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Editorials
Clinton plays Democrat
Tuesday, August 15
The lobbyists, pundits and political hacks who make up the permanent occupation force of Washington have been in a panic since last week's defeat of Sen. Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut Democratic Primary.
The conventional wisdom is that Lieberman lost because he supported the Bush administration on the Iraq war. But that isn't the sole reason why Lieberman lost to Ned Lamont.
The problem is that people like Lieberman, who supported the invasion of Iraq, are trying to change the subject now that things have gone horribly wrong.
Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Edwards and John Kerry -- to name four prominent Democratic senators with presidential aspirations -- all voted in October 2002 to authorize President Bush to invade Iraq.
Of the four, only Edwards, the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2004, has publicly apologized for his vote. He is no longer a senator and he supports a withdrawal of U.S. troops.
Kerry, who ran for president in 2004, co-sponsored a Senate resolution with Russ Feingold, D-Wis., to set a timetable for a withdrawal. Kerry and Biden are both up for re-election to the Senate in 2008. Biden and Clinton, who are on the short list to run for president for the Democrats in 2008, are more circumspect in their opposition to the war. They both rail against the incompetence of the Bush administration in the execution of the Iraq war and hope no one remembers that they supported the war in the first place.
The only one of those four who is up for re-election this year is Clinton. On the surface, she doesn't seem to have to worry. She's raised $45 million for her re-election campaign and has a strong organization.
Clinton voted for the war, like the rest of the Democrats who wanted to run for president, because she was afraid of looking like a wimp if she opposed it. Until recently, she was only slightly less strident than Lieberman in her support of the war. But even she has noticed that 60 percent of Americans now oppose the war, according to a recent CNN poll.
It's no longer "the wackadoo wing of the party," as Michael Goodwin of the New York Daily News inelegantly put it, that opposes the war. It's now mainstream political thought.
But as was the case with Lieberman, it's not just the war. It's Clinton's pro-corporate, Republican-lite stand on the issues. She opposes universal health care, as you might expect from someone who is the second leading recipient of campaign donations from the health care industry.
She's been cozying up to media baron Rupert Murdoch. She thinks free-trade agreements such as NAFTA are great. She opposes gay marriage, supports more restrictions on immigration and voted for a constitutional amendment to ban flag-burning.
In other words, Clinton is not exactly the wild-eyed radical that right-wing talk radio hosts have been savaging for the last 15 years. She backed Lieberman in the primary, although she left it to her husband to campaign for him in Connecticut.
Hillary Clinton has her own outsider challenging her in the primary, labor activist Jonathan Tasini. Unlike Lamont, he's not a millionaire businessman from a old-money family. He's the former president of the National Writers Union who won a Supreme Court case that successfully challenged the right of media companies to republish writers' work on the Internet without compensation.
Tasini has only raised $150,000 to Clinton's $45 million. He's way behind in the polls, at 13 percent as of last week. He has received virtually no media attention. But six months ago, Ned Lamont had similar polling numbers and was also seen as a hopeless longshot.
The real test as to whether there is a shift in the Democratic Party is how Clinton fares in the New York primary on Sept. 12. Will she too be punished by voters for trying to have it both ways on Iraq, or will she get a free ride to a second term in the Senate?
This, however, we do know. A majority of Americans are tired of seeing their young people come home in flag-draped coffins from a war that didn't need to happen. They are fed up with a reckless foreign policy that has increased the threat of terrorism worldwide. Most of all, they are sick of politicians who won't listen to them and are still pretending that everything is fine.
