Mark Schmitt

A Last Few Words on Connecticut

Some random thoughts in the closing days:

First, is there a better expression of what I called “checklist liberalism” than Lieberman’s I-gave-at-the-office answer to George Stephanopoulos this morning, complete with the Rumsfeldian question-answer format?:

Lieberman: “Did I keep in touch with Democrats? You bet I did….I have the support of most of the key inner constituencies, advocacy groups within the Democratic Party : the AFL-CIO, the League of Conservation Voters, Defenders of Wildlife, Human Rights Campaign, NARAL, Planned Parenthood PAC. They wouldn’t support me if I lost touch with them.”

Second, I want to comment on some bits of Dan Balz’s article, billed on the Washington Post website as “What A Lieberman Loss Would Mean.” Balz’s unsurprising argument is that if Lieberman loses, it will increase the importance of the Iraq War in the 2008 Democratic primaries, and advantage candidates like Al Gore whose opposition has been stronger.

In contrast, Balz says, “many party moderates say they see worrisome parallels to what happened to the Democrats during Vietnam, when they opposed an unpopular war but paid a price politically for years after because of a perception the party was too dovish on national security.

“‘Candidates know they cannot appease [antiwar] activists if they are going to run winning national campaigns,’ said Will Marshall, president of the centrist Progressive Policy Institute.”

Two comments on this: First, the 2008 primaries are seventeen months away. Balz projects a straight line from the way the issue breaks today to that point. And seems to take it for granted that we’ll still be embroiled in Iraq. But consider that at the time of the 2004 primaries, the war was less than one year old! By the time of the first primary votes in 2008, it will be almost five years of war. We’re now in the fourth year of the war; does anyone seriously think that by the sixth, absent some enormous change, that “antiwar activists” won’t be the vast majority of people? If the issue - the war - remains unchanged, the politics of it cannot remain unchanged.

This is why I’ve never been worried in the past about the “split” on Iraq among Democrats. I thought that by the time we got within sight of the 2008 primaries, either something dramatic would have happened to change things, or it would become completely obvious to everyone that withdrawal on a timetable was the only option. With David Broder and Tom Friedman now in the “cut and run” camp, with Senator Clinton standing up to Rumsfeld, that moment has almost come. And while the Lamont challenge may accelerate it somewhat among the more cautious politicians, it’s the reality, the fact that we are now in the middle of someone else’s civil war, that is driving everyone else to that consensus.

Also, I’m really tired of the Vietnam/Democrats analogy, in which the entire political history of Vietnam is reduced to McGovern’s loss in 1972. The real reason the Vietnam War divided and discredited Democrats and splintered the liberal consensus was because - let’s not be afraid to admit it -- Democrats started that war. Opposition to the war didn’t unify or define the party, it divided it. Nixon won the 1968 election because Humphrey was associated with the war, couldn’t split with LBJ, and Nixon promised - dishonestly -- to end it. The national security gap for Democrats first appeared in polls in 1967-68, because LBJ was held responsible for the war itself, not because they were associated with antiwar activists. (See this paper from the Truman Project for more.) And in the election after 1972, the 75+ Democrats who won congressional seats were overwhelmingly anti-war, a transforming fresh spirit in politics that dominated Congress for the next two decades. We can only hope that a new class of legislators elected on a wave of revulsion at the war and at corruption will be as skilled and resilient.

Third, I’ve been predicting for weeks that the Lieberman independent bid would amount to nothing, and that seems to now be the conventional wisdom, especially after Senator Frank Lautenberg suggested that if he did not come within 10 points of Lamont, he should drop the Party of One bid.

Politicians can be superficially supportive but also cruelly contemptuous toward colleagues who can’t take care of their own business. I think that some of the establishment figures have to be noticing that not only did Lieberman put himself in this situation, but he did absolutely nothing, at any point, to get himself out of it. From attacking Lamont, acting peevish and entitled, declaring the independent bid, refusing to say anything that would show any difference between his view of Iraq and Bush’s (even with George Stephanopoulos this morning he was mouthing the WH line that the only threat to a unified, stable Iraq was “the terrorists”), to finally trying a clumsy imitation of Lamont’s enthusiastic rallies, the only result of which was that the face of his campaign for a day was a loudmouth DC lobbyist who looked like an understudy for the “Billionaires for Bush” comedy troupe, Lieberman didn’t make one right move in six months. He doesn’t even seem to realize that if he denounces his opponent for voting with Republicans and calls him “center-right,” he can’t credibly also say, “That’s something that separates me from my opponent - I don’t hate Republicans.”

I was going to end this post with some attempt to figure out why it happened, but all explanation - such as that he doesn’t quite understand how politics has changed since the 1990s - seems inadequate to the magnitude of the flame-out. I think it’s possible that after the primary, unleashed from the obligation of being a checklist Democrat, Lieberman may emerge as a very, very conservative figure, one of those real neoconservatives (in the older sense of the word) whose main politics is to obsess over and recoil at what they see as the excesses of the left. Michael Barone is a good example of such a figure, and that way madness lies. I’m just speculating, but if that does occur, we’ll understand why he couldn’t run a plausible Democratic campaign in 2006: he couldn’t bring himself to.

