Last night's election returns leave me with mixed emotions. As a longtime Democratic Party leader in Pennsylvania--23 years on the Democratic State Committee, 17 years as an elected Democratic leader in the state House of Representatives--I have publicly and privately advocated for an inclusive Democratic Party.
Jesse Jackson's aphorism--"A plane needs a left wing and a right wing to fly straight. So does a political party"--resonates with me because I know the members of the Pennsylvania House Democratic caucus well as people, and count all of them as friends, and some as very close friends.
But, as a voter, I know that elected officials should be compatible with their constituencies. And Joe Lieberman and Cynthia McKinney both pushed the envelope pretty far, although in opposite directions.
Contrary to the right wing spin we are likely to get, the voters in both the Lieberman and McKinney races opted for the center.
Taking a combination of left wing and right wing positions did not make George Wallace or Ronald Reagan a centrist. Nor did it make Joe Lieberman a centrist, even though he is far more liberal than either Wallace or Reagan.
Support for the war in Iraq is not a centrist position. Frequent appearances on Fox News and other conservative outlets attacking Democratic positions is not a centrist strategy. Fighting against the initial go- slow inclinations of the Bush Administration to set up a Department of Homeland Security--which gave the Bush Administration unparalleled power in numerous areas--was not a centrist goal.
At least in the context of Vermont politics, Howard Dean was a centrist. Lieberman's only Jewish predecessor as Senator from Connecticut, Abe Ribicoff, functioned for most, if not all, of his career as a centrist.
A centrist is someone who seeks out broad consensus of constituents and key groups of constituents and stakes out broadly appealing positions that unite a majority of the electorate time after time. Lieberman's strategy of veering back and forth between liberal and conservative positions--and spending the vast majority of television airtime selling the conservative line--was not a centrist strategy.
As a wealthy businessman who mobilized the grassroots and the netroots, Ned Lamont has a greater claim to centrism than Lieberman does. The scion of a family long active in both politics and business--his great grandfather, for instance, was a key backer of Wendell Wilkie's insurgent campaign for the Republican nomination against Franklin D. Roosevelt--Lamont has a chance to develop broadly appealing positions that speak to the diverse realities understood by different parts of the political spectrum.
Lieberman's career is not over, of course; he has a chance to follow the lead of his original target Lowell Weicker and run as a third-party candidate. The Republicans have what must be for them the delightful option of either throwing support to Lieberman and trying to elect him as the de facto Republican candidate--a Republican Bernie Sanders--or of getting a strong Republican candidate in the race hoping to win with a Democratic split.
My guess, though, is that Lieberman's loss of the Democratic nomination will hurt him deeply, and that his survival will not prove to be a concern for enough voters for political strategists to be able to mobilize successfully.
The voters have sent the nation a very strong message, and it is a message that many Lieberman primary supporters agree with: the war in Iraq must end quickly.
Just as Lieberman successfully constructed an image as a right-wing firebrand on key issues (watch out, Rick Santorum!), so Cynthia McKinnedy constructed an image as a left-wing firebrand on some issues. Her voters did not like that image any more than Lieberman's voters did.
The voters in both Connecticut and Georgia opted for centrism. The big news tonight is that opposition to the war in Iraq is now (and has been) a centrist issue. Republicans and Democrats will ignore that fact at their peril in 2006 and 2008.