Peretz froths about Lamont
Wall Street Journal - August 7, 2006
ELECTION 2006 Lieberman The “peace” Democrats are back. It’s a dream come true for Karl Rove.
BY MARTIN PERETZ
We have been here before. Left-wing Democrats are once again fielding
single-issue “peace candidates,” and the one in Connecticut, like
several in the 1970s, is a middle-aged patrician, seeking office de
haut en bas, and almost entirely because he can. It’s really quite
remarkable how someone like Ned Lamont, from the stock of Morgan
partner Thomas Lamont and that most high-born American Stalinist,
Corliss Lamont, still sends a chill of “having arrived” up the spines
of his suburban supporters simply by asking them to support him.
Superficially, one may think of those who thought they were already
middle class just by being enthusiasts of Franklin Roosevelt, who
descended from the Hudson River Dutch aristocracy. But when FDR ran
for, and was elected, president in 1932, he had already been a state
senator, assistant secretary of the Navy and governor of New York. He
had demonstrated abilities.
At least in this sense, Mr. Lamont comes to this campaign for the
U.S. Senate from absolutely nowhere–and it shows in his pulpy
statements on public issues. Here is a paradigmatic one: “We need to
provide parents and communities the support they need to assure that
children start their school day ready to learn.” Of course, he also
thinks that U.S. troops should be replaced by the U.N. in Iraq. Does
he know anything at all about the history of the idea that he so
foolishly rescues from the dust? So what we have in this candidacy is
someone, with no public record to speak of but with perhaps a quarter
of a billion dollars to his name, who wants to be a senator. Mr.
Lamont has almost no experience in public life. He was a cable
television entrepreneur, a run-of-the-mill contemporary commercant
with unusually easy access to capital.
But he does have one issue, and it is Iraq. He grasps little of the
complexities of his issue, but then this, too, is true of the genus
of the peace candidate. Peace candidates know only one thing, and
that is why people vote for them. I know the type well. I was present
at its creation.
I was there, a partisan, as a graduate student at the beginning, in
1962, when the eminent Harvard historian H. Stuart Hughes (grandson
of Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes) ran for the U.S. Senate as an
independent against George Cabot Lodge and the victor, Ted Kennedy, a
trio of what in the Ivies is, somewhat derisively, called “legacies.”
Hughes’s platform fixed on President John F. Kennedy’s belligerent
policy towards Cuba, which had been crystallized in the “Bay of Pigs”
fiasco. The campaign ended, however, with Hughes winning a dreary 1%
of the vote when Krushchev capitulated to JFK just before the
election and brought the missile crisis to an end, leaving Fidel
Castro in power as an annoyance (which he is still, though maybe not
much longer), but not as a threat.
Later peace candidates did better. Some were even elected. Vietnam
was their card. One was even nominated for president in 1972. George
McGovern, a morally imperious isolationist with fellow-traveling
habits, never could shake the altogether accurate analogies with
Henry Wallace. (Wallace was the slightly dopey vice president,
dropped from the ticket by FDR in 1944, who ran for president on the
Progressive Party ticket, a creation of Stalin’s agents in the U.S.)
Mr. McGovern’s trouncing by Richard Nixon, a reprobate president if
we ever had one, augured the recessional–if not quite the collapse–
of such Democratic politics, which insisted our enemy in the Cold War
was not the Soviets but us.
It was then that people like Joe Lieberman emerged, muscular on
defense, assertive in foreign policy, genuinely liberal on social and
economic matters, but not doctrinaire on regulatory issues. He had
marched for civil rights and is committed to an equal opportunity
agenda with equal opportunity results. He has qualms about
affirmative action. But who, in his hearts of hearts, does not? He is
appalled by the abysmal standards of our popular culture and our
public discourse. Who really loves our popular culture–or, at least,
which parent? He is thoroughly a Democrat. But Mr. Lieberman believes
that, in an age of communal and global stress, one would do well to
speak with the president (even, on rare occasion, speak well of him)
and compromise with him on urgent matters of practical law.