Beyond Checklist Liberalism

Two comments on Adam Nagourney’s Lieberman story yesterday:

1. It’s not said explicitly, but it sure does sound like the Party Of One option is now considered likely to fizzle. Nagourney focuses only on the way in which the move alienated Democrats, and says, “should Mr. Lieberman lose the primary, all indications are that most Democratic leaders will abandon him in the general election race.” Even David Broder, painfully unable to understand what’s happening and dreaming that sanity will one day return - “the early successes of these elitist insurgents have been followed by decisive defeats when a broader public weighs in” - seems to have little hope that the general election in Connecticut will be that return to normalcy. Lieberman, I’m told, calculated that he had a 50% chance of winning the primary and an 85% chance of winning the general as an independent, making his decision obvious. But of course that was a terrible miscalculation, because among other things it failed to factor in the effect of the decision itself. If he had a 50% chance of winning the primary the day before the election, that chance dropped enormously the day after, as both Nagourney and Broder say. And there was never an 85% chance of winning the general after being tagged as a loser, with Democratic officials and donors unable to help, with 40% of the vote sufficient for victory. I point this out only because you read it here first.

2.Nagourney writes:

Mr. Clinton had told him to acknowledge that Democrats should be able to hold contrary opinions on the war, Mr. Lieberman recounted. But Mr. Clinton also recommended that Mr. Lieberman aggressively try to refocus the debate on other topics.

A longtime associate spoke of sending an e-mail message to Mr. Lieberman suggesting that he talk about domestic issues important to liberal Democrats: blocking oil drilling in Alaska, protecting affirmative action and preserving abortion rights.

Is “refocus the debate on other topics” really brilliant, insightful advice for Lieberman? Hasn’t he been trying to change the topic? Isn’t the whole point that that’s not working?

And what about Clinton? This is the guy who is assumed to be the de facto strategist-in-chief for the front-running Dem 08 candidate. Is “refocus the debate” the best he can do? Or, “acknowledge that Democrats should be able to hold contrary opinions on the war,” which if Lieberman can’t or won’t do, he’s got some serious problems. (If Lieberman won’t even acknowledge that views other than his own are legitimate within the party, then who’s the unyielding ideologue here?)

And then the second paragraph, which I think says it all about why the mainstream Democrat advice to Lieberman misses the point. This paragraph is not attributed to Clinton, although its positioning implies that it expands on the advice Clinton gave. It’s a great expression of the Democratic Party of 1996: You got your enviros, you got your minorities, you got your women. Each group has one issue. For the enviros, it’s ANWR (the most trivial of victories, but the one that raises the money). For the minorities, affirmative action. (Likewise, of minor relevance to the actual structure of economic opportunity for most African-Americans and Latinos.) For women, it’s all about “preserve abortion rights.” There are a couple others, but those are the basic buttons you press to be credentialed as a good liberal Democrat. After you press them, you can do whatever you want.

But has Lieberman failed to press those buttons? No! In fact, he’s been pounding on them like that guy at the elevator who thinks that if he presses “Down” hard enough and often enough, eventually the elevator will recognize how important and how late he is.

But it’s not working. Why? Two reasons: One of course is that Iraq, and the constellation of foreign policy and security failures it represents really is huge. And while Democrats can accept a fairly wide range of viewpoints, roughly from Biden’s make-it-work to Murtha’s get-out-now, only Lieberman’s stay-the-course is ridiculous. It’s pretty difficult to look at ANWR and Iraq and conclude that a good position on ANWR more than offsets a bad one on Iraq. (Especially if there’s no reason to think that Ned Lamont has a different position on ANWR or the other three buttons.)

The second reason is that Lamont supporters actually aren’t ideologues. They aren’t looking for the party to be more liberal on traditional dimensions. They’re looking for it to be more of a party. They want to put issues on the table that don’t have an interest group behind them - like Lieberman’s support for the bankruptcy bill -- because they are part of a broader vision. And I think that’s what blows the mind of the traditional Dems. They can handle a challenge from the left, on predictable, narrow-constituency terms. But where do these other issues come from? These are “elitist insurgents,” as Broder puts it - since when do they care about bankruptcy? What if all of a sudden you couldn’t count on Democratic women just because you said that right things about choice - what if they started to vote on the whole range of issues that affect women’s economic and personal opportunities?

But caring about bankruptcy, even if you’re not teetering on the brink of it or a bankruptcy lawyer yourself, is part of a vision of a just society. And a vision of a just society - not just the single-issue push-buttons of a bunch of constituency groups - is what a center-left political party ought to be about. And at the end of this fight, I don’t expect that we’ll have a more leftist Democratic Party, but one that can at least begin to get beyond checklist liberalism.

Lieberdem Speaks

I probably shouldn’t be so obsessed with the Lieberman-Lamont race, but I can’t help it.

This seems to be the week when the Republican right (Kondracke, Chris Caldwell) has decided to make Joe Lieberman’s cause their own. Which is fine, but their opinion about who should be the Democratic nominee in a state they don’t live in is about as relevant as my opinion about who should be the next president of France. (Anyone interested in my strongly-held opinion on the latter question, the answer is here.)

