Terrence Samuel considers the meaning of Joe Lieberman:
Still the narrative that emerged this week was that Lieberman's shape-shifting abilities had saved him yet again. He was the survivor. But while he will chair a powerful and important committee, Lieberman has no margin for error. While Harry Reid and Democrats -- salivating over the potential of having 60 filibuster-busting votes -- made their deal with the devil to preserve the possibility, Lieberman has tied his fate to the whims of a Democratic caucus that will regard him with an unstable mix of caution and suspicion. His days as a free agent are over.
And Harold Meyerson explains the context of Henry Waxman's defeat of John Dingell and explains why Californians have come to dominate the House Democratic caucus.
With his victory, Waxman now joins a small group of longtime California allies who are running key congressional institutions. Howard Berman, his political sidekick since they took over the California Young Democrats in 1965, chairs the House Foreign Relations Committee. Like George Miller, who chairs the House Education and Labor Committee and who is Nancy Pelosi's consigliere, and like Pelosi herself, Berman and Waxman are the political protégés of the late Phil Burton -- the militantly liberal San Francisco congressman of the 1960s and 1970s who was probably the single most effective liberal legislator the House has ever known. One of Burton's achievements was to persuade the House Democratic caucus to change its rules on committee chairmanships, so that seniority wasn't the sole criterion in determining a committee's chair. With the backing of the Democratic Watergate classes -- the new members elected in 1974 and 1976 -- Burton changed the process so that the caucus itself was sovereign, and could depose old Southern segregationists from their chairmanships. Thirty years later, Waxman has taken advantage of the Burton reforms so that the generation of California liberals whom Burton schooled in the ways of power are now the most powerful members of the House.
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--The Editors
