Learned Aggressiveness
Regardless of the outcome tomorrow in Connecticut, the netroots have already won.
By Ezra Klein
Web Exclusive: 08.07.06
Snip...
Blame the media, who continue to play moths to the blogosphere’s flame, and so are swarming about Connecticut, trying to discern What It All Means. To listen to their early predictions though, the answer is basically nothing if Lamont fails to win the seat. Writing in The Washington Post, Dan Balz gave voice to this reductive outlook, opining that, “(a) victory by businessman Ned Lamont on Tuesday would confirm the growing strength of the grass-roots and Internet activists who first emerged in Howard Dean's presidential campaign. Driven by intense anger at President Bush and fierce opposition to the Iraq war, they are on the brink of claiming their most significant political triumph, one that will reverberate far beyond the borders here if Lieberman loses.”
What Balz doesn’t realize is that the time for “woulds” and “ifs” is over -- the reverberations have already rippled forth. The phase of this race bearing significant implications for the Democratic Party already happened, and whether Lamont wins or loses tomorrow is almost entirely immaterial to the political triumph of the netroots. Their scalp was claimed, mounted, and hung on July 7th, the day Joe Lieberman, an affable, popular incumbent who’d been his party’s celebrated vice-presidential candidate only six years earlier, was forced to mount a stage against some nobody named Ned Lamont and defensively debate his right to call himself a Democrat. Or maybe the seminal instant occurred four days earlier, on July 3rd, when Lieberman admitted that he would gather signatures to enable an independent run, a sign he feared defeat in the primary. Either way, the point is the same: The netroots won the moment Joe Lieberman felt fear.
With the netroots having proved they can generate an existential challenge to a safe-seeming incumbent, actually defeating Lieberman would be little beyond icing on the cake. Moving forward, a Lieberman victory would do nothing to blur the traumatic memory of his near-loss. And that gives the netroots an extraordinary amount of power, vaulting them into a rarified realm occupied by only the strongest interest groups.
Snip...
Now the netroots will join that category. But, as evidenced by their choice of target -- Dianne Feinstein and Herb Kohl, while war supporters, face no primary challenges -- they will demand something altogether different. Rather than requiring submission to a certain set of policy initiatives, they’ll demand unity in certain moments of partisan showdown. What so rankled about Lieberman was his willingness to abandon ship when steady hands were most necessary -- he was always the first to compromise on judicial nominees, or flirt with Social Security privatization, or scold critics of the Iraq War. His current plight is evidence that such opportunistic betrayals will not, in the future, go unpunished. On July 7th, being the Democrat who criticizes Democrats ceased being safe.
more...
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=11819Sunday, August 06, 2006
"Anti-war" movement? What "anti-war movement"?
by John in DC - 8/06/2006 11:29:00 AM
I just heard Stephanopoulos start his coverage by saying the "anti-war movement" could send political shockwaves through the Democratic party on Tuesday (if Lieberman loses), and I don't like what I'm hearing. Worse yet it's the same kind of somewhat-lazy reporting we're hearing from every other reporter covering the issue.
Here's the problem.
Snip...
The problem for many of us in Iraq is not "war." It's THIS war, how it got started (a lie) and how it's being run (into the ground).
3. A word about the "netroots."
Snip...
The point being, it is disingenuous and misleading to portray this thing called "the netroots" as some kind of all-powerful sieg-heil far-left monolith. It is not, we are not. Collectively we have some power and some anger (see below), to be sure, but far-left and anti-war as our running credo we are not.
The "netroots" - which is simply a trendy way of saying "politically-active Americans" - are motivated by a profound concern about where America finds itself today. That kind of concern isn't liberal, it isn't anti-war, it isn't even partisan. It's American. And check out the polls, George and all the rest of ya - most of the country agrees with us, not most of the Democratic party, most of the COUNTRY.
more...
http://americablog.blogspot.com/2006/08/anti-war-movement-what-anti-war.html
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