When We Define Our Politics Primarily Through Loathing

This is mildly amusing. Jamie Kirchik:

Just when you thought Joe Lieberman couldn't frustrate and perplex liberals any further, he is going off to become chief sponsor of the most significant piece of socially progressive legislation that Congress will deal with this year.

Myself, I don't find it frustrating at all that Holy Joe has decided to sponsor DADT-killing legislation. Perplexing, yes; it's bloody difficult, from day to day, to try to figure out precisely where Holy Joe's Independent Moral Compass is going to lead him, but it's generally sensible to bet on "evil." In any case, however, I suspect that the central problem is that Jamie is mirror-imaging liberals. Jamie has made a career of anti-liberal contrarianism; he's not terribly bright and doesn't have any ideas of his own, but when he can manage to successfully figure out what progressives think, he astutely takes the opposite position. While this doesn't differentiate him from most other contemporary conservative journalists, he is almost striking in his emptiness; there's literally nothing there beyond the hatred for whatever he believes liberals want. As such, it's very hard for Jamie to understand that anyone could be motivated by an actual policy concern. Most progressives, however can distinguish between a policy they like (ending DADT), and a politician they don't like (Holy Joe Lieberman).

Conservatives.... not so much. Indeed, (and this is just a crazy thought experiment) I suspect that if liberals came out against something as nasty as, say, torture, that conservatives might even be for it...

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Enough

I will concede that at the time the decision was made, we didn't know whether the decision to let Joe Lieberman keep his chairmanship was a good idea or not. Well, at this point we know it was a disaster, and surely relieving him of his perks has become a no-brainer. This isn't a question of balancing a desire for revenge against the pragmatic interests of the party. Continuing to reward people who double-cross you and continuing to trust people who have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they can't be trusted is just bad strategy.

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A Little From Column A...

With respect to the question of whether Joe Lieberman is stupid or mendacious, the answer is, of course, both. Certainly, the fact that he's not very bright can be seen in the fact that none of the explanations he offers for whatever idiotic position he's now taking are even remotely coherent. Having said that, I also have to agree with Brad that no matter how little respect you have for Lieberman's intelligence or command of policy details -- and, like Chait, I certainly have none -- I don't believe he's so stupid as to have not noticed that his new ad hoc objection to provisions excessively favored by liberals completely contradicts the ad hoc objections he came up with three months ago. In this case, his embarrassing hackishness has to be seen as trumping his intellectual limitations, although both are very much present.

Of course, as Bowers points out, he's not alone among the "centrists" in the world's worst deliberative body. So why does he attract the by far the most vituperation? First, while senators from Nebraska and Louisiana are going to be an obstacle to decent progressive legislation as long as the stupid supermajority rules remain in place, a senator from Connecticut shouldn't be. (Unlike Lieberman, Ben Nelson has never made any pretense of being a liberal on domestic policy in order to get elected.) Secondly, Lieberman's fairly ordinary venality is made much worse by the fact that he's such a sanctimonious prick.

And despite this gap between his immense self-regard and non-existent integrity, he has a massive cheering section among journalists. As Somerby has pointed out more than once, Gore's selection of Lieberman was basically the only time he got positive media coverage in the 2000 campaign. And, surely, Charles Lane wouldn't have been compelled to engage in disgusting, substance-free smears of Ezra Klein in order to defend Mary Landrieu's honor from analysts too ""youthful" to know that we have to pretend that Joe Lieberman is a great statesman and man of principle no matter how overwhelming the contradictory evidence.

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Yet More on Lieberman

This seems largely correct to me:

So why is he doing this? Because he’s bitter. According to former staffers and associates, he was upset by his dismal showing in the 2004 Democratic presidential primary. And he was enraged by the tepid support he got from many party leaders in 2006, when he lost the Democratic primary to an anti-war activist and won reelection as an independent. Gradually, this personal alienation has eaten away at his liberal domestic views. His staff has grown markedly more conservative in recent years, and his closest friends in Congress are now Republicans John McCain and Lindsey Graham. For Lieberman, the personal has become political, and it has pushed him further to the right.

There are two ways of reacting to this argument. On the one side, you can treat it as an accusation that liberals are "to blame" for Lieberman's lurch to the right. The altogether more sensible way to take it is that the campaign to unseat Lieberman by supporting Ned Lamont had the foreseeable consequence of pushing Lieberman to the right if he managed to win anyway. As Ezra argued, the primary forced Lieberman to find an electoral coalition that was far more right wing than the one he had previously assembled, and it's natural that he'd be more responsive to that coalition after the election. But as Beinart suggests, politicians aren't simply vote-seeking automatons. It's not surprising that Lieberman reacted to harsh criticism with bitterness, and consequently with a shift farther to the right.

None of this means that supporting Ned Lamont was a bad idea. First, it was unlikely that both of the above conditions would hold. Had Lieberman won the primary, he might have been bitter but he would have been responsible to the same electoral coalition. Having lost the primary, it was unlikely that he was going to win the election, but unlikely things do happen in politics. Second, Ned Lamont would have made a much better, and much more progressive, Senator than even the pre-2006 Joe Lieberman.

The institutional failure, I think, was that the Democratic Party didn't fully understand that it needed to put Joe Lieberman's political career in the dirt in 2006. I think they believed that the choice was essentially between two Democrats, rather than between a Democrat and a guy who was going to be elected by Republicans and was going to loathe the party's progressive base.

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The Blunder

I will admit that in the immediate aftermath of the election, it wasn't 100% clear that Reid blundered by letting Holy Joe keep his committee chairmanship; it was certainly the most plausible scenario, but there was at least some chance that in exchange for keeping his perks Ried had good reason to believe that Lieberman wouldn't join Republican obstructionism of major Democratic legislation. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Well, the pudding is ready, and it sure tastes like shit.

I wish I could be confident that if Lieberman goes through with making the legislation far worse for reasons that couldn't be more incoherent, at least after the midterms he'll lose all of his perks and be reduced to the lowest-seniority position on a committee determined to have the least possible relevance to the interests of Connecticuit voters. But I don't even believe that. "Please, Sir, May I Have Another?" still seems to be the organizing principle of Senate Democrats.

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Fool Me Thrice...

Let's just say that I'm going to put this in the "I'll believe it when I see it" file...

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What exactly does Joe Lieberman have to do to get sanctioned?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Recall that after, if I may be permitted to reach for le mot juste, thoroughly ratfucking the Dems last November, Lieberman was threatened with the loss of his committee chairmanship, but kept it after promising to be a good boy from here on out.

I guess he has just too much integrity to keep his promises.

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If Democrats Wanted To Be Serious

This wouldn't even be debatable. The idea that Senators who vote to filibuster major initiatives of the party -- filibusters that are highly deleterious not only on the policy merits and for democracy but politically -- should be entitled to special policy-making privileges from the party is absurd. (For Lieberman, of course, this doesn't go far enough; his office should be transferred to a broom closet somewhere in Camden.) It should also be noted that while there may be certain risks in alienating Senators in red states, this doesn't apply at all to Lieberman.

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