Inside Joe Lieberman's Kamikaze Campaign – great Village Voice piece

Day of the Spoiler

by Rick Perlstein
October 22 - 28, 2003

The listbot at meetup.com, the commercial site whose clever software facilitates face-to-face gatherings between Web surfers of like interest, sent me a forlorn little e-mail the other day. "Congratulations on a successful National Lieberman in 2004 Meetup last week! See photos from every city," it read, giving a link. Click lieberman2004.meetup.com/photos yourself, and you'll see the pathos: There ain't no photos.

That's not surprising. In Chicago, where I live, there wasn't any meetup. Not enough supporters RSVP'ed to trigger the software's automated threshold. Meetup.com, in fact, has registered only 332 Joseph Lieberman fans in the entire United States of America, four in Chicago. An undercover reporter from The Village Voice—uh, me—represents one quarter of the total.

It could be considered comic, this abyss at the Lieberman grassroots. It could be, that is, if Lieberman showed any signs of going away. Instead, he's been ramping up: launching a splashy new tax plan; publishing a dowloadable campaign book, Leading With Integrity: A Fresh Start for America, and an accompanying website; kicking off a campaign tour—all just this past week. And that's not funny. Because it's not too early to predict that if the Democrats lose the presidential election next November, Lieberman will be the one to blame. That will certainly be so if he ends up becoming the nominee—in which case the Democratic Party will be left without an activist base. ("I'll vote for Joe Lieberman absentee from whatever country I move to if he wins the nomination," as one friend of mine puts it.) Perversely, it might even be worse for the Democratic Party if he fails.

It works like this. He has already conceded Iowa, but let's suppose Lieberman doesn't do too poorly in the other early states, picking up some delegates here and there, perhaps even winning a primary, say one of the five on February 3, the week after New Hampshire, when his name recognition will help him because no one will have time to campaign in all these states. Thus emboldened, he campaigns harder—by intensifying his pattern of tearing down his opponents as dangerously liberal—and remains committed to staying in for the duration. Then, as his star fades, he'll have only one viable strategy left, a manic, all-or-nothing strategy: trying to convince Democrats that the front-runner must be dumped altogether, using the dark arts of opposition research, trying to dig up something purportedly embarrassing from the front-runner's past that the jubilant Republicans might even have missed if left to their own devices.

Lieberman still loses the nomination. But the successful nominee ends up, in a self- fulfilling prophecy, becoming just what the spoiler-candidate said he was: unelectable—as a man named George Bush effortlessly exploits the opposition research that a member of his own party has dug up. It has happened exactly this way before. Just ask Joe Lieberman's old friend Al Gore.

<snip>

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0343/perlstein.php

and the "$ two-thousanders" continue to contribute to Lieberman's and Kerry's campaigns.

John Belushi character in that SNL skit with Jane Curtin and Bill Murray as a couple who host a party and then simply cannot get rid of the last guest, Belushi, who insists on staying and doing what he wants no matter what the couple does and the not-so-subtle hints they give that they want him to just GO THE HELL AWAY!

And that's exactly what I wish Holy Joe would do, take his repuke-lite ass out of the campaign for the nomination and GO THE HELL AWAY! And I also wish he'd finally just switch parties and make it official, since he's a repuke in disguise, anyway.

On one hand, a person who does genuinely hold liberal beliefs in many areas -- or at least left-of-center. On the other, a man who is so compromised by his fat-cat donors, and either a complete unwillingness or cluelessness to do anything resembling actual grassroots campaigning, that his candidacy is only hurting the party's chances in 2004.

In fact, it's pretty much in line with the view I've held of Lieberman for quite a while. He's no Republican, but his prescription for "winning" is actually one for disaster.

Lieberman supporters will endlessly gripe about the the internal party sniping, and claim any critic of Lieberman "wants Bush to win".

But it's hard to find a more fervent attacker of fellow Democrats than Joe Lieberman. His entire campaign message during his kickoff speech was "an end to partisan politics" -- in other words, he thinks the biggest problem facing America is that Democrats argue too much with Republicans. And in the name of proving himself a different kind of Democrat, the guy who's not afraid to tell the Republicans when they're right and the Democrats when they're wrong, he's going to gut-punch exactly the people we need right now, the ones who do disagree vehemently with the Republicans enough to stop what they're doing instead of just slowing it down. -1/2 is not yet a plus.