E.J. Dionne is Correct and Incorrect 
Today's Washington Post editorial by E.J. Dionne correctly identifies the reason Lieberman is being successfully challenged for his Senate seat.
"The opposition to Lieberman is motivated by an effort to reverse the trend to the right. It's true that Lamont's campaign has been energized by widespread opposition to the Iraq war and the fact that Lieberman has been one of the most loyal Democratic defenders of President Bush's Middle East policies.
But Lieberman's troubles are, even more, about a new aggressiveness in the Democratic Party called forth by disgust with the Bush presidency -- an energy comparable to the vigor that a loathing for liberalism brought to the Republican right in the 1970s and '80s.
Like the earlier generation of conservatives, today's Democratic activists are impatient with accommodating the powers that be. They demand that Democrats stop trying to chase a "center" that has veered ever rightward since 1980. Instead, they want to haul that center back to more progressive terrain. That's why so much of the political energy in Connecticut seems to be with Lamont."
I find what he writes to be true. Today, Liberals and their interests have for so long been unjustly villified and scapegoated by politicians just like Lieberman. Their cynical assertion that they promote progressive causes is betrayed by their complicity in contributing to the right-wing Liberal-hate machine.
Liberals never were America's problem and this generation of Liberals is not afraid to say so. And Liberals are successful, thoughtful, working Americans who are insisting that their voices be represented - not by the rotten political core of politicians who have produced the Bush agenda but - by politicians who actually believe that Liberal ideas and policies can contribute to solving America's problems.
And this is where Dionne is incorrect. He closes by saying, "If Lieberman is to survive this round, he needs to make clear between now and next Tuesday that he's gotten the message."
Whether Lieberman gets the message or not is inconsequential. America wants politicians who walk the walk rather than those whose career has been punctuated by patronizing the constituency while stabbing them in the back.
KEYWORDS: Lieberman, Politics, Liberal
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