In Full Voice Against Bush
By Sidney Blumenthal
The Guardian UK
Thursday 29 January 2004
The remaining Democratic hopefuls are all singing from the same hymn sheet to
defeat the president
For the first time, the United States is hearing sustained criticism of its president and, though the
Democratic presidential primaries have been going less than two weeks, the effect has been
immediate. Bush was already rattled and preoccupied with his suddenly full-throated opposition even
before the Iowa vote. He scheduled his state of the union address to follow it by a day, and it was the
most poorly rated in modern times. By last weekend, his approval had fallen below 50% in a
Newsweek poll and he was three points behind Senator John Kerry, the new Democratic frontrunner.
In New Hampshire, the turnout for the Democratic primary was the greatest in history, reflecting
their determination to oust Bush. Intensity of feeling against the president has combined with the need
felt for an electable candidate. Democrats don't want either political clarity or political skill, but both in
one package. Now, amid the din, the party is finding its voice. New Hampshire began to sort out the
candidates. Men of destiny discovered that the crowds were thronging for someone else's future. And
those who suffered brutally abrupt judgments tell much by their rejection.
Wesley Clark, former supreme allied commander in Europe, campaigned as a national redemptive
hero, and finished a distant third. Senator Joseph Lieberman, the vice-presidential candidate in 2000,
ran as rightful pretender, and came in fifth. The Democratic party (unlike the Republican) has no natural
deference to eminence or inheritance. Clark is the four-star general as political amateur at a moment
when the party demands an experienced politician. Lieberman is a scold of cultural conservatism and
defender of Bush's foreign policy when the party wants to storm the barricades under an unwavering
standard.
Clark insisted on being drafted to run by a committee that had been created for that purpose. He
wanted to be seen as Olympian, above politics and embodying the will of a postwar nation. But he had
to struggle through a gruelling primary contest. Fatefully, he decided not to go to Iowa, allowing Kerry
to outflank Howard Dean there. The elements that Clark sought to assemble were held by others: Kerry
owned electability; John Edwards, southern identity; and Dean, the persona of the Washington
outsider. A man of parts, Clark was left in pieces.
The general began his New Hampshire campaign with a shot to his foot. Attempting to pull rank, he
dismissed Kerry as a mere lieutenant. By his condescension, Clark underscored Kerry's genuine
Vietnam war heroism and helped make him less the aloof aristocrat. Then he appeared with Michael
Moore, the self-promoting leftwing comedian, as responsible as anyone for Nader's destructive
sectarian campaign that put Bush in the White House. Moore grabbed the microphone to call the
president a "deserter", a remark that Clark spent the rest of the New Hampshire campaign trying to
deflect.
Lieberman wanted to advance the right wing's culture war within the party, making a career out of
picking fights with Hollywood, the music industry, even proposing a law outlawing rave concerts. As an
Orthodox Jew, he lent an aura of the ecumenical to the intolerant. He also cosponsored "faith-based"
legislation with the conservative Republican senator Rick Santorum, which gave tax incentives and
contracts to churches to perform government services while exempting them from equal opportunity
laws.
Lieberman presented his alliances as the only way to uphold decency, family life and "values". He
urged the Democrats to reform their evil ways, accept God, and only then receive the promise of
salvation. This was the essence of his notion of a New Democrat.
He never criticised the religious right for its undermining of the constitution and civil society or for its
hateful divisiveness and hypocritical cant. During the unconstitutional impeachment trial of President
Clinton, Lieberman was the first Democratic senator to denounce him. On the floor of the Senate, at an
uncertain political moment, he upheld Ken Starr as a figure of probity and compared Clinton's private
consensual acts with "negative messages communicated by the entertainment culture".
Al Gore chose him as his running mate partly because of this moralistic posturing. His smug
cultural conservatism repelled alienated younger voters and sent them in Ralph Nader's direction.
Lieberman served almost as a genial sidekick to Dick Cheney in their debate. During the Florida
contest he publicly conceded, without ever consulting anyone, the Republicans' fraudulent overseas
ballots (the so-called "Thanksgiving stuffing"), which cost Gore the presidency. On election night in
New Hampshire, Lieberman called Kerry "out of the mainstream", and for old time's sake attacked "the
entertainment industry".
With the elimination of the quasi-neoconservative and the rookie, the remaining candidates'
messages, with relatively minor variations, are the same in almost every respect. Dean can claim he
opposed the Iraq war from the start, but they all lash Bush now on his falsehoods and abuse of
intelligence to justify it. Among Democrats, the issue is no longer salient in defining one candidate
against another. The nuance of difference means that there are no irreparable internal divisions. For the
next two months, though the result appears preordained, the Democratic roadshow will barnstorm the
country from coast to coast against Bush, more symphony than cacophony.
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