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Wednesday, August 9, 2006
Mr. McGovern, your party is waiting
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Well, they got him. The crazies of the anti-war left, a rising force within the national Democratic Party, got Joe Lieberman last night. But saner Democrats in Georgia’s 4th Congressional District got Cynthia McKinney, too. It was a night of mixed blessings.
I view Connecticut Democratic politics and the party’s voters the same as I do Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Unitarians: What they do amongst themselves — whatever rules, rituals and rites they wish to rally ‘round — is none of my business. But ol’ Joe. Dang. It’s hard to envision a party that swore by him just six years ago, that vouched to the American people that he was White House material, and Tuesday they dumped him. Out in the hinterlands, dumping Joe over Iraq suggests that the McGovernites are back.
The other race of national interest was McKinney’s. It’s an amazing fall from power, evidence that middle and upper class blacks in her district had grown weary of the volatile confrontationalist who on a bad day could find racism and conspiracy in a bowl of breakfast ceral. The old rabble-rousing street rhetoric that had worked so many times before failed to move the Lexus crowd. The district changed. She didn’t. She lost fair, square and decisively.
Lieberman is not finished, by any means — though McKinney is either at the end of her career or at the beginning of a long process of easing from the edge to center-left before she is again capable of winning any significant political office. Lieberman will most likely win his fourth term in the U.S. Senate in November running as an Independent. His defeat Tuesday does fix the national Democratic Party ideologically. It is now the McGovern party.
For newcomers to this earth who are below the U.S. median age of 35.3 years old, that’s the virulently anti-war party of George McGovern. The message of his 1972 campaign was a rip-roaring success. In Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, that is, for those were the only two electoral-vote producers McGovern carried.
Republicans lost big in Georgia onTuesday. One of their biggest recruiters bit the dust. But they won bigger in Connecticut, where the party of the angry and unelectable McGovern Democrats was reborn to lose again.