Yes, Mr. Lieberman sometimes sounds a bit treacly. He certainly is
preachy, and advertises his sense of his own righteousness. But he
has also been brave, and bravery is a rare trait in politicians,
especially in states that are really true-blue or, for that matter,
really true-red. The blogosphere Democrats, whose victory Mr.
Lamont’s will be if Mr. Lamont wins, have made Iraq the litmus test
for incumbents. There are many reasonable, and even correct, reproofs
that one may have for the conduct of the war. They are, to be sure,
all retrospective. But one fault cannot be attributed to the U.S.,
and that is that we are on the wrong side. We are at war in a just
cause, to protect the vulnerable masses of the country from the
helter-skelter ideological and religious mass-murderers in their
midst. Our enemies are not progressive peasants as was imagined three
and four decades ago.
If Mr. Lieberman goes down, the thought-enforcers of the left will
target other centrists as if the center was the locus of a terrible
heresy, an emphasis on national strength. Of course, they cannot
touch Hillary Clinton, who lists rightward and then leftward so
dexterously that she eludes positioning. Not so Mr. Lieberman. He
does not camouflage his opinions. He does not play for safety, which
is why he is now unsafe.
Now Mr. Lamont’s views are also not camouflaged. They are just
simpleminded. Here, for instance, is his take on what should be done
about Iran’s nuclear-weapons venture: “We should work diplomatically
and aggressively to give them reasons why they don’t need to build a
bomb, to give them incentives. We have to engage in very aggressive
diplomacy. I’d like to bring in allies when we can. I’d like to use
carrots as well as sticks to see if we can change the nature of the
debate.” Oh, I see. He thinks the problem is that they do not
understand, and so we should explain things to them, and then they
will do the right thing. It is a fortunate world that Mr. Lamont
lives in, but it is not the real one. Anyway, this sort of plying is
precisely what has been going on for years, and to no good effect.
Mr. Lamont continues that “Lieberman is the one who keeps talking
about keeping the military option on the table.” And what is so
plainly wrong with that? Would Mahmoud Ahmadinejad be more agreeable
if he thought that we had disposed of the military option in favor of
more country club behavior?
Finally, the contest in Connecticut tomorrow is about two views of
the world. Mr. Lamont’s view is that there are very few antagonists
whom we cannot mollify or conciliate. Let’s call this process by its
correct name: appeasement. The Greenwich entrepreneur might call it
“incentivization.” Mr. Lieberman’s view is that there are actually
enemies who, intoxicated by millennial delusions, are not open to
rational and reciprocal arbitration. Why should they be? After all,
they inhabit a universe of inevitability, rather like Nazis and
communists, but with a religious overgloss. Such armed doctrines, in
Mr. Lieberman’s view, need to be confronted and overwhelmed.
Almost every Democrat feels obliged to offer fraternal solidarity to
Israel, and Mr. Lamont is no exception. But here, too, he blithely
assumes that the Palestinians could be easily conciliated. All that
it would have needed was President Bush’s attention. Mr. Lamont has
repeated the accusation, disproved by the “road map” and Ariel
Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza, that Mr. Bush paid little or even no
attention to the festering conflict between Israel and the
Palestinians. And has Mr. Lamont noticed that the Palestinians are
now ruled, and by their own choice, by Hamas? Is Hamas, too, just a
few good arguments away from peace?
The Lamont ascendancy, if that is what it is, means nothing other
than that the left is trying, and in places succeeding, to take back
the Democratic Party. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Maxine Waters
have stumped for Mr. Lamont. As I say, we have been here before. Ned
Lamont is Karl Rove’s dream come true. If he, and others of his
stripe, carry the day, the Democratic party will lose the future, and
deservedly.
Mr. Peretz is editor in chief of The New Republic.