But at the same time, the actual Democrats supporting Lieberman seemed to have figured out what contributors to TPMCafe and others have been saying for months: Lieberman got himself into this situation, and every day he makes it worse. The other day, while looking for some of those "savage, internet-based attacks" that Kondracke laments, I came across the blog "Lieberdem," devoted mostly to savage, internet-based attacks on Mr. Lamont and those they call "Nedheads." Lieberdem has two contributors, one being Dan Gerstein, who I recall vaguely from years ago when he, Lieberman, and Bill Bennett were trying to stamp out the threat to America’s families posed by "Melrose Place." (And especially, of course, the show’s single, chaste gay character.) While Gerstein’s contributions to the blog read like a dark-side imitation of David Sirota, his counterpart, Matt Smith, seems a little more grounded. Here’s Smith on Friday:

Joe Lieberman’s campaign has looked as if it has been in a constant state of panic ever since Lamont’s campaign started to look serious. ...Even Lieberman himself has acted like he never saw this coming. Many political observers have noticed it, and so have I.

Ned Lamont has every right to run against Joe Lieberman in the primary, and Democratic voters have every right to support him...

Lieberman simply never saw this coming, and still hasn’t gotten over the initial shock of Lamont’s entry into the race. The initial surprise is somewhat understandable. He’s a three-term Senator with a strong record on nearly all progressive causes who has not faced a serious electoral challenge at home in 18 years. Lieberman realized that most Democrats in his state disagreed with him on the Iraq War, but it probably was hard for Lieberman to imagine that any single issue could fuel a serious intraparty challenge to him.

His campaign staff also seems like they never expected to have to run a real campaign. So at first they seemed to ignore Lamont’s challenge, probably expecting it to fade fast. It didn’t, and Lieberman’s campaign came to realize that Lamont’s challenge was serious. And what they did next is mind-boggling: Instead of reminding the voters of Lieberman’s strong history on progressive causes, their campaign increasingly focused on disqualifying Lamont.

I can’t think of a polite word to describe that strategy. I agree with the general rule that if the incumbent’s campaign can make the election about the challenger, that the incumbent will almost certainly win. But that simply was never going to happen and will never happen in this race. Lieberman is one of the most prominent politicians in the state’s - and indeed in the nation’s - recent history. By contrast, Lamont has no record, and virtually no one had ever heard Ned Lamont’s name before this year. Ned Lamont is a vehicle for opposition to Lieberman; the campaign will never be about him...

The vast majority of voters voting for Lamont were doing so not because they supported Lamont, but because they were against Lieberman. Consequently, any campaign strategy that was designed to damage Lamont in the eyes of voters has always been and will always be doomed to failure. As the Hotline On Call blog asked this weekend "Are negative ads what really what Lieberman needs right now? Aren’t voters looking for a reason to come back to Lieberman?"

They are, and they have plenty of reasons to. Joe Lieberman is hardly out of the mainstream of the Democratic party - one need only look at his voting record to see this - and Lieberman’s long history of fighting for progressive causes cannot seriously be questioned. Iraq is admittedly a big thorn in Lieberman’s side, but less than a quarter of all voters and just 33% of Democrats said Iraq was the top issue for them in this election.

Lieberman clearly can improve if his campaign just reminds voters of how strong he is on the traditional progressive issues of education, the environment, civil rights, choice, worker’s rights, and virtually every other progressive cause that you can think of. Those same Quinnipiac polls still show that a majority of Democrats think he deserves to be re-elected, and the loyalty of his supporters runs deep.

The Quinnipiac polls show, as they always have, that Lieberman would easily dispatch of Lamont in the general election. However, it really should not come to that, and it’s never too late to break bad habits. There are plenty of reasons for Democrats to vote for Lieberman. He and the members of his campaign need to remind voters of what they are, or else be willing to accept a good share of the responsibility if Lieberman loses on August 8.

All very true. Lieberman’s not the first politician, Senators especially, to lose touch with his voters. Senators have a tendency to think that the people who voted for them six years earlier are some kind of loyal base, forgetting that six years is a long time; people move in, move out, turn 18, etc.; and that all those people did six years ago was a 10-second act of expressing a preference for you over your opponent. (Lieberman’s opponent from six years ago is now serving a 37-year prison term for pedophilia, so it wasn’t much of a choice.) It’s one reason Senate races tend to be more competitive, and more often surprising, than House races. Sometimes it catches a Senator totally by surprise right before the election, as in Rudy Boschwitz’s 1990 loss to Paul Wellstone. But Lieberman has had plenty of warning, plenty of opportunity to reestablish his connection with voters. And the first step would have been to acknowledge, as Smith does, that "Lamont has every right to run," and then make his own case.

What the "Netroots" Can Do, And What They Can't

Can we please put to rest the idea that Ned Lamont’s challenge to Senator Lieberman is a product of, or a wholly-owned subsidiary of, that thing called “the netroots.” (Without, in so doing, disparaging or minimizing the netroots themselves.)

Yes, a lot of nationally prominent liberal bloggers are enthusiastic about the Lamont challenge. They’ve presumably helped raise some money (the thing he needs least, but the only symbolic gesture of support available to most people outside the state) and perhaps have generated some volunteers, including a number of bloggers themselves, notably Jane Hamsher. And a number of fabulous Connecticut-based blogs are central to the internal and external communications around the Lamont campaign. But that’s true of every successful campaign today, left, right and center, and in either major party. (The centrist Democratic Senate candidate in Missouri, for example, Claire McCaskill, is backed by almost as impressive a group of Show-Me-State blogs as Lamont is by Nutmeg blogs.)

