Liberal Democrats take aim at Lieberman
If the Bush presidency and the war in Iraq have emboldened liberals to try to wrest control of Congress from Republicans this fall, they have also provoked the left to take on another foe: Democrats deemed too cozy with the GOP. And no such lawmaker is more high profile or higher ranking than Joe Lieberman. Now running for a fourth term, the Connecticut senator has been an unwavering supporter of the Iraq war. He was famously kissed on the cheek by Bush after last year's State of the Union address. "Lieberman has spent the last six years undermining the Democratic Party every chance he gets," says Markos Moulitsas, founder of Daily Kos, a popular liberal blog. "He spends the weekend going on Fox News and Sean Hannity's show talking about how wrong the Democrats are."
Moulitsas recently appeared in the first TV ad aired by Lieberman's primary opponent, the antiwar Ned Lamont, and he has posted a link for Lamont donors at Daily Kos, generating $50,000 for the candidate. "We're not accepting money from lobbyists, so we need to be creative with fundraising," says Tom Swan, Lamont's campaign manager. "The Netroots have been vital in that effort."
Maybe not financially vital. Local news outlets reported last week that Lamont, who founded a successful telecommunications network company in the 1980s, is worth between $90 million and $300 million, and he has plowed hundreds of thousands of his own dollars into the race. But the campaign against Lieberman nonetheless represents the biggest test this year for the political clout of the liberal "Netroots"—the grass-roots activists who have embraced the Internet as an organizing tool. In heavily Democratic Connecticut, whoever wins the Democratic primary is expected to win in November. Toppling Lieberman "would be a pretty big trophy," for the Netroots, says Cook Political Report analyst Jennifer Duffy. "It's the biggest they've gone after so far."
Lamont got a boost last Friday, when he managed to pick up a third of the votes at the Democratic Party's state nominating convention, more than double the number he needed to qualify for this August's Democratic primary. "Lieberman used to be untouchable to the party regulars," says Kevin Rennie, a former state legislator in Connecticut and a Hartford Courant columnist. "For delegates to get up and vote for Ned Lamont took some steel in the backbone."
Still, most political observers say Lamont's campaign is a long shot. A recent Quinnipiac University poll found that Lieberman had a 59 percent approval rating in Connecticut and that just 15 percent of voters there would oppose a candidate based on his position on the Iraq war alone. "Lieberman knows what he's doing, and he's not going to run a dumb campaign," says Duffy. "Then there's this question of, can this guy's 18-year record be reduced to one vote, like the rest doesn't matter?"
Duffy is referring to Lieberman's vote authorizing Bush to go into Iraq, but Lamont says he parts company with the senator on other issues as well, like on Lieberman's refusal last year to filibuster Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito. It's a stance that is likely to go over well in an online Connecticut primary this Thursday sponsored by MoveOn.org Political Action, the most powerful Netroots group on the left. If either candidate gets more than two-thirds support from Connecticut's 50,000 MoveOn members, he wins the group's endorsement.
Last Thursday, MoveOn invited candidates to submit a pitch to their Connecticut members. "Our big points are for universal healthcare, opposing Alito, and questioning the war in Iraq," says the Lamont campaign's Swan. "Those are positions we think [MoveOn voters] will find very appealing."
The Lieberman campaign, meanwhile, declined to participate in MoveOn's primary. "Senator Lieberman has as good a chance of winning the MoveOn primary as he does being the next American Idol," says campaign spokesman Marion Steinfels. She notes that Lieberman has already won endorsements from the gay-rights group Human Rights Campaign, the League of Conservation Voters, and roughly a dozen labor unions. But in an August primary in a nonpresidential election year, liberal MoveOn-type voters stand to have a disproportionate impact. "A lot of people will be on vacation," says Rennie, "while angry people will find a way to vote."
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