Concession without Conceding
I was most curious to see Lieberman’s concession speech (I assumed, correctly, that he gave one last night). I knew he wasn’t planning on staying beaten, and I just wanted to see how he could give a proper concession knowing that he planned to continue the campaign. I found these generous excerpts at the NYT.
Let me tell you, I almost felt sorry for the dude. In a way he is right. It was an ugly race. A lot of people - myself included - have a lot of anger about what’s going on in the Bush Administration right now, and Joe Lieberman has spent the last 6 years making himself the Democratic Senatorial face of that Administration. And despite his long record of being a pretty-good Democrat in many ways (voting with us 90% or better), and a damn good Democrat in other ways (organizing for Civil Rights in the ’60s), we looked at him, saw the enabler for the most destructive administration … possibly in this country’s history… and could not contain our anger. It did look a lot like partisan politics at its worst. It looked like polarizing politics. And that’s because the events of the last 6 years have taken a Democratic party that is no more cohesive than a herd of cats and galvanized us in opposition to anything that enables these trends to continue. And Joe Lieberman staked out ground on the wrong side of every one of these issues. And, we let him have it, without mercy.
So, I do feel his pain. When he says that we should be uniting to solve problems instead of polarizing and purifying - he’s right. We should be doing that with every issue we can afford to compromise on. He just had to pick the issues that we cannot afford to compromise on, and make a stand on the wrong side of them. Still, I know the slings and arrows have taken their toll. I was glad I could stop feeling sorry for him when, late on the second page of his concession excerpts, he said, “You can go to my Web site, joe2006.com - when it is unhacked - to send me your ideas about how we can build this new politics of unity and purpose.” That made me laugh. And, I’m going to keep laughing until November, with hopes the good people of Connecticut will follow through with what they began yesterday.