The plausibility of the Lamont campaign is attributable to two major things, none of which have anything to do with Markos Moulitsas or his loyal minions:

1. Decades of statewide progressive organizing in the state. Lamont’s campaign manager is no blogger, but Tom Swan, who left his job as head of the Connecticut Citizen Action Group (CCAG) to run the campaign. According to one of the Connecticut blogs I mentioned above, much of the CCAG staff has also quit or taken a leave to help Lamont. CCAG got its start before even Al Gore had heard of the Internet, in the same year that Lieberman won his first primary - 1970 - and from the same impulses that created the reformist/anti-war Caucus of Connecticut Democrats in which Lieberman was active.

CCAG has had its ups and downs over the decades, but it is one of a very few multi-issue progressive groups of that era to have survived. A related group, the Legislative Electoral Action Program (LEAP) was very successful at getting progressives elected to the state legislature, many of whom are still there. CCAG has had a very successful last couple of years, most notably in winning passage of the state’s public financing law for campaigns, the first such “clean money” law to be passed through a legislature rather than by voter initiative. It takes a lot of skill and political savvy to get a legislature to back a proposal with low political salience that most politicians view as a threat. (That is, they would like to bury it and expect they can get away with it.) The Lamont campaign is coming off the energy and lessons learned of that victory.

You could imagine a challenge like Lamont’s emerging without the “netroots,” although they certainly drive a lot of the enthusiasm. You couldn’t imagine it without politically savvy, experienced organizers like Swan, with a base in a long-term, multi-issue progressive coalition that has allies and experience and understands the state. And anyone thinking about how to build structures and parties that can win elections against Republicans needs to understand this as well.

2. The fact that Lieberman has run, so far, the second most embarrassingly bad campaign of the year. (The worst campaign’s entire staff just quit, so there may be an opening to move up.) The fact is that there’s been a lot of latent discontent with Lieberman in the state at least since his speech about Monica Lewinsky, but as recently as a few months ago, his approval rating among Democrats was solidly in the low 70’s, indistinguishable from his support among Independents and Republicans. (This is an important point, by the way: A good portion of Republicans and Independents in Connecticut are more liberal than the average registered Democrat, and his support among those groups could prove just as soft as his Democratic support.) Lieberman could easily have restored his bond with Connecticut Democrats, or at least enough to be sure of winning a primary. I could have written that speech or that ad, and I would have done it, too, before he said “we criticize our commander-in-chief at our own peril.” It would involve a much stronger condemnation of Bush’s conduct of the war, a heartfelt acknowledgement of respect for opponents of the war and for the legitimacy of dissent, and a message that, wherever anyone stood in 2003, now we have a crisis on the ground in Iraq and have to work together - and with Republicans -- to get it right and get out. (If he couldn’t in good conscience say those things, then he’s got bigger problems.) The war is not the only issue driving opposition to Lieberman, of course, but it is the great question of our time and if he could defuse it somewhat as an issue, the opposition doesn’t have that much to work with.

Instead, for whatever reason, he chose to act petulant about the fact that anyone would oppose him at all, which is not the right response for a democrat, much less a Democrat; produce a series of comically inept ads, and shrink himself into a sort of suburban-mensch version of Al D’Amato : “I saved 3,000 jobs at Electric Boat in Groton.” “I voted for the energy bill because we got $800 million for energy conservation in Connecticut.” (Large forces have been unleashed in our politics, and a national figure like Lieberman should be seen as confronting those questions, not selling out for petty earmarks.) And finally, by taking out the “insurance policy” of running under a party named after himself, he highlighted every one of his own negatives and virtually ensured his defeat in the primary, with a very good chance that the independent candidacy will fizzle as well.

So let’s credit the netroots for what they do well - generate enthusiasm, force the big questions onto the agenda, generate a new definition of what it means to be a Democrat. But by themselves they can’t create a viable candidacy or bring down a popular three-term incumbent. Only organizing and the incumbent’s own mistakes can do that.

Netroots, Labor and Strong Parties

It seems to me that Noam Scheiber and Garance Franke-Ruta are both making too much of the distinction between “netroots” and traditional Democratic interest groups, especially the possible “split” between netroots liberals and organized labor.

It’s as simple as this: Interest groups think like interest groups, netroots want to think like a party. They are two different ways of operating and thinking in a political world, not two different constituencies competing for a zero-sum quantity of influence.

The key fact adduced as evidence of a breach is that unions have endorsed seven of the most vulnerable northeastern House Republicans, seats that the netroots are enthusiastic about taking back for Democrats. Is that evidence of an ideological divide between labor and the netroots? Does labor have a problem with the Democratic challengers for those seats?

No. It’s evidence of nothing of the kind. It’s simply a function of the way interest groups work, the way they have to work. I used the example of environmental groups in my column in the Prospect in June, but it applies to organized labor just as well. The one thing they know is that to get anything done, they need bipartisan support. They have to be able to go into the offices of Republican members of Congress from districts where labor has influence and ask for their help. And when the member says, “If I’m with you on these three things, will you endorse me in the fall?” they need to be able to say Yes. They need to be strategic about it, they shouldn’t sell out for peanuts. But they can’t say, “Oh, gee, we like you and we need your help, but we are a Democratic interest group after all.” That would be malpractice. And these groups can all point to good things they’ve gotten done, or terrible things they’ve prevented, as a result of offering these incentives.

