As we all know, tomorrow is the Connecticut Senate primary. To hear the hype, the day could hardly be more momentous if As we all know, tomorrow is the Connecticut Senate primary. To hear the hype, the day could hardly be more momentous if Galactus himself were to descend and declare his intention to devour the earth. But in fact, for all the build-up, Tuesday itself will be almost mundane -- a bunch of hurried GOTV operations, blustering press secretaries, and delivered ballots. There's nothing novel, after all, about a Democratic primary in New England. And tomorrow's outcome, while important as a practical matter, is no more meaningful than that of any other primary pitting a true believer against an establishment artifact. So why, unlike similar contests unfolding in Rhode Island and Hawaii, are we all so focused on Lieberman and Lamont?
Blame the media, who continue to play moths to the blogosphere's flame, and so are swarming about Connecticut, trying to discern What It All Means. To listen to their early predictions though, the answer is basically nothing if Lamont fails to win the seat.Writing in The Washington Post, Dan Balz gave voice to this reductive outlook, opining that, “[a] victory by businessman Ned Lamont on Tuesday would confirm the growing strength of the grass-roots and Internet activists who first emerged in Howard Dean's presidential campaign. Driven by intense anger at President Bush and fierce opposition to the Iraq war, they are on the brink of claiming their most significant political triumph, one that will reverberate far beyond the borders here if Lieberman loses.”
What Balz doesn't realize is that the time for “woulds” and “ifs” is over -- the reverberations have already rippled forth. The phase of this race bearing significant implications for the Democratic Party already happened, and whether Lamont wins or loses tomorrow is almost entirely immaterial to the political triumph of the netroots. Their scalp was claimed, mounted, and hung on July 7th, the day Joe Lieberman, an affable, popular incumbent who'd been his party's celebrated vice-presidential candidate only six years earlier, was forced to mount a stage against some nobody named Ned Lamont and defensively debate his right to call himself a Democrat. Or maybe the seminal instant occurred four days earlier, on July 3rd, when Lieberman admitted that he would gather signatures to enable an independent run, a sign he feared defeat in the primary. Either way, the point is the same: The netroots won the moment Joe Lieberman felt fear.
With the netroots having proved they can generate an existential challenge to a safe-seeming incumbent, actually defeating Lieberman would be little beyond icing on the cake. Moving forward, a Lieberman victory would do nothing to blur the traumatic memory of his near-loss. And that gives the netroots an extraordinary amount of power, vaulting them into a rarified realm occupied by only the strongest interest groups.
So much of an incumbent's life is predicated on avoiding trouble, dodging disaster, avoiding serious primaries and well-funded challengers. To do that, incumbents make all sorts of concessions -- a Republican officeholder needs to keep taxes low in order to placate the Club for Growth and Grover Norquist, and support social conservatism to avoid James Dobson and Jerry Falwell. A Democrat, meanwhile, has to vote with the unions (witness Illinois representative Melissa Bean's troubles after her conservative capitulation on CAFTA), support a woman's right to choose, and so forth. The key is averting the ire of those few groups that can actually furnish and fund a potential replacement.
Now the netroots will join that category. But, as evidenced by their choice of target -- Dianne Feinstein and Herb Kohl, while war supporters, face no primary challenges -- they will demand something altogether different. Rather than requiring submission to a certain set of policy initiatives, they'll demand unity in certain moments of partisan showdown. What so rankled about Lieberman was his willingness to abandon ship when steady hands were most necessary -- he was always the first to compromise on judicial nominees, or flirt with Social Security privatization, or scold critics of the Iraq War. His current plight is evidence that such opportunistic betrayals will not, in the future, go unpunished. On July 7th, being the Democrat who criticizes Democrats ceased being safe.
Given that agenda of tone rather than substance, whether Lieberman triumphs tomorrow is curiously beside the point. Future Democrats seeking a slot on the Sunday shows to proudly trumpet their heterodoxy will have flashbacks to Joe Lieberman, looking stung and defensive on that stage, seeing his thirty years of service torn apart by a much-blogged-about dweeb named Ned. The effect of this will not necessarily be a more liberal Democratic party, but a more unified one. Partisan pride, not progressive policies, will be the currency with which savvy incumbents pay off the angry online villagers.
The netroots, it would seem, have come a long way. Their first demonstration of power came after Howard Dean captured their hearts by channeling their rage at the Democratic National Committee's 2002 winter convention. “What I want to know,” he famously roared, “is why in the world the Democratic party leadership is supporting the president's unilateral attack on Iraq!” For giving voice to their belief that the party was packed with wimps, the netroots rewarded Howard Dean with a viable presidential campaign, and, as a result, saw the rest of the field (including Joe Lieberman) hastily sharpen their critique of Bush. It was the first hint that an organized progressive movement might prove able to provide a cure for political cowardice.
The party's skittishness, Mike Tomasky has argued, was analogous to the legendary “learned helplessness” experiments where dogs “were administered electrical shocks from which they could escape, but from which, after a while, they didn't even try to, instead crouching in the corner in resignation and fear.” The media, the pollsters, the consultants, and, occasionally, the voters seemed to punish the very act of being a Democrat, just as the researchers had turned on the shocks for the very act of being a dog. The result was a Democratic Party filled with cowering corner-dwellers.
The netroots have deployed Pavlov's principles in the opposite direction. Call it learned aggressiveness -- they've rewarded Democratic backbone (Howard Dean, Ned Lamont) and attacked its absence (Henry Cuellar, Joe Lieberman). And just as the researchers didn't need to kill the dogs to teach the lesson, neither do the netroots need to defeat Joe Lieberman to make their point. The only question for tomorrow is whether the voters of Connecticut feel differently.
Ezra Klein is a Prospect writing fellow.
