A friend of mine (one of the four people who has this blog in her news-reader) complained the other day that I wasn't posting much, and what little I was posting was very techie. So, this morning's resolution, which will likely last for at least a day, is to post once a day on some snippet of political news.
Today's must-read: Eli Pariser's op-ed in the Washington Post, which is titled "The Death of Triangulation." I think he gets the post-Lamont moment almost exactly right:
...while Lamont's victory is a promising development, it marks the beginning of the end for an old favorite of Washington insiders -- the tactics of triangulation. Originally employed as a survival strategy by a Democratic president in the wake of 1994's Republican revolution, the policy of seizing the political middle ground no longer makes sense in an era when any attempt at bipartisanship is understood as a sign of Democratic weakness and exploited accordingly.
Had triangulation worked, we'd be in a different moment. But for six long years, it hasn't. Even Sen. Hillary Clinton has seen the writing on the wall in recent weeks, criticizing the Bush team's Iraq fiasco by publicly confronting Donald Rumsfeld, calling on him to resign and demanding that troop withdrawals from Iraq begin soon.
With triangulation passing, a new era of bolder, principle-driven politics can begin. Lamont's success should be the opening salvo in a 90-day campaign to establish the clear-cut differences between Democrats and Republicans. Most independent voters, like Democrats, want change, but many of them aren't sure yet whether Democratic candidates are capable of giving it to them. Now's the chance to seize that mantle.
Pariser describes a few core elements of a serious Democratic agenda--an end to the US occupation of Iraq, a government that is an ally in helping ordinary people deal with soaring energy prices and health insurance.
The only thing he leaves out, which I believe was also a big part of Lamont's win, is that Americans also want a change in how their representatives relate to them. Lieberman's manner captures all the haughtiness of a Senator with a capitol-S who thinks his position is hereditary and who is more comfortable among other CEOs than among ordinatry folks. On the campaign trail, Lamont never ceased to remind voters that Washington was overrun by lobbyists--63 for every Member of Congress I think was the number he used--and people viscerally responded.
If Democrats are going to build on Lamont's victory in the Connecticut Senate primary, I think their "bolder, principle-driven politics" has to contain a constant call to change how Washington works. (Lieberman, with his "independent" bid, is making noises that also sound like reinventing how Washington works, in particular with respect to hyper-partisanship, but he has spent so much time in the Senate coddling up to Republicans that his rhetoric of independence rings hollow to me.) Lamont--who has endorsed full public financing of elections, tough new ethics and transparency rules, and the wholesale elimination of earmarks--gets it. Maybe others will follow.