So labor’s not stupid or mistaken to endorse Jim Gerlach in Pennsylvania, just as NARAL’s not stupid to endorse Lincoln Chafee. Sure, both know that their causes would be better served by changing the majority, but neither can give up the retail trade of your support for our endorsement that is their basic way of doing business. But as I wrote in my column, “at a certain point, rewarding friendly Republicans crosses the line into desperately trying to prop up a few so that you can still seem bipartisan -- at the price of legitimating a majority whose highest priority after tax cuts is the evisceration of environmental regulation” (or, substitute “labor laws” or “abortion rights” for “environmental regulation.” Perhaps I should have said, amongst their priorities are such diverse elements as…) Of course it’s hard to know when that line has been crossed: after Gerlach, Shays and a dozen other Republican moderates with good records on labor, environment and choice lose this year, then how are these interest groups going to continue to function in the normal bipartisan way? Will they define moderation down, endorsing Republicans they wouldn’t touch in the past but who are now the best the party has to offer? Or will they accept that their cause is best served by operating within the single party that is pro-labor, pro-environment and largely pro-choice?

Netroots, on the other hand, doesn’t need to worry about bipartisan deals because it doesn’t have a cause. Instead, it is a vision of what the Democratic Party ought to be: Liberal, sure - up to a point. (Ideology barely begins to explain why some politicians - Brian Schweitzer, Harry Reid - are netroots favs). Fights back. Responsive. Broadly critical of corporate power. It is not a faction looking for influence in the Democratic Party, as Scheiber puts it, but the vanguard of a strong and cohesive party.

While Garance is right to point out that the netroots can’t substitute for the voter mobilization that labor produces (and doesn’t even try - this is not a voter turnout operation), there are also shortcomings to the traditional advocacy-group model of voter turnout. Only a party can do the kind of serious targeting that the Republicans do, not finding voters through membership lists but locating people who fit the economic and demographic profile of Republican voters.

There’s a lot to be said for a strong and cohesive party, even apart from questions of whether Democrats win elections or not. For one thing, as Scheiber does note, it puts different issues on the table. Interest groups, for as many as there are, leave hundreds of important issues un-spoken for. That’s why the bankruptcy bill was such a good example of the value of netroots. Members had voted for that bill several times before, and they had not heard a word about. Sure, there was a little effort by bankruptcy lawyers, but they seemed like a petty, interested party. (Although most were so busy that losing business was the least of their worries.) Near bankrupt families simply had no one to speak for them in Washington, and no power if they did. There are more such collective-action problems than there are solutions. And so a politician goes through life thinking that there are a few issues on which he has to deal with engaged and interested constituents that will endorse him or not, rank him on scorecards, mobilize voters, and then lots of other issues that no one pays attention to, and on which he can just go with his cash constituents. Netroots totally changes the logic of this - an issue he thought was invisible suddenly becomes a key marker of Democratic Party principles. And that’s a good thing.

I didn’t mean this to be so laudatory of the netroots world, because it’s not without its problems. But the era of interest-group politics is dead, and the strong party that the netroots advocates foresee will take its place, and while that won’t be without some disruptions, it will be to the good.

Lieberman and the Millionaire Provision

Senator Lieberman recently described his decision to take out petitions to appear on the November ballot as an independent if he loses the Democratic primary as “an insurance policy” against opponent Ned Lamont’s capacity to fund his own campaign.

One problem (of many) with this argument is that when Congress wrote the new campaign finance law in 2002, it wrote itself a sweet insurance policy against self-funded challengers: the so-called “millionaire’s provision.” Under this rule, if a candidate spends more than a certain amount of his or her own funds (a complex formula based on the state’s population), the contribution limits for other candidates in the race are doubled, quadrupled, and eventually sextupled.

In practice, in Connecticut, if I’m reading the law correctly, this means that if Lamont were to spend $2.5 million of his own money (which is not that much; Lieberman himself spent $3.7 million on his barely contested reelection in 2000), Lieberman would be able to accept contributions six times the normal $2,000 limit. And presumably he would be able to accept them for the primary and the general election separately: a single lobbyist could contribute $24,000 to Lieberman.

To his credit, Lieberman voted against the millionaire provision, as did most Democrats, and his colleague Senator Dodd offered the strongest speech in opposition. It is surely the worst thing in that law, incumbent protection of the most blatant kind. Yes, it is disturbing that so many Senators and members of Congress are wealthy and financed their own first campaigns. But given the advantage incumbents already have, in name recognition and access to donors - until the rise of small donors and the netroots -- a self-financed candidate has usually been the only challenger who has a chance, and many of them lose. (The world’s expert on self-financed candidates is Jennifer Steen of Boston College.) And only incumbents, not another challenger, are likely to be able to take advantage of these $4,000, $8,000 or $12,000 donors. The millionaire provision doesn’t level the playing field against self-financed candidates, rather, it restores and magnifies the advantage that incumbents already have.

And if Congress has concluded that $2,000 is an appropriate contribution limit, because higher contributions can be corrupting, why is $12,000 not corrupting when your opponent happens to be self-financed?

The Supreme Court did not rule on the constitutionality of the Millionaire Provision when it upheld McCain-Feingold in 2003, because no millionaire candidate with standing to claim he was hurt by the provision had appeared. Now, however, the Democrat challenging Rep. Tom Reynolds, head of the National Republican Congressional Committee, has filed suit challenging the provision.

