The Daily Novel

Godfrey Hodgson explains last week’s upset in the US Democratic Party in our first guest blog.

One of the most cherished myths of the conservancy persuasion, in Britain as in the United States has been the idea that liberals are all millionaires, and millionaires are all to be suspected of being liberals.
This is part of the belief system of the Murdoch tendency, and it is cherished by serried ranks of American conservatives. Tom Frank, author of What’s Wrong with Kansas? called this dogma “market populism”. The idea is that you, little man, are better looked after by the masters of the corporate universe than by your elected representatives and the government they control, let alone by civil servants employed to carry out the purposes of democratically elected government. .
It is, of course, self-interested nonsense. Most liberals are far from being millionaires, and most millionaires, in spite of a handful of exceptions, are even farther from being liberals.
Every now and again, though, a story comes along that seems to confirm the Big Lie of market populism. Such a story has just been enacted in Connecticut. Joe Lieberman, three times elected Democratic senator from the Constitution State, and the Democratic party’s standard-bearer for Vice President in 2000, has just been beaten, 52 per cent to 48 per cent, by a rank outsider.
Ned Lamont is an amateur, whose only previous political credit was to have been elected Selectman (roughly, councillor) from Greenwich, Connecticut, best-known as the opulent New York commuter suburb that is the home of many hedge funds and those who have profited mightily from them.
Not that Ned Lamont, the conqueror of Joe Lieberman, owes his fortune to hedge funds. He and his wife were both comfortably rich, thank you, before hedge funds were invented. Ned is the great-grandson of Thomas W. Lamont, partner of the great J. P. Morgan. It was Morgan in his pride who, accused of breaking the law, protested to President Teddy Roosevelt, ““If we have done anything wrong, send your man to my man and they can fix it up.”
Not that Ned has been sitting back and clipping the coupons on his stock. He is the successful founder and boss of a cable TV company. His income last year was $2.8 million. So how does it come about that, in the American equivalent of the People’s Party, honest Joe Lieberman, after labouring in the Democratic vineyard for decades, is cast aside in favour of a scion of hereditary wealth?
Lamont’s victory can be explained n a single word.
Iraq.
Or, to be more precise, in two words: Iraq and Lebanon.
Lieberman was the victim of an insurgency — a sort of silk stocking jacquerie — because he supported the Iraq war, did not apologize for supporting it, was even observed giving President Bush the equivalent of a Latin abrazo or bear-hug. It goes without saying that, like many Democrats of his generation, he has been an absolutely unquestioning supporter not only of Israel, but of whatever even the most Right-wing Israeli government might do.
Lieberman is an Orthodox Jew and a strict one. It is perhaps normal that he should display this loyalty. The trouble is that, in his attitude to the politics of the Middle East, and on many domestic issues as well, Lieberman had become indistinguishable from a Republican. He was chair of the Democratic Leadership Council, which might be called the Blairite tendency in the Democratic party. He consistently took strong positions on “moral” issues, campaigning against rude words on television and denouncing the wickedness of President Clinton’s dalliance with Monica Lewinsky. (It takes two to tango.)
He has been, according to the Washington Post’s sage commentator David Broder, an “apostle of a Democratic philosophy that incorporates market-oriented thinking of the Reagan revolution and a muscular defense and foreign policy.” He was not alone in a Democratic party where union power and working class politicians are both hard to find.
It may seem odd that it takes a Lamont, a fourth generation millionaire educated at private boarding school and at both Harvard and Yale, to spot that the Democratic party has taken leave of its roots in the people. But if the Democrats are to defeat a Republican party that is discredited on every front, from New Orleans to Iraq, someone has got to point out that the emperor has no clothes.
Say what you like about Hillary Clinton, but no one has ever said she was stupid. (Yale Law, again.) Last week she finally showed that she has understood what support for the disastrous Iraq venture is doing to the Democrats. She goaded the ineffable Donald Rumsfeld, who as Secretary of Defense has been formally as well as really responsible for the disasters of Iraq, into appearing before a Senate committee, and when he got there, gave him the sharp edge of a very sharp tongue. Then she called formally on President Bush to fire the former Greco-Roman wrestler.
Joe Lieberman has not knuckled under. He threatens to run against his fellow Democrat, Lamont, in the autumn. If he does, the odds seem to be that the voters of Connecticut, will add insult to injury. Connecticut, of course, is not America. It is so much part of the “blue” (we would say pink) political culture that its three seats in Congress may all go to the Democrats in November. But more than 60 per cent of all Americans now say they oppose the Iraq war.
MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN . Those words were written by a mysterious hand on the wall of Belshazzar’s palace. The meaning is obscure, but the usual interpretation is that the king was found wanting, his reign numbered, and his kingdom would be given to the Medes and Persians.
For all the successes of the Persians’ Hizbullah proxies, George Bush’s kingdom is in no danger from the Persians yet. It is rather a rich irony that a grandson of the great Republican House of Morgan has put the writing on the Republican wall. Perhaps Ned Lamont has numbered George Bush’s political reign and handed his kingdom over to the Democrats.

Godfrey Hodgson is an associate fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, Oxford University. He was The Observer’s correspondent in the United States, and foreign editor of The Independent. Among his books are The World Turned Right Side Up: a history of the conservative ascendancy in America (1996), The Gentleman from New York: Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (2000), and More Equal Than Others: America from Nixon to the new century. His latest book is Woodrow Wilson’s Right Hand: a biography of Colonel Edward House.