Lamont v. Lieberman

This has been heavily quoted on the lefty blogosphere in the past few days, but I'm posting it anyway because I like it so much. It's Mark Schmitt on the Lieberman race, which he says is all about "The End of Checklist Liberalism":

Lamont supporters actually aren’t ideologues. They aren’t looking for the party to be more liberal on traditional dimensions. They’re looking for it to be more of a party. They want to put issues on the table that don’t have an interest group behind them - like Lieberman’s support for the bankruptcy bill -- because they are part of a broader vision. And I think that’s what blows the mind of the traditional Dems. They can handle a challenge from the left, on predictable, narrow-constituency terms. But where do these other issues come from? These are “elitist insurgents,” as Broder puts it - since when do they care about bankruptcy? What if all of a sudden you couldn’t count on Democratic women just because you said that right things about choice - what if they started to vote on the whole range of issues that affect women’s economic and personal opportunities?

But caring about bankruptcy, even if you’re not teetering on the brink of it or a bankruptcy lawyer yourself, is part of a vision of a just society. And a vision of a just society - not just the single-issue push-buttons of a bunch of constituency groups - is what a center-left political party ought to be about. And at the end of this fight, I don’t expect that we’ll have a more leftist Democratic Party, but one that can at least begin to get beyond checklist liberalism.

I do wish we'd have a more left-wing Democratic Party, but the fact is that the pundits, the MSM, and, it seems, Joe Lieberman himself are either being obtuse about why so many of us want desperately to see him lose, or else they just prefer to push another, more inflammatory story. I, for one, want him to lose because he's a preachy moralist who has bad values -- not values I want represented in the Democratic party -- and who denounces me and my ilk for giving enough of a crap about the country to have an opinion about something important like, say, the War, and cozies up to Republicans without getting anything useful in return for Democrats. It's not because I am part of a blogofascist conspiracy of fanatical leftists who want to purge the party of all dissent in the course of destroying the country and making it safe for the terrorists, to whom we will give hybrid cars we paid for by a massive sales tax on SUVs.

Actually, I think it would be a great idea to put a massive sales tax on SUVs and subsidize hybrids for low-income people. But not terrorists. They probably want to bike, anyway, as part of their training regimen.