Tapped has some great stuff today
Normally, Tapped, The American Prospect weblog, just highlights articles instead of doing analysis. However, today Tapped had some great analysis on Lieberman's latest speech:
Tapped has long thought that Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) would be a better candidate if he'd stop droning sonorously and just run hard on his own record. So Tapped was intrigued to read over the weekend that Lieberman had decided to become the anti-Dean. Certainly, it's a great role for some candidate to take, especially in a race where everyone is running in ideological drag. After all, Dean is a moderate running as a liberal; Kerry is a liberal running as a moderate; Edwards is a conservative (for a Democrat) running as a moderate; and Lieberman is a moderate running as a conservative.
(And if you don't believe that Lieberman is more liberal than Edwards, check out these figures Daily Kos pulled from the American Conservative Union and the League of Conservation Voters last week. And remember that Lieberman is from New England and Edwards represents a Southern state.)
On Sunday, The Associated Press previewed Lieberman's new anti-Dean strategy:
In an appearance Sunday on CNN's "Late Edition," Lieberman said Dean would "take the Democratic Party into the political wilderness."
"There is an important role for government, but the era of big government is over," he said. "We're going to be fiscally responsible. We're going to be strong on security, and we're going to be socially progressive."
Yesterday's speech "Fighting for the Future of the Democratic Party and the Security and Prosperity of America" at the National Press Club made the new strategy even clearer. But Tapped is disappointed that, rather than offering an optimistic New Democratic vision to counter Dean, Lieberman seems largely to be trying to go down swinging. The new strategy does little to solve the biggest problem with Lieberman's campaign thus far: an approach that is out of sync with the times.
To begin with, there's no evidence that the era of big government is actually over, and saying it doesn't make it so. Even Andrew Sullivan, in this great formulation from his blog , notes that "the difference between Republicans and Democrats right now is not between big and small government. It's between the Democrats' Big, Solvent Government and the Republicans' Big, Insolvent Government."
The only parts of big government that seem to be over are the parts provided by localities around the country, which are furiously slashing popular social programs as a response to massive budget short-falls brought on by excessive tax cuts at the state and local levels. Rather than attacking the new reality and defending threatened schools and health programs, though, Lieberman seems to prefer to attack old Democratic stereotypes about "old, big government solutions." Contrast Lieberman's approach with Rep. Dick Gephardt's speech ("Economic Security Through a Stronger Middle Class") on the economy yesterday in New York : "George Bush ran on a platform of making government as small as it could possibly be, but he got confused along the way. Instead, he’s exploding the deficit and exploding government spending, while making the private sector economy as small as it can possibly be to the tune of three million lost jobs." [italics added]
That's a very nice piece of rhetoric and it has the added benefit of being true. Instead of accusing the Democrats of "grasping failed solutions that will not meet our 21st Century needs," as Lieberman did in his speech today, Gephardt rightly focuses the attack on how Bush is doing so: "President Bush has taken us right back to the broken policies of the past, the economics of debt and regret: unaffordable tax cuts for the few, zero new jobs, surging unemployment. I've got to hand it to him: never has so much been done, in so little time, to help so few."
The fact of the matter is that a fundamental transformation has occurred in American politics. The Democratic Party has become the party of fiscal restraint, balanced budgets and efficient government. Republicans , meanwhile, are the party of deficits, runaway spending, and uncompetitive contracts. To a shocking degree, we are all fiscal conservatives now. The Democratic presidential candidates have been acknowledging this, with wonderment, for several months in their tours through conference rooms full of insiders -- but the transformation has yet to reach the level of conventional wisdom and Lieberman's attacks on "old, big government liberals" only delay the emergence of this new understanding. And that doesn't just hurt Dean or Gephardt, but all of Lieberman's congressional colleagues, as well.
Instead of providing a compelling, affirmative vision of what the Democratic Party stands for, Lieberman's speech was summed up by The Associated Press with a title that was only too accurate: "Lieberman: Dems Must Shun Gov't Programs." Now there's a winning agenda!
And while Tapped is at it, let's take a look at this whole into the wilderness business that Lieberman and Al From have been bandying about. "Most of the other Democratic candidates are threatening the change that Bill Clinton and Al Gore brought on the Democratic Party and threatening to take us back into the political wilderness," Lieberman told the audience at the National Press Club Monday in response to a question. "I'm not going to stand back and let this party be taken over by people who would take us into the political wilderness again."
Maybe one of Lieberman's high-priced consultants could sit him down and explain to him the fact that the Democrats are already in the political wilderness. And that they got there with him at the helm, as the vice presidential candidate in 2000. Yeah, yeah, we all know that Gore and Lieberman won the popular vote and if weren't for the Supreme Court . . . blah, blah, blah. Tapped sympathizes, really. But the fact of the matter is that you don't lose the game in the final play; that election was Gore and Lieberman's to lose and they lost it. Politically, it's not 1972; it's 1973. But things are actually worse this time around, because Nixon was a relatively liberal Republican and Bush is a conservative radical. Combined with the loss of the House in 1994 and of the Senate in 2000 and 2002, the situation facing the Dems in 2003 is much more dire than it was three decades ago, or even in 1992. No candidate who doesn't get this can win the Democratic nomination. It's not a question of avoiding the wilderness; it's a question of finding someone to lead Democrats out of it. Because they are already in there, and deep.
6:42:56 PM 
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