(or, What does the
Warren Times Observer have to do with anything?)
(or, It's about the Connecticut voters, dammit!)
I travel quite a bit, and one of my small pleasures while on the road is to pick up little local papers to see what they're writing about.
Over the weekend, I found myself reading the Times Observer of Warren, Pennsylvania, a small town in the northwestern part of the state, a long way from the Beltway and even farther from the Connecticut state line.
And what, you might ask, did that have to do with Joe Lieberman, Ned Lamont and the importance of the democratic process in Connecticut? The answer, below the fold...
Right there on page 4, just after the front-page story about the La Fiesta Taco Eating Contest and the Adequate Yearly Progress report from the Warren County School District, there's the Times Observer's editorial page, with a lead editorial all about, yep, Joe and Ned:
But hapless Republicans have nothing on Democrats' taste for fratricide, now being played out in dramatic fashion in Connecticut. There one of the Democratic Party's senior senators, a former vice presidential nominee and credible presidential aspirant, may fall victim to the MoveOn.org hard left of the party...
It is his support for the war effort that has the party's hard left practically apoplectic. They've recruited a millionaire challenger...
Americans may well be disgusted with Republicans' squandering of their mandate, but somehow we doubt that an agenda premised on the de facto surrender to a very real, very dangerous set of enemies is going to be a winner in November...
For the good of the country, wise Democrats ought to be working to drag their party back to a center where good men like Sen. Lieberman are at least allowed respectable dissent, if not the mantle of party leadership.
Now, I'm pretty certain that the Times Observer's circulation in Connecticut is zero, give or take a mail subscription or two. So surely this little paper can't think it's speaking to Connecticut voters, can it?
I was almost going to dash off an LTE to the Times Observer, noting that under our democracy (if we can keep it), our representatives in Washington serve solely at the continued pleasure of the people they're hired to represent. It is up to Democratic voters in Connecticut, and no one else, to determine who they want representing them on the ballot this fall.
That idea gave me pause to wonder: What business do I, someone who lives far outside the Times Observer's circulation area, have commenting on something in their paper? I surely don't know enough about Beaty Middle School's test scores, to pick a random front-page article, to comment intelligently on them in a letter, and I'd be laughed out of the paper if I tried to do so.
And of course the Times Observer has similarly little standing (or credibility) to comment on Connecticut politics, especially at the primary stage. This editorial, in a paper that seems (from a quick one-day read) to lean to the right, isn't meant to influence the Connecticut electorate - it's meant to reiterate the latest talking points about the "MoveOn.org hard left," with that extra little "millionaire" slur in there while they're at it. I get that.
But then I started wondering - if the Times Observer has no business meddling in the internal politics of a state where it has no standing, what business do I - or any of us outside Connecticut - really have, trying to tell Democrats in Connecticut who they should hire to represent them in Washington? Remember the blowback against Howard Dean in Iowa after he flooded the state with "outsiders" in 2004?
So here's my modest proposal this Monday morning:
How much of the national smear campaign against Ned Lamont and the netroots would be blunted, instantly, if Lamont went on TV and made a speech like this?
I believe in the democratic process, and in the right of the voters to decide who should represent them on the ballot and in Washington. I've pledged to support whoever wins the Democratic nomination next month, and I stand by that pledge.
In fact, I believe so strongly that this is a decision solely for the people of Connecticut to make that I will accept no further campaign contributions from outside Connecticut until the primary, and I challenge my opponent to do the same.
We know what Joe Lieberman's response would be, and suddenly the frame would shift.
It's not about Ned Lamont being "recruited" by the "anti-war hard left." It's about what Connecticut Democrats want, and about THEIR right - not ours, and certainly not that of the Warren Times Observer - to decide who should represent them, and to choose someone new if they don't think their existing representative is living up to his responsibilities.
(Obviously, once the primary is over, this becomes more of a national race, just as every Senate race is these days - but framing the last few weeks up to the primary as being "all about Connecticut voters" would make it harder for the DSCC and national Democrats to avoid throwing 100% support behind Lamont if he wins the primary.)