Swing State Project

Myrna Watanabe is retaining the copyright for what follows:

If it weren’t that computers are very glitchy, I would think I’m getting the electronic finger from Lieberman. Granted, I do sign these group emails asking our congressional delegation to oppose this bill or that bill, as there’s not much out there to support nowadays; but the day after I asked Lieberman that very polite question at our Democratic State Central Committee meeting about how to sell him to my town committee, I followed up with a fax (letterhead, real signature) offering a dialogue with him. (I wasn’t going to offer to contribute to his campaign or babysit for his dog or anything that would have fiduciary value.)

Since then, I’ve received two emails from his office. The first was a form letter thanking me for visiting his online contact center. As I haven’t a clue what that’s all about, having never visited his online contact center, and having no interest in spending my time visiting it, I thought that perhaps, just perhaps, it was in response to one of those People for the American Way or some other group’s click-through email letters. But just in case, I figured I’d send an email back, warning them that if it just happened to be a response to my fax, it was unacceptable. It bounced. Not really having the time or inclination to send it to one of his staffers directly, I figured I’d forget the whole thing—although I must say, some of my friends in the Party are egging me on to push for a real reply.

But today, I received another email from his office. This time, it was totally blank. My system’s a little slow, so I gave it enough time to develop, just in case it had a photo of our senator as a young man pumping Lyndon Johnson’s hand or something else of historic value. Nada. Just blank--an email written in the electronic equivalent of invisible ink. Is this, I have to ask myself, the way Joe Lieberman’s office responds to a request for a dialogue?

It shouldn’t be this way. Many of my friends, both inside and outside the Democratic Party, have known Joe Lieberman for a long time. When I first introduced myself to him, requesting that he listen to the anti-war message during the run up to the Iraq War vote, I mentioned the name of a mutual friend who had nothing but praise for Joe. “He’s a good man, a fine human being,” my friend had said.

But something must have happened to Joe Lieberman during his political career. I was chatting with one of his old political friends the other night, who remembers when Joe was a true liberal. I asked him if he thought that Joe could be a victim of what my dear friend Robert Flower, who has run many a political campaign in Westchester County, New York, refers to as the politician’s revolving door. Joe’s friend agreed that, yes, this is what probably happened to Joe.

Robert’s theory, which I explained to Joe’s friend, is that after people are elected to office, they suddenly believe all the rhetoric and think that they were elected, not because they supported a particular stance, or the party line, or were in the right place at the right time, but that there's something intrinsic in them that makes them better than the people who worked for them and/or voted for them. In their minds' eyes, they assume mythic proportions. And they begin believing the myth. Once that happens, Robert says, they go through this revolving door where they become something other than a member of the group that elected them. They forget where they came from. It sort of reminds me of a T-shirt I saw a young man wearing yesterday, with a two-headed arrow, one end pointing to his head and the other pointing to his genitals. The one to the head was labelled, "The Man," the one to the genitals, "The Myth".

And, unfortunately, that's what happened with Lieberman. He goes around joking that he was elected vice president of the United States--except it isn't a joke to him or to his audience. He has to know he is an historic figure, but he seems to have forgotten how this all occurred and to whom he owes his luck (or lack thereof).

Until recently, we on Democratic town committees (DTCs) didn't even hear from his people. Now, they're trying to schedule meetings between town committees and him, and the number of takers is probably far fewer than Lieberman would like to see. But back when Lieberman started in politics, so I hear, he made his way with the help of Democratic town committees and good Democrats from around the state, an obligation, some say, he has forgotten.

Lieberman doesn’t need the town committees to run for office, but he needs them because their delegates designate the party nominee for U.S. Senate. Town committees in Connecticut are the groups politicians love to hate. A good town committee, one that will work for a candidate, raise money for a candidate, and share information with a candidate is worth its weight in gold. But, like everything else, some town committees are terrific, some are helpful, and others are useless. But even if useless, they are powerful. If a town committee chair doesn’t support a candidate for a wider office—as an example, my enthusiasm for our last congressional candidate was negligible, and I didn’t like some of her volunteers—he or she can tell the candidate, as I did, not to come to their town. The candidate can ignore it, but it looks bad for a candidate to have no elected officials from the party, no other party candidates, and no members of the town committee with her when she visits. One town committee chair told me that Lieberman’s people asked him to fill a room with people for a visit by Lieberman to take place within a few hours of the request. The town chair said something very rude to Lieberman’s staffer, and asked that that message be given directly to the senator. So Lieberman appeared with only one elected Democratic official at his side. (It was in my district. They didn’t call me and ask me to bring out the troops—as I tried to do for Dodd--but they know better than to send me anything but blank emails.)