So here’s a good question for tonight’s Lieberman-Lamont debate: “Senator Lieberman, since you have decided to run as an independent as an ‘insurance policy’ against Mr. Lamont’s personal wealth, will you promise not to use your other ‘insurance policy,’ the provision that allows you to raise huge amounts of money from private donors and lobbyists?”

Carville and Penn: Where's the Data?

There seem to be various complaints about James Carville and Mark Penn’s case for Hillary Clinton’s electability that appeared in the Post yesterday, including that Penn was not identified as a current consultant to Clinton’s Senate reelection campaign. But I had a different reaction.

Here’s one of Carville and Penn’s key arguments, and to me the most powerful one:

Pundits and fundraisers and activists may be unsure of whether Hillary can get elected president, but Democratic voters, particularly Democratic women and even independent women, are thrilled with the idea.

The X factor for 2008 -- and we do mean X -- is the power of women in the electorate.... We believe that Hillary is uniquely capable of getting those swing voters back to the Democratic column...we could see an explosion of women voting -- and voting Democratic.

The big question about Senator Clinton’s candidacy is this: Does she have a particular appeal to women, including independent and Republican-leaning women, and married women?

I think she might, which is one reason I’m open to the idea that Clinton is as electable as anyone else, and possibly more so. I could have written the sentences above, but purely as speculation. It’s a huge question, and if I were a pollster, if I had the capacity to do more than speculate, I would sure like to find out.

Which gets to the problem with the op-ed: Mark Penn is a pollster. He actually has the capacity to find out. Presumably he is out there trying to find out, unless he’s too busy inventing new and dubious demographic categories, like "office park dads." Not one single piece of data is attached to statements like, "independent women are thrilled with the idea," or "we believe that Hillary is uniquely capable of getting those swing voters," or "we could see an explosion of women voting."

At the launch of the new online publication, The Democratic Strategist, last week, Ruy Teixera promised a new era in which Democratic thinking would be guided by "facts not faction." I’m totally open to the argument that Senator Clinton is electable -- but please show us some facts.

My Lieberman Problem -- And Ours

Like Josh Marshall and others, I have strong and deeply conflicted feelings about Ned Lamont’s challenge to Senator Lieberman. I have a lot of residual respect for Lieberman, which goes way back. And I mean way back: As I often note, Lieberman is probably the first politician I was aware of when I was a little kid. When I was about seven years old, my view of politics could probably be summed up as Nixon=bad/Lieberman=good.

This was when he was a State Senator representing New Haven, following the last great anti-war rebellion in the Connecticut Democratic Party. In 1970, incumbent U.S. Senator Thomas Dodd - hawkish, pro-war, and ill - withdrew from the race for the Democratic nomination when it was apparent that he would lose to anti-war candidate Joe Duffey, but then later reentered the race as an independent. Meanwhile, Lieberman, who with Duffey had founded the anti-war Caucus of Connecticut Democrats, was riding the same wave to unseat the State Senate Majority Leader in a primary. Helping to run both the Lieberman and Duffey campaigns were a lovey-dovey pair of idealistic Yale law students named Rodham and Clinton.

Later I didn’t pay much attention to Lieberman as he ran and lost campaigns for Lieutenant Governor and Congress. He seemed to be one of those ‘70s reformers who just couldn’t stop running. By the time he was elected Attorney General of Connecticut (where he pioneered the role of activist A.G. that Elliott Spitzer has perfected) I had moved out of the state. But later, when I worked in the Senate, I often worked closely with Lieberman and his staff - he and Bill Bradley often shared idiosyncratic positions, such as support for school vouchers, as well as less idiosyncratic but highly complicated interests, such as improving child support enforcement. In most such dealings between Senate offices, staff as well as the Senators, even when they agree, are always subtly jockeying for credit, for a visible leadership role on the issue, or for a place in front of the camera. Even though Lieberman had written a book about child support enforcement, based on his efforts to fix the system in Connecticut, and knew more about it than any other Senator (and surely more than I did), he contentedly played a supporting role. And it always seemed apparent from everyone who worked with him that he was simply a better human being (kinder, more respectful) to those around him than 99% of politicians.

Lieberman’s positions on various issues never really bothered me. I don’t need elected officials to exactly match my issue positions, which often change anyway. And in some cases, I shared his positions. I found his sanctimonious tone grating, his obsession with popular media distasteful and misdirected (as in, you might have more credibility on this if you didn’t suck up to “the I-Man” - Don Imus -- two mornings a week), but they would never be enough to make me think that if I lived in Connecticut, I wouldn’t vote for him. While my family and family friends developed a deep distaste for Lieberman, I would simply repeat the reminder, drilled into my head by own friends in the Lieberman camp, that his voting record really isn’t that different from Senator Dodd’s. And it isn’t.

Josh Marshall suggested recently that his greatest misgiving about Lieberman was his weirdly persistent refusal last year to get off the fence on Social Security privatization, as if he was waiting for some bipartisan deal that he could courageously join. “Perhaps he’s just out of step with the parliamentary turn of recent American politics,” Josh suggests. By which he means that, despite the Medicare drug bill, the energy bill, and the abundance of evidence to the contrary, Lieberman still thinks that he can deal in good faith with the Republicans. True, Lieberman doesn’t seem to really understand the current power structure, but he’s hardly alone in that. It took a couple of whippings before Ted Kennedy understood it. I’ve argued that everyone had better reckon with the fact that the era of bipartisan coalitions is dead, but I think there are downsides to that change and I don’t blame Lieberman for trying. Nor, in the end, did he cause any harm by his misreading of the Social Security game.

