SENATOR Joseph Lieberman’s defeat in the Connecticut Democratic primary at the hands of an upstart anti-Iraq war candidate reverberated through American politics yesterday, triggering an earthquake with potentially large but unpredictable consequences for the Democratic party.
Though Mr Lieberman lost narrowly to his once anonymous challenger, businessman Ned Lamont, by 52-48 per cent, the shock to the Democratic establishment was seismic.
Mr Lieberman, a senator for 18 years, became only the third elected incumbent member of the senate of either party in the last quarter of a century to lose his party’s nomination. He was the party’s nominee for vice-president in 2000, running alongside Al Gore, and stood unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004.
As his re-election battle in Connecticut got tougher over the last few weeks, almost all the leading members of the party flocked to his side, led by former President Clinton and his wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.
But on Tuesday he was swept aside in a torrent of grassroots anger at the war in Iraq — channelled by a highly effective campaign by left-wing internet bloggers — and his enthusiastic support for it and President Bush’s wider War on Terror.
Mr Lieberman immediately made good on his pre-election pledge to run as an independent Democrat in November’s general election, as polls suggest that he has a good chance of winning. Prominent Democrats moved quickly to endorse Mr Lamont as the party’s now official candidate for the Senate seat. But the result focused sharp attention on the Democratic party’s position on the war in Iraq and will prompt a broader foreign policy debate in advance of the mid-term elections in November and the presidential contest that will begin soon thereafter.
The obvious lesson was that the war in Iraq now has the power to derail the careers of those Democrats who have, to varying degrees of enthusiasm, supported it in the last three years. It could force the Democrats’ leadership in Washington to take a much more confrontational line with Mr Bush over his conduct of foreign policy more generally.
But if it does tempt the party’s standard-bearers towards a more aggressive anti-war stance it risks undermining not only their own credibility, as erstwhile supporters of the war, but also the party’s ability to convince a wider electorate that it can be trusted with the nation’s security.
Few Democrats were as supportive of Mr Bush as Senator Lieberman, but his defeat still spells trouble for them, most notably Senator Clinton, the leading candidate for the party’s presidential nomination in 2008. Mrs Clinton has enraged many of her party’s own voters by maintaining her support for the war. As a Lieberman debacle looked more likely in recent weeks she has stepped up her criticism of the conduct of the war, calling last week for the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, but not repudiating her support for it.
Tuesday’s result suggests that it could provide an opening for a powerful anti-war campaign from a credible challenger in 2008, perhaps someone such as Mr Gore. But more broadly, the Lieberman defeat echoes down through four decades of mostly unhappy Democratic party history and captures in one tumultuous result much of the party’s electoral problem throughout that time. The Vietnam War in the 1960s tore the party apart and raised doubts in the broader US electorate about its reliability on the pivotal political issue of national defence.
The image of Eugene McCarthy, the anti-war candidate, unseating Lyndon Johnson in the 1968 Democratic presidential primary and four years later, of the left-wing Senator George McGovern as the party’s presidential nominee against Richard Nixon, seemed to define the party in the minds of much of the American public as not only against the war, but soft on national security and even vaguely antiAmerican.
In 1991, still haunted by the failures in Vietnam, the party’s leaders almost all opposed the first Gulf War to evict Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait. All but five Democratic senators (one of whom was Mr Lieberman) voted against the conflict and saw their presidential ambitions collapse when it turned into a stunningly easy victory for the US.
Later Bill Clinton, casting himself as a moderate Democrat unafraid to use American power, undid some of the damage. He authorised the use of force more times around the world than had the Republican Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.
Determined not to repeat the mistakes of 1968, 1972 and 1991, and mindful of the national change of mood after September 11, 2001, ambitious Democrats all supported the Iraq war in 2003.
But three years later, with the war turning sour, the national security hawks are in full retreat and the party’s left-wing base is in the ascendant.
The Connecticut result underlines the polarisation of American politics, especially now on national security. Polls suggest that while overall support for the war is down in the last year, large majorities of Republicans firmly support it, while Democrats are almost overwhelmingly opposed. The same polls also suggest, perhaps surprisingly, that Democrats are much more likely to be opposed to Israel’s military campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon than are Republicans, indicating that Democrats are moving increasingly towards a broader anti-war stance.
While the reverses in Iraq might have been expected to pose problems mostly for Republicans, it is the party of Mrs Clinton and Mr Lieberman that seems most convulsed by them.
“This will just add to the party’s agony,” said a former Clinton Administration foreign policy official yesterday. “I can only imagine what Hillary is going through right now, trying to figure out with her foreign policy people the right approach to take.”
There may or may not be a civil war under way in Iraq: the Democrats are going to have to fight hard to avoid a less bloody but politically more significant one in their own ranks.
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THE CV
1942 Born in Stamford, Connecticut. Studied at Yale and practised law
1970 Elected to Connecticut State Senate
1983 Becomes Connecticut attorney-general
1989 Won Senate seat. Served on committees of Armed Services, Environment and Public Works, small businesses and Governmental Affairs Committee
2000 Became first Jewish person to run for vice-president as Al Gore’s running-mate in his unsuccessful presidential bid
2004 Pulled out of race for the Democratic presidential nomination after failing to win any preliminary state primaries Does not adhere to left or right-wing policies. Ardent supporter of war in Iraq but opposed Bush’s extensive tax cuts and has supported the right to abortion
THE PROS AND THE CONS
“At the end of the day what was done to him was a statement about the Democrats, not Joe. And it is a sad one. A once great party threw out its last best hope of foreign-policy sanity.” Conservative author Bill Bennett, Secretary of Education under Ronald Reagan
“What tonight showed is that democracy can work. That even the most powerful, entrenched forces can be dislodged by people-power. That the combined mights of the Democratic and Conservative establishments couldn’t hold the gates against the barbarian intruders.” Markos Moulitsas, DailyKos.com
“[Lieberman] voted his conscience, but he neglected to take the fight to his constituents, to try to convince them that his principled stand was correct, or at least tolerable. There’s some arrogance in that failing, and every incumbent of both parties ought to take note.” Professor Larry Sabato, Director, Center for Politics at the University of Virginia
“The perception was that [Lieberman] was too close to George Bush and this was, in many respects, a referendum on the president more than anything else.” Joint statement by the Democratic Senators Harry Reid (Nevada) and Chuck Schumer (New York)
“I think he miscalculated how much people, particularly in a blue state like Connecticut, wanted to say something about the war.” Jeff Greenfield, CNN political analyst
“I haven’t changed. Events around me have changed.” Lieberman last Friday
“I think we have to get out of Iraq; I’m a one-issue voter . . . I’m hoping Connecticut can become a bellwether, that this is an opportunity for us to take a stand and show how much people are opposed to this war.” Peg Hickey, voterTHE LOSERS
Since 1980, 3 Republicans and 5 Democrat incumbent senators have lost primaries
Joseph Lieberman
D- Connecticut (2006)
Robert C. Smith
R- New Hampshire (2004)
Sheila Frahm*
R- Kansas (1996)
Alan Dixon
D- Illinois (1992)
Mike Gravel
D- Alaska (1980)
Jacob Javits
R- New York (1980)
Donald Stewart
D- Alabama (1980)
Richard Stone
D- Florida (1980)
* appointed not elected
