CT Progressive

It occurs to me in watching Chris Dodd re-integrate himself into the local political culture - coordinating op-eds with Love Makes a Family and their press operation, writing on local blogs, along with bringing local people down to DC and just generally being more readily available for sit-downs with local constituencies - that his current situation is such that he’s more susceptible to public pressure than your average Senator at the moment. Most especially from the left, as he has a somewhat urgent need to solidify his skeptical base.

And in a way, that’s a little bit of a shame, as he’s generally one of the best handful of Senators on any issue you might care to name: he’s fought anti-consumer bankruptcy policies, filibustered warrantless wiretapping, trimmed back the abusive practices of credit card companies, and so on. If he was the median Senator, we’d be in pretty good shape, all things considered. So he’s compelled to come over to MLN and toot his own horn on his support for the Public Option in the upcoming healthcare reform debate – when, in truth, he’s pretty far down on the list of people I think needs to be cajoled by progressives on healthcare.

Meanwhile, the other Senator is proudly touting his opposition to the public option, in a pretty brazen opposition to public opinion, and I can’t think of any meaningful opportunity for progressives to persuade him, nor (imagining his perspective) can I see any real incentive for him to open himself up for public input on the matter.

It really does seem like our two Senators are engaged in very different sorts of politics: Dodd is focusing on his (largely progressive) constituents who live in Connecticut, while Lieberman is focused on cultivating the support of conservative institutional players in Washington DC. His project to block the release of torture documents brought me more despair than most of Lieberman’s nonsense, because I realized that even if he casts the deciding vote to destroy Obama’s public plan in the Senate, we’re overwhelmingly likely to see our President’s smiling face in an endorsement commercial three years hence for what Joe is doing on these photos.

I have to wonder how we can apply pressure to Lieberman – can it be done through the institutions of the Senate and the Sunday talk shows, or is there a way to change the incentives on the ground in Connecticut so he has to engage in politics differently?

This entry was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 4:29 pm and is filed under National Policy, Party Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.