Nor is it fatal to me in itself that Lieberman supported the war and opposes withdrawal on a timetable. I voted twice in 2004 for Senators who had voted for the war, and I have no cosmic certainty at this point about what the right answer is. I’d vote for withdrawal on a timetable, but not without doubts. Maybe Biden’s right, maybe Levin and Reed, maybe Murtha. Because the risks are so uncertain, this is the hardest question to answer, and for myself, I find I can’t categorically dismiss anyone’s answer or insist that every Democrat toe one line.

So I ought to be a Lieberman “dead-ender.” I’ve respected him for 30-some years, I don’t mind his idiosyncratic positions, I don’t demand party loyalty, and I don’t insist on any particular position on how to end the war. But I’m not. Because something happened to Lieberman, and it’s more than his position on the war. It is not, as John Dickerson wrote on Slate this week that he “symbolizes” all the other Democrats who voted for the war or won’t take a firm stand. Above all else, it’s simply his self-righteous anger, his hostility to those who differ. He alone among Democrats seem to think that opponents of the war are not just mistaken, but will cause us to lose. (Just as he alone can continue to describe the choice in the war as “winning” or “losing,” as if “winning” were somehow still possible, as opposed to salvaging a bad situation.) He alone would say something like, “”We criticize the commander-in-chief at our own peril.” And he alone would suggest, as he did to David Broder, that Democrats who criticized Bush on the war were acting from "partisan interest" while he was thinking of "the national interest." He alone seems more focused on what he sees as the errors of the war’s opponents than those who launched the war. As Michael Tomasky said of Peter Beinart’s New Republic position on the Iraq War, it was not so much that they supported the war as that they “opposed the opposers.”

It seems to me that Lieberman is following the path, quite literally, of the neo-conservatives - not the Rumsfeldian nationalists who incorrectly wear that label now, but the original neo-cons of the 1960s, driven to the right above all by their irritation at the left, often based on domestic politics. (Hence the title of this post, an allusion to one of the most famous original documents of the neocons, Norman Podhoretz’s 1967 essay, “My Negro Problem - And Ours”.)

Is that enough of a reason to oppose Lieberman? Sure, because it’s a huge error on one of the most fundamental questions of our time. It’s an error not of policy or of political loyalty, but of attitude. And it is not an error that I see others making. I heard Ed Kilgore today, on a bloggingHeads sequence, argue that if “the bloggers” come for Lieberman today, tomorrow they’ll go after Steny Hoyer or Hillary Clinton. I can’t speak for everyone, but while I have disagreements with Clinton and probably Hoyer, I’ve never heard them say things as deeply offensive to my sense of what democracy and patriotism requires as I’ve heard from Lieberman recently.

Nor do I accept the argument that if Lamont wins, it represents a “purge” or shows that “there’s no place in the Democratic Party” for Lieberman. I value competitive elections. Lieberman’s not guaranteed a fourth term in the Senate. Ned Lamont’s reasonably well qualified, certainly as qualified as, say, Paul Wellstone was. If Connecticut Democrats want a Senator who had the right position on the war, or at least doesn’t treat those who did have the right position with contempt, they are entitled to it.

Finally, as to the possibility that Lieberman would run as an independent - well, in the David Broder column mentioned above, he noted Lieberman’s admiration for the great Connecticut Democratic boss and DNC chair, John Bailey, and Bailey’s skill at engineering nominations and avoiding primaries. He should not forget what Bailey said of Senator Thomas Dodd’s decision to run as an independent in 1970: "...any action like this can’t help but hurt the party.”

(I’m grateful to the author who writes as “Genghis Conn” on the Connecticut Local Politics blog for a well-sourced account of the 1970 campaigns.)

The Completely Incorrect History of the Democratic Party

I know we’re done with the Peter Beinart book club, and the poor guy is getting picked on a lot this week. But I can’t resist, and as President Bush said after teasing a legally blind reporter for wearing sunglasses, `I needle you guys out of affection." (The bully’s excuse, doubly vicious because so plainly untrue, and forces the victim to be courteous.) I wouldn’t say that I needle Beinart out of affection -- I don’t know him well, but I admire him for trying to produce something of substance out of the admission that he was wrong about Iraq -- but out of frustration with the fact that he so often seems to start off o.k. and then gets things so spectacularly wrong.

So here’s his latest. In a defense of the Clinton Administration (which I’m totally comfortable with, by the way, having seen myself recently described as a "Clinton Democrat" and not flinching) Beinart gives the following thumbnail history of the Democratic Party in the 1970s:

In reality, the Democratic Party didn’t lose the confidence of its convictions when Clinton became president; it lost them when he was in graduate school. From Harry Truman through Lyndon Johnson, Democrats stood for three basic things: enlightened anti-communism, an expanding welfare state, and racial integration.

Between 1968 and 1972, under pressure from Vietnam and racial conflict, two of those three collapsed. By 1972, George McGovern was urging the virtual abandonment of anticommunism and advocating racial quotas. Then, in 1976, Democrats nominated a relative economic conservative, Jimmy Carter, who showed little interest in extending Johnson’s Great Society largesse. And, poof--there went principle number three.

