Sirotablog

By David Sirota
Hartford Courant - July 2, 2006 (Permalink)

Something rare is happening in Connecticut: The state is actually playing host to a contested U.S. Senate primary election.

This is a shocking development. Today, well-funded incumbents rarely face serious challenges. These incumbents tend to see themselves as royalty and their Senate seats as their personal property, rather than the property of the people.

But in Connecticut this year, incumbent U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman has a very serious Democratic primary challenger in small-businessman Ned Lamont. Lieberman is clearly panicking. First, he dishonestly attacked his opponent as siding with Republicans, then an ally of his told reporters that voters “terrorized” him.

Apparently, the Lieberman campaign’s cynical strategy is to smear the opponent and then convince the public that holding a contested election is somehow wrong, when in reality that’s exactly what’s supposed to happen in our democracy.

Lieberman wants to make this election about whether he is a likable guy.

But this is not a two-bit popularity contest. This is a critical election about whether Connecticut Democrats believe Lieberman is representing their party and mainstream America in the Senate, or whether he has lost his way and become part of the corrupt establishment in Washington.

A look at Lieberman’s record shows he is most decidedly the latter - a senator who has “gone Washington” and forgotten about the people who elected him. Lieberman may call himself a centrist, but the record shows he has used his platform to push policies that are far out of step with what ordinary Americans want from their government.

Take the Iraq war. Lieberman unflinchingly supports the stay-the-course policy of the Bush administration, to the point where he has attacked those who even raise questions about the administration’s Iraq policy as “undermin[ing] the president’s credibility at our nation’s peril.”

His out-of-the-mainstream position comes at a time when major national polls show more than half of Americans oppose the war and want a change in policy. Put another way, Lieberman is on the fringe, using his Senate seat not to represent the will of his constituents, but instead to parrot the destructive rhetoric of a tiny group of neoconservatives in Washington.

How about partially privatizing Social Security? Lieberman was one of the earliest and most outspoken senators giving credence to the concept. In 2000, The New York Times reported that Lieberman suggested he could support allowing workers to invest a portion of their payroll taxes in private markets.

Privatizing Social Security like this is an extreme move that would jeopardize the program. This explains why Lieberman - facing a tough primary challenge - now desperately claims he’s reconsidered his position and is against privatization. But voters should not forget that he used Connecticut’s Senate seat to help fuel President Bush’s push to hand over Social Security to the sharks on Wall Street.

On other critical economic issues, it is the same thing.

At a time when Americans are forced to pay the highest prices for medicine in the world, polls show the public wants our government to crack down on pharmaceutical industry price gouging. Yet Lieberman has voted against bipartisan legislation to make sure drugs developed at taxpayer expense are offered to Americans at a fair and reasonable price. He ignored what the public wanted and instead went to bat for the drug industry, which has given him more than $400,000 in campaign contributions.

Similarly, at a time when wages are stagnating and our country is hemorrhaging good-paying jobs, polls show the public wants our government to reform our international trade policy to better protect Americans’ jobs and wages. Yet Lieberman has consistently voted for corporate-written “free”-trade deals with Mexico and China that have exacerbated the problem and crushed Connecticut’s manufacturing base - all while publicly attacking those who want a change. Again, he used his Senate seat to represent Big Money interests in Washington against the will of the people.

Lieberman did not always behave this way. But after 18 years in Washington, Lieberman has clearly lost touch with Connecticut voters, to the point where his own spokesman was forced to admit as much. It was his campaign manager who recently acknowledged to reporters that Lieberman “hasn’t really had a dialogue with Connecticut voters about Connecticut issues in a while.”

That is precisely what elections in America are all about: voters deciding whether they want an out-of-touch incumbent who ignores them or a fresh voice who is serious about representing them.

Joe Lieberman may be a nice guy, but he is not royalty. And come Aug. 8, Connecticut voters will show that in a democracy, nobody - not even Joe Lieberman - gets to use the people’s office to ignore the will of the people.