Triumph of the Turncoat Houdini

Today's escape from losing his chairmanship of the Senate Homeland Security Committee caps Joe Lieberman's career of having it both ways in two decades of sanctimonious posturing and backroom politicking.

With a novelist's eye for the absurd, Joan Didion nailed him in her reporting of the 2000 election campaign:

"Senator Lieberman, who had come to the nation's attention as the hedge player who had previously seized center stage by managing both to denounce the president [Bill Clinton] for "disgraceful" and "immoral" behavior and to vote against his conviction (similarly, he had in 1991 both voiced support for and voted against the confirmation of Clarence Thomas) was not, except to the press, an immediately engaging personality...

"His speech patterns, grounded in the burdens he bore for the rest of us and the personal rewards he had received from God for bearing it, tended to self-congratulation."

Lieberman called today's verdict “fair and forward-looking” and one of “reconciliation and not retribution,” but others, like this constituent, will see it as another slithering out of responsibility for his actions by the weasel who was voted out by his party in the 2006 primaries but kept his seat when Republicans named a non-entity to throw the three-way race his way.

The President-Elect and Senate Democrats may congratulate themselves on today's act of anonymous generosity, but Connecticut residents who are enraged by and stuck with Lieberman's smug, self-righteous, self-serving wrong-headedness won't join in the celebration.

How Rove Stole My Vote and Lost the Senate

Last November, my Congressman, Christopher Shays, was the only Republican House member in New England to be reelected. I didn’t vote for him, but Karl Rove did. Ironically, in doing so, the “boy genius” missed a chance to keep Republican control of the U.S. Senate.

Today’s Washington Post singles out Shays’s campaign as an example of his work:

“Under Rove's direction, this highly coordinated effort to leverage the government for political marketing started as soon as Bush took office in 2001 and continued through last year's congressional elections, when it played out in its most quintessential form in the coastal Connecticut district of Rep. Christopher Shays, an endangered Republican incumbent...

“Between April 2006 and Election Day, Shays was able to announce at least 25 new federal grants or projects totaling more than $46 million, including a new veterans medical facility and a long-awaited installment of federal money for ferry service...Seven different Bush administration officials, including two Cabinet secretaries and the chief of the highway administration, visited his district during that time.

“In contrast, Shays announced just $39 million in grants and got just one visit by a federal official in the prior 15 months, the analysis shows.

“No federal generosity was too small to tout. A top official of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was on hand with Shays when the NOAA awarded a single severe-weather alert radio, valued at $23, to an elementary school in Norwalk, Conn., two months before Election Day.

“Shays wrote Bush on Sept. 8, 2006, to seek the early release--before the election--of heating assistance money for low-income residents in his state. Just four days later, the White House released $6 million.”

Before Bush, Shays was a relatively independent Republican but after 2001 was dragooned into blindly supporting the war in Iraq to the point that a Democrat, Diane Farrell, came close to unseating him in 2004.

But he was still a popular and credible enough figure in the state to have won the U.S. Senate seat that was in play after Joe Lieberman was defeated in the Democratic primary.

In a three-way race with the Democratic newcomer Ned Lamont and Lieberman running as an Independent, Shays might well have been elected with less than 40 percent of the vote.

But the Republicans, in love with Lieberman as their Democratic cheerleader for the war, put up a non-entity, a small-town former mayor tarnished by gambling scandals, who drew 9.6 percent of the Republican vote. The rest went to Lieberman and reelected him to caucus with the Democrats and give them control of the Senate.

In 1968, Joe Flaherty wrote “The Selling of the President” to show that Nixon’s media manipulators had won the White House for him. But after the chaos of the Democrats’ Chicago convention, Nixon led the polls by 15 per cent. Two months and $20 million dollars later, he won by less than one per cent.

”Evil geniuses” are always overrated.

ThisClose to a Banana Republic

If Democrats hadn’t taken control of Congress this year, we might be living in a third-world country under self-reinforcing Republican rule. Ultimately we have George Bush’s stupidity and stubbornness over Iraq to thank for saving us.

As Karl Rove prepares for his final bows tomorrow on Sunday morning talk shows, the House Oversight Committee leaks the latest news in his dismantling of the Hatch Act, which has barred federal employees from engaging in partisan politics since 1939.

The McClatchy newspapers report: “Top Commerce and Treasury Departments officials appeared with Republican candidates and doled out millions in federal money in battleground congressional districts and states after receiving White House political briefings detailing GOP election strategy.”

This comes after revelations that the State Department, American ambassadors, the General Services Administration (which oversees government contracts) and, most infamously, U.S. Attorneys were dragooned into using their time and taxpayer money to benefit Republican office holders.

Despite all this electoral manipulation, intense and widespread public anger over Iraq and the personal corruption of Congressional Republicans gave both houses to the Democrats last November. It’s sobering to imagine how a little less hubris would have kept Bush and Rove’s lackeys in power.

As Democrats congratulate themselves for uncovering the chicanery and relish their prospects in next year’s voting, they may want to take a sober look at how much their efforts to sweep out the Augean Stables are distracting them from pressing public needs.

Nobody, especially in Washington, is immune from arrogance.