In The Good Fight, it’s not quite so clear that this is how he would sum up the history, but Wow! Let’s take that second paragraph one point at a time:

By 1972, George McGovern was urging the virtual abandonment of anticommunism,

Um, don’t know what you’re talking about here. McGovern was opposed to the Vietnam War, which was a war against communism. But the "enlightened" anti-communist liberals also opposed that war. To say that opposing the Vietnam is tantamount to "virtual abandonment of anticommunism" is the same as arguing that opposing the Iraq war is a virtual abandonment of opposition to terrorism. Since Beinart is not now willing to make either argument, he cannot keep baiting McGovern as insufficiently anti-communist, in the same way that he cannot continue to bait Iraq war opponents (among whom he now counts himself) for being insufficiently anti-terrorist. Although he makes a good rhetorical effort to do so.

and advocating racial quotas

o.k., the point here seems to be that the Truman-through-Johnson Democrats stood for "racial integration," whereas McGovern abandoned that principle by "advocating racial quotas." That assumes that affirmative action is somehow antithetical to integration,rather than a means to achieve it. But even if you accept that quotas are antithetical to the older ideal of race-blind integration, it seems worth noting that actual racial quotas were introduced into American political life by President Richard M. Nixon, who as it happens was McGovern’s Republican opponent in 1972.

(It’s possible that Beinart is referring to something much more arcane here, namely the internal reforms in the Democratic Party nominating process, implemented by a commission McGovern chaired. Those reforms included some criteria to ensure sufficient numbers of women and minorities were delegates to the convention, which was an important move given that southern states still produced all-white delegations. Beinart follows a traditional neo-conservative argument -- first advanced by Jeanne Kirkpatrick -- that the McGovern-Fraser reforms led to a fragmentation of the New Deal Democratic coalition into identity group politics. But if this is Beinart’s point, and even if he and Jeanne Kirkpatrick are right, it is bizarre to call it an "abandoment" of racial integration. At worst, it was an excessive commitment to integration. And it is also an event of very minor significance, except in the worldview of the neo-cons.)

in 1976, Democrats nominated a relative economic conservative, Jimmy Carter, who showed little interest in extending Johnson’s Great Society largesse. And, poof--there went principle number three

I’ll assume he means principle number two, "an expanding welfare state." I suppose this is a version of the argument that if only that most reckless of big spenders, Saint Scoop, had been elected president in 1976, all would be well. There are a lot of reasons the Carter presidency failed; not spending money on social programs wasn’t one of them. This was the era of CETA, after all. (The big public jobs program, which paid for my last summer in high school.) Carter didn’t have the sway over Congress that LBJ had, and both fiscal and economic circumstances were very different. Nor is "expanding welfare state" (that is, spending) a principle in itself -- expanding economic security is.

And that point Beinart immediately concedes, when it comes to Clinton:

If Clinton convinced Americans that government action could be moral, he also convinced them that it could be responsible. By reducing the budget deficit, he helped restore the Democratic Party’s reputation for economic stewardship, which had been gravely damaged under Carter. And, by using market mechanisms to achieve traditional liberal goals, he found ways to fight poverty in an environment where large new programs were politically impossible.

Yes! I think that’s basically right. But celebrating Clinton as an economic conservative is the complete opposite of arguing that Carter’s mistake was that he was an economic conservative who didn’t launch big programs the way LBJ did.

I have no gripe with Beinart’s rehabiliation of Clinton. I was never very critical of Clinton, and now that we really understand just how vicious the right-wing machine is, we have to appreciate that he did not have the freedom of movement that LBJ had, and that he made almost as much as could be made of his severely constrained political circumstances. It should be possible to make that case without trashing a couple decades of well-meaning, serious liberals -- as committed to anti-communism, racial fairness and broadly shared economic security as their elders -- who just happened to lack the policial skills of an LBJ or Clinton.

Mr. Rove is Ready for His Close-Up

Now that Karl Rove"has his reputation back," what’s he going to do with the rest of his life? Here’s what he did last night:

MANCHESTER, New Hampshire, June 12 (Reuters) - Republicans should campaign on U.S. economic strength and the war in Iraq as they gear up for the November election, President George W. Bush’s political adviser Karl Rove urged on Monday.

"We have the strongest economy of any major industrialized country in the world," Rove told about 400 Republicans at a fund-raising dinner in New Hampshire...

Party officials estimate the fundraiser brought in $60,000. expected to help pay legal bills for a Republican scandal over a phone-jamming scheme designed to keep New Hampshire Democrats from voting in a 2002 election.

The case led to the conviction of three Republican party officials and seriously squeezed the state party’s finances....

Political consultant Rich Killion, who paid $250 to meet Rove...People who attended just to listen to Rove paid $100 each.

Now I’m sure plenty of people here will be appropriately outraged by the fact that an official paid by taxpayers is out there raising money for a felon’s legal fees.

But I’m too busy laughing at the shabbiness of the whole thing. $60,000?? Whoever heard of a Republican fund-raiser that produced $60,000? Aren’t we missing some zeroes here? $60,000 is the price of the car you drive to the Republican fund-raiser in. Not to mention, it’s not even a down-payment on the $3 million in legal fees stemming from the case.

And what’s Rove’s time worth these days? Shaking hands for $250? Isn’t this like the end of a "Behind the Music" or E! True Hollywood Story, where the celebrity gamely tries to make a comeback, playing small clubs or shaking hands for money at conventions of fans of his long-cancelled show?