moral clarity,” the man who saw fit to flirt with social security privatization, with tort reform, with ending affirmative action – the list goes on. Much attention surrounded Lieberman in 2000 as the first Jewish candidate on a “major party” ballot. The man also had a shot at “first Jewish Republican on a Democratic ticket,” but that one doesn’t sell quite as well. Were I running the RNC (that’ll be the day), and were Lieberman to run as the Democratic candidate for President in 2004, I might just push, in the spirit of bipartisanship, for my party not to run a candidate.
Josh Eidelson 