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I remain slightly amused and concerned about the situation around Senator Lieberman. Having no party affiliation, I don't care on any official or emotional level how the Democrats choose to organize their party. I do care about the openness of intellectual discussion and debate in our discourse that is being snuffed out by party ideologues. The Republicans have done this and have rightly been marginalized (their candidates certainly didn't get my vote this year).
Those on the left who seek to purify the Democratic Party will ultimately be emulating the Republican path to shrillness and irrelevance (hence my amusement at the way the party, after gaining control of the government, would use it to emulate the worst aspects of contemporary Republicanism). They will also be alienating voters like myself who supported President-Elect Obama because he refused to fit neatly into the partisan boxes that the rabid ideological bases of the parties demand. It is this style of politics that has broken our government at the national level, with Republicans, admittedly, leading the way over the past eight years.
This is not to say that Obama won't be a president of the center left. But if he does create an administration and a political environment that permits dissent among people across the political spectrum to be heard (as opposed to marginalized or punished), then he will go much further to correcting the systemic failures of our government than he would by tossing out those within and outside his party who don't pass a very narrow litmus test. This is George Bush governance, and I, for one, am heartened to see that Obama has taken some preliminary but real steps to show that he understands an important factor in what has gone wrong in our federal government over at least the past decade. Whether or not Lieberman supported his longtime friend in a presidential bid is irrelevant to the task of fixing this country; his constituents can decide on whether or not he is representing them appropriately in four years. But the more the Democrats, or at least the far left, fixate on him, the more convinced I’ll become that they don’t understand the full breadth of the coalition Obama assembled to win the election. The Democrats will disassemble this coalition at their own risk.
