Somewhere in New Haven, Emily Bazelon keeps a secret diary. After the kids are in bed, she opens the heart-shaped lock and tears the pages with her purple pen.
"I HATE JOE LIEBERMAN!!!"
So it was all sundaes and frosting yesterday for Emily when news broke that Lieberman won't seek a new Senate term in 2012. This made her SO happy she found some choice bits from Slate and made sure they were posted at exactly midnight on 19 January. The first news article about Lieberman that day would be hers, dammit!
She references Curtis Sittenfeld's piece on Obama (another political piece that sounds like it started in a Lisa Frank diary) in what has to be the most obvious way possible. Bazelon, "loathes, loathes, loathes," Lieberman.
Her grievances against Lieberman are justifiable. He does things that benefit the financial and insurance industries, he chastised Bill Clinton over the Lewinsky scandal, he was hawkish on the Iraq war, he supported efforts to limit some morning-after pill access.
Personally, she calls Lieberman out as a shameless self-promoter. I don't think even Lieberman's staff would disagree. But what Lieberman's doing with his excess of ego and constant political manipulation is what any political moderate in this day and age has to do to be successful. Bazelon's distaste with Lieberman isn't groundless, but she's myopic in calling out Lieberman when she should be calling out the system that produced him.
Let's compare Lieberman to his buddy John McCain. McCain wasn't going to win any conservative purity tests and he certainly couldn't curry as much favor with the establishment as other Senators. So he played the role of "Maverick," deal-maker, iconoclast to the hilt. He swaggered in his support of MOR legislation and, more importantly, never shut up about himself. In doing so, he became a new center of power in the party and leveraged it into a Presidential run.
Bazelon isn't angry at Lieberman; she's angry at the fact that he's a moderate Democrat. She's angry he isn't as liberal as she is and that he's able to exploit that for political gain. Yawn.
