WASHINGTON - Tuesday's defeat in
Connecticut's primary election of US President
George W Bush's "favorite Democrat", Senator Joe
Lieberman, by a little-known anti-war candidate
marks a major setback to neo-conservative hopes of
maintaining bipartisan support for the
administration's aggressive foreign policies,
particularly in the Middle East.
Lieberman, the Democrats'
vice-presidential candidate in the 2000 campaign,
received strong support from prominent
neo-conservatives, especially those who had led
the campaign to invade Iraq, in the closing days
of the primary battle, when it became clear that
his challenger, Ned Lamont, was on the verge of
victory.
"What drives so many Democrats
crazy about Lieberman is not
simply his support for the
Iraq war," complained Weekly Standard editor and
co-founder of the Project for a New American
Century, William Kristol, in response to polls
last week showing that Lamont had pulled ahead of
the three-term incumbent by a large margin. "It's
that he's unashamedly pro-American."
In
the event, Lieberman, who was backed in the
primary by both
Bill and Hillary Clinton, among
other prominent establishment Democrats, did not
do as poorly as last week's polls indicated,
losing by a 48-52% vote.
The relative
closeness of the final results clearly encouraged
him to announce, even as he conceded the primary
on Tuesday night, that he will run as an
Independent against both Lamont and the Republican
candidate, Alan Schlesinger, in the general
election in November.
Because Connecticut
is strongly Democratic, Lieberman's hopes rest on
wooing a sufficient number of conservative
Democrats and independents to his side to overcome
the backing of the state and national party
organizations for Lamont, a multimillionaire heir
and businessman who had never run for statewide
office. Whether he can succeed - particularly in
light of the strong anti-incumbent mood in the
country - was a matter of much speculation in
Washington on Wednesday.
Most analysts
attributed Lamont's remarkable victory - it marked
only the third time in 25 years that an incumbent
senator was defeated in a primary election - to a
combination of grassroots Democrats' revulsion
toward Bush and the Iraq war, in particular, and
Lieberman's failure to pay attention to the
concerns of his constituents.
"There was a
personal sense among Connecticut Democrats that
his national agenda is what matters to him and not
Connecticut," a former state party chairman told
the Washington Post.
Nonetheless, Lamont's
victory was hailed by critics of both Lieberman
and Bush's foreign policy as a potential watershed
for both the Democratic Party and the anti-war
movement.
"His victory represents a
growing voter revolt against the failed policies
and politics of the Bush administration and its
congressional enablers, particularly the debacle
in Iraq," said Robert Borosage, co-director of the
Campaign for America's Future, which represents
more left-wing Democrats.
"After
[Lieberman's] defeat, Democrats will show more
backbone in challenging the current disastrous
course, and more Republicans will look for ways to
distance themselves from the president," he wrote
in TomPaine.com on Wednesday.
In
particular, the primary result is likely to give
pause to several likely Democratic presidential
aspirants. These include Senator Clinton and
Senator Joseph Biden, who, while critical of the
administration's competence in Iraq, have
steadfastly resisted setting a timetable for
withdrawal.
They are also closer to the
growing number of their congressional colleagues
who favor a relatively quick pullout beginning no
later than the end of this year - a position
shared by 61% of the US public, according to a CNN
poll that was coincidentally released on
Wednesday.
As noted by former Republican
Connecticut senator Lowell Weicker, who supported
Lamont against Lieberman, the primary was a
"referendum on the Iraq war - not just for
Connecticut but for the whole country".
That is precisely the concern of
neo-conservatives like Kristol and other backers
of the Iraq war who see in Lieberman's defeat not
only the possible collapse of dwindling public
support for the war, but also the loss of the
leading champion for their foreign-policy ideas in
the Democratic Party, which have been channeled
mainly through the Democratic Leadership Council,
of which Lieberman is a longtime member and former
chairman.
To them, Lieberman is the lineal
descendant of the late senator Henry M "Scoop"
Jackson, in whose office some of today's most
influential neo-conservatives, including former
Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle;
Bush's top Middle East adviser, Elliot Abrams;
Center for Security Policy president Frank
Gaffney; and Kristol himself got their start.
Reliably liberal on civil and women's
rights and the environment, closely tied to
conservative labor unions, Jackson, like Lieberman
today, was the standard-bearer of what became the
neo-conservative wing of the Democratic Party -
staunchly pro-Israel, a steadfast supporter of
ever-higher defense budgets, and a strong believer
in what was euphemistically called "peace through
strength".
"Until yesterday, Senator
Joseph Lieberman was the most prominent
representative of the Scoop Jackson wing of the
Democratic party," wrote Clifford May, president
of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy
(FDD), a hardline pro-Israel group for which
Lieberman has served as a "distinguished adviser".
"Today, that wing is down to its last few
feathers."
On Middle East issues,
Lieberman has long favored close alignment with
Israel, although, unlike hardline
neo-conservatives, he has leaned more to the Labor
Party than to the right-wing Likud.
In
April, he became the first prominent Democrat to
voice support for an eventual US military strike
against Iranian nuclear facilities.
Lieberman's association with the FDD was
typical of a number of "bipartisan" organizations
he helped create or sponsor that have been
dominated by neo-conservatives.
In 2002,
for example, he became honorary co-chair of the
Committee to Liberate Iraq, an advocacy group
created just a few months before the US invasion
by Kristol, Perle, former Central Intelligence
Agency director James Woolsey, and Eliot Cohen,
among other prominent neo-conservatives. In 1998,
he co-sponsored with Republican Senator John
McCain the Iraq Liberation Act, which made the
ouster of Saddam Hussein official US policy.
Since 2004, he has served as co-chair of
the Committee on the Present Danger, another
influential, mainly neo-conservative group
created, in Lieberman's words, to "form a
bipartisan citizens' army, which is ready to fight
a war of ideas against our Islamist terrorist
enemies, and to send a clear signal that their
strategy to deceive, demoralize and divide America
will not succeed". Other board members are
Woolsey, Perle, Cohen and Gaffney.
As the
Iraq war became increasingly unpopular over the
past year, Lieberman, to the frustration and fury
of many of his party colleagues, served as the
administration's chief Democratic defender.
In a column he published in the Wall
Street Journal last autumn - and which was
subsequently cited repeatedly by top
administration officials, including Bush and Vice
President Dick Cheney - he criticized fellow
Democrats who favored withdrawal, arguing that "we
undermine the president's credibility at our
nation's peril".
Indeed, so favorably was
Lieberman regarded in the White House that, as he
was leaving the well of the House of
Representatives after his 2005 state of the union
address, Bush embraced Lieberman and planted a
kiss on his cheek.
For most Connecticut
Democrats, it turned out to be the kiss of death.
Bill and Hillary Clinton, among
other prominent establishment Democrats, did not
do as poorly as last week's polls indicated,
losing by a 48-52% vote. 
