Boomerang?

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

One of my best friends, a centrist Democratic Leadership Council supporter, purchased the following bumper sticker after the Supreme Court gave the 2000 election to George W. Bush: I blame Nader.

Despite the hand wringing on the Florida recount and the conspiracies of the Michael Moore crowd, the consensus among most Democrats I knew in 2000 was that they could not afford an independent presidential candidate running to their left in such a divided nation. Better to have the beat-the-bank crowd in the tent.

As the August 8 Connecticut primary approaches, it’s time for the Democratic party to rethink that. After an uneasy alliance in 2002 and 2004, the Nader’s refashioned Raiders are restless. Yes, they want to beat Bushitler politically. But they also would like to purge anyone in the party who thinks it’s worth fighting the Iraq war.

Inside the influential chat rooms of the left-leaning blogosphere, this strategy of creating ex-Democrats is lauded as brilliant strategy. For a group of people determined to destroy Karl Rove, the ascendant liberal bloggers certainly are making his job this election season easier.

For Mr. Rove intends to nationalize the Congressional elections as a contest between the party of strength and a party of waiverers. Win the war Republicans against cut and run Democrats. The netroots of the Democratic Party intends to nationalize the primary challenge in Connecticut against Joe Lieberman next month. The man who was a few Florida ballots away from the vice presidency in 2000, is being punished because he has not publicly regretted his support for the war our soldiers are currently fighting in Iraq. For the online activists who hide behind anonymous handles in anti-war cyberspace, this is an election between an enabler of the evil Bush and a man who is willing to fight him.

It should be said that there is nothing wrong with any of this. It’s politics in a democracy. If Connecticut’s Democrats want a senator who thinks the war for Iraq’s elected government was foisted on the nation by neoconservatives through deceit, it is their right. But if, come August 8, Ned Lamont knocks off Joe Lieberman, then the scare quotes for September’s GOP direct mail pieces will be contained on the web pages of Daily Kos, MyDD.com and the Huffington Post.

Spend a few minutes scanning these websites and you find a hyperbole factory. Take this recent entry from a radio host and Huffington poster Cenk Uyger, “You can’t come in here today and tell me the Iraq War was a good idea,” he declares in “Note to Mainstream media: Why we hate Lieberman.” “It is not an argument a feeling and rational person can make. It is an argument that only someone who cared more about their blind ideology and personal pride can make. And when you’re willing to sign off on other people’s death certificates to protect your own pride, I have no patience for you. You’re playing with other people’s lives.”

Mr. Uyger is not saying the war is not going well, which even some of its supporters now concede. He is saying you can’t continue to support the aims of the war in good faith. Successive elections? Killing Zarqawi? Dismantling a lurid dictatorship supported by the west? There is no good news from this war. It’s all Haditha and abu Ghraib.

The ringleader at Daily Kos, Markos Moulitsas, appears in a Lamont campaign commercial who was cut loose from Senator Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004 because he wrote that he “felt nothing” about American contractors killed and mutilated in Fallujah. “They aren’t in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them.” In political circles, the technical term for these kinds of rants from the other side is “gift.”

Even today, when support in America for the Iraq war is at a nadir, it’s a gift. While a majority of Americans, according to a Gallup survey late last month, favors a gradual withdrawal of troops, only 31% support immediate withdrawal.

Today Democrats can dismiss the gate crashing Daily Kos as a glorified chat room. It’s true that this segment of the web has been successful in fundraising. But the netroots’s only electoral victory so far has been among party activists last year for the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, Howard Dean. So far, the blogosphere has not been able to tilt a primary let alone a general election.

But a Lamont win next month could change all of that. It will put every other pro-war Democrat on notice that they are not tolerated. It will also give Karl Rove the same opportunity the draft card burners gave Richard Nixon in 1972. While most Americans were then weary of war in Vietnam, they were wary of protestors who burned American flags and called our soldiers war criminals.

So far, the blogosphere has not gone this far yet. But should it feel empowered by victory on August 8, the White House might be the only ones celebrating in November.


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