More Political Advice to Dems from the WSJ
While waiting for a meeting earlier today, I paged through the Wall Street Journal and was left gobstruck by the contrast of two articles on their editorial page. In a top-of-the-fold piece entitled “Run, Joe, Run,” Peter Beinart praises the candidacy of Democratic Presidential hopeful Joe Lieberman as a valiant centrist with a pragmatic (read “pro-war”) foreign policy, not afraid to vote against his own party or stand up to his own President (he called for Clinton to resign during the Impeachment debacle). The simple fact that Lieberman meets with the approval of the WSJ neatly encapsulates the problem that many actual Democrats have with this loathsome, sanctimonious opportunist whose views are barely distinguishable from the worst sort of Republican on many key social issues. To many, he embodies the DINOcrat (Democrat-in-name-only), worth having in the Senate if he votes with the caucus, but not fit to be the standard-bearer of the party in a national election.
One article down the page, “The Toomey Specter” by Jason Riley goes on to lambaste Arlen Specter, the Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, for indulging in exactly the sort of self-serving pseudo-independent posturing as Lieberman, only in this case, Specter’s deviation from the Republican Party line comes in for nothing but jeers. He’s not a “sensible moderate centrist,” but someone far out of step with the views of many Republicans and a ripe target for defeat in his own state primary. In the Journal’s eyes, there was nothing courageous or principled about the way Specter lined up against Robert Bork in the Supreme Court nomination fight in 1988 (though he subsequently did his bit to get the egregious Clarence Thomas confirmed a few years later), or about how he has had a mixed and generally responsible record voting on tax and spending legislation.
The moral of our story? Independence is only a virtue in maverick Democrats. Thanks for that bit of fair and balanced political insight, WSJ.
9:00:32 PM 
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