Lanny Davis — a key member of the Clinton team — writes today (in a piece he calls “Liberal McCarthyism") about the bile-filled political climate. What’s interesting about his piece is that he’s mostly describing the vitriol on his side of the aisle. The lead:
My brief and unhappy experience with the hate and vitriol of bloggers on the liberal side of the aisle comes from the last several months I spent campaigning for a longtime friend, Joe Lieberman.
This kind of scary hatred, my dad used to tell me, comes only from the right wing — in his day from people such as the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy, with his tirades against “communists and their fellow travelers.” The word “McCarthyism” became a red flag for liberals, signifying the far right’s fascistic tactics of labeling anyone a “communist” or “socialist” who favored an active federal government to help the middle class and the poor, and to level the playing field.
I came to believe that we liberals couldn’t possibly be so intolerant and hateful, because our ideology was famous for ACLU-type commitments to free speech, dissent and, especially, tolerance for those who differed with us. And in recent years — with the deadly combination of sanctimony and vitriol displayed by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Michael Savage — I held on to the view that the left was inherently more tolerant and less hateful than the right.
Now, in the closing days of the Lieberman primary campaign, I have reluctantly concluded that I was wrong.
...
Read the rest; it’s a kickass piece…
I haven’t commented much on the Lamont/Lieberman battle, mainly because I don’t really have anything to add to all the fine commentary out there. But if I think about that struggle as just another example of a larger phenomena — the transformation of the Democratic Party — then I have a little more to say.
Zell Miller and Joe Lieberman are, so far as I can tell, just about the last two old-fashioned Democrats left alive. The last two “honest men” left in the party, as some have said. And that’s very sad, because from my perspective they’re honorable, serious, respectable political opponents — unlike the Reids, Deans, Pelosis, Corzines, Lamonts, McKinneys, Schumers, and Kennedys (and I could go on and on) who seem to have successfully replaced them.
This is certainly not to say that the Republican Party doesn’t have any of the unserious partisan types for whom I have no respect — they do have them. But while I am not a member of either political party (neither even comes close to representing my own views), I have a lot more respect for the GOP, mostly because the partisan loonies haven’t taken over that asylum, as they seem to have on the Democratic side. Most of the time, when I hear a Republican speak, I can detect at least a whiff of something that smells like a position truly believed in. More often than not, when I hear a Democrat speak, my nose is overwhelmed by the foul odor of a position taken for momentary political advantage — even when that position is clearly not in the best interest of my country, my state, or my community.
For me, no single issue illustrates this difference better than the war on terror — and most especially the war in Iraq. This is the key issue in the Lamont/Lieberman Democratic primary battle, and I think it’s fair to think of that race as a kind of Democratic referendum on the war in Iraq. The conventional wisdom is that Lamont will easily win the primary — which means that the referendum’s results will be opposing the war in Iraq. I hope that the pundits and media are wrong, but I fear they are not.
And I shudder to think about the message that a Lamont win will send to those who control the Democratic party. I’m pretty sure they’d interpret it as a “mandate” to go all Full Moonbat on us. I would expect to hear Dean, Reid, and Pelosi start howling and screeching for immediate, unconditional withdrawal from Iraq. And I think nearly all paths from there lead to bad places…
One path leads to a Democratic party solidly committed to isolationism and denial of the fundamentalist Islamic threat to America. Depending on the degree of public support for their position, this could make prosecution of the war very difficult — and much less effective. This is reminiscent, in some ways, of the political atmosphere just prior to America’s entry into World War II. The serious political operatives on both sides of the aisle understood the need to stand with Europe, but popular sentiment was against them. In that case (unlike, apparently, 9/11) Pearl Harbor galvanized the whole country to persevere through to victory, an attitude sustained even when the political leadership decided to concentrate on Europe first, even though it was Japan that attacked us. It’s very hard for me to be confident about the general American support for the war in Iraq — there is so much apparently conflicting information out there to confuse us all…
Another path leads to the destruction of the Democratic party as an effective political force. This might well happen if most Democrats found the Full Moonbat didn’t really represent them, and they were frightened about the implications to their country. I’d like to think that that would be the case — but the likely outcome of that is (at least for the moment) that we’d have just a single effective party (the Republicans). And I don’t much like that, either — I think it’s very important for us to have political tension, especially at the national level.
There’s only one path that leads to a good place. It’s a variation of the preceding path, wherein the disintegration of the Democratic party leads to the creation of a new — and effective — political party. It’s happened before in the U.S., but not very often — and never in our modern age of instant communications and a relatively ill-informed population. I’m not at all optimistic that a new party could successfully be formed. But if it did form, and especially if its ideology resembled that of Zell Miller and Joe Lieberman, then I think that would be a very healthy thing for America.
That I would really like to see…
But I fear something much worse is more likely…