These negative feelings toward Lieberman have been growing for several years. The war in Iraq, of course, has been a major polarizing factor. During the buildup to the vote on the war, Lieberman was unreachable for discussion. The anti-war groups, including moveon.org, found it impossible to meet with him (not that Dodd was much more reachable, but Dodd's office was, at least, accommodating and was willing to share his conflicted thoughts about the impending war vote with us).

By the time Lieberman's people attempted to contact Democratic town committees for support for his run for president, his people were on the receiving end of quite a bit of hostility from the committees. I told his people outright to stay away from us: we weren't interested. And I was not alone.

When rumors hit the streets that Lieberman was possibly up for a Bush cabinet position, many of us had had enough--and that predates the Rice, Gonzales, and Chertoff votes. I asked at our State Committee meeting if we could have a vote on the sense of the State Committee to tell Lieberman exactly how we felt about him taking a position with the Bushies. Our then state chair, George Jepsen, discouraged us from doing that, but another state committee member urged that we call Lieberman's office to voice our displeasure, and Jepsen agreed.

Meanwhile, some people who are considering running for office--from town selectman on up to statewide office--are privately voicing concern about making a run with Lieberman at the top of the ticket. Although our voters tend not to vote straight party line (despite our endless statements that they undoubtedly will), there is a concern that voters will see anyone on the Democratic ticket as painted with the Lieberman brush. Now, with the Quinnipiac poll showing positive figures for Lieberman in the comfortable high 60s, one would ask why should that matter? Yet I can tell you that three years ago, when I was distributing flyers that had a local candidate posed with Lieberman (something we can't do anymore because of campaign finance laws), people came up to me, pointed to Lieberman's photo, and said, "If he's with your candidate, I can't vote for your person." If I were in Lieberman's shoes, I wouldn't get too comfy with the poll numbers because they do not detect the undercurrent of dislike and mistrust.

Now, let's get back to DTCs. If the state Democratic convention were held right now, Lieberman wouldn't have the votes to get the nomination without doing some very, very, very serious arm twisting--and even then he might not have the votes. Maybe the population still likes Joe Lieberman, but his friends in the Democratic Party are having second or third thoughts about him. To some it's the votes, to others it's the war, to still others it's the Dem-bashing rhetoric, while others are concerned about the spectacle of Lieberman at Bush's elbow when Bush signs some particularly un-Democratic piece of legislation. But even more telling is that his good friends, people who've known him for 20 or 30 years and who came into politics with him or came up in the party with him, don't want to be associated with him. Months and months ago, many of them, independently, contacted Joe or his close associates and made it clear that Joe was doing himself and the party no good by kowtowing to the Bushies and by continuing his strong support of the war.

After I asked my polite question to Lieberman at State Committee last week, I started getting emails and calls from people telling me that they, too, are seriously disturbed about Lieberman's political stances. The day after the State Committee meeting, there was a meeting of 4th C.D. town chairs at which Mitchell Fuchs, the Fairfield DTC chair, lambasted Lieberman for his votes, his coziness with the Bushies, his stance on the war, etc. One town chair sent me the following email: "Tell him he doesn't have to come to XXX either, unless it's to announce he isn't going to run again." Another town chair told me, "We hate him here!" He probably doesn't have many friends on State Committee either. When he responded to my question by saying that he had a 70 percent favorable rating, someone in the back yelled out, "From Republicans!"

As I see it, Lieberman has a choice: he can go forward, risk not being the party’s nominee, and come up with a third-party endorsement; switch to the Reps, with whom he will be very uncomfortable; do a mea culpa and take on the cloak of leadership of the Democratic Party (“I made a mistake on the war; I shouldn’t compromise with these people because there is no compromise; I will lead us out of this political morass.”); or declare that it’s time to retire and think of something else he can do as an elder statesman.

I suspect that Joe won’t like any of these choices. But he should have thought of that before he cuddled up with the Bushies. Yes, Joe, Democrats do have a litmus test. You have to support good Democratic principles, 24-7, every day of the year, every vote in the Senate (not exactly every vote; we’ll leave you some leeway, but on the big things, and especially in what you say and how you say it, you’ve got to prove you’re a Democrat). And you can’t sleep with the enemy because the stench of dead bodies stays on you.

© 2005 Myrna E. Watanabe