Are Democrats really so lame?

Things only get worse the more time Bai spends at the other bloggerpalooza event of summer '06 (which, given Bai's angst about the blogosphere, might best be called the Summer of Hate) -- the insurgent campaign of preppie cable exec Ned Lamont against Iraq war cheerleader Joe Lieberman. Bai clearly thinks Lieberman got a raw deal. His overall Senate voting record, Bai points out, is comparable to Hillary Clinton's. His sin was supporting the Iraq war and being kissed (but Lieberman tells Bai there was "no actual lip contact") by President Bush. The lefty blogosphere's effort to defeat Lieberman, according to Bai, was marked by two features the writer can't abide: the bloggers' desire to exert power for its own sake, and even worse, a desire to exert power motivated mainly by hatred. He quotes his friend Markos as saying if the bloggers could take down Lieberman "then no one will want to be the Joe Lieberman of 2008." "The real goal here for the netroots," Bai concludes, "wasn't so much about change as it was about power."

This is the crux of what's wrong with "The Argument." Bai depicts the revolt against Lieberman as though it's the cool kids turning on a nerdy old friend they don't like anymore. Throughout the book, he minimizes what the Iraq war means to bloggers, to Democrats, to the vast majority of American voters, to the world, in order to depict Democratic insurgents as power-mad kingmakers or simply haters. But this wasn't some wonky clash over, say, the dimensions of welfare reform or the estate tax; or some venal battle to protect the power of teachers unions or the tax advantages of hedge fund executives. It wasn't Egomaniac Asshole Pol No. I vs. Egomaniac Asshole Pol No. 2. The dishonest marketing of the Iraq war and the treacherous lies behind it, the cavalier way it was executed, the disastrous way it unfolded, along with some Democrats' collusion in all or part of the debacle, have shaped and will shape American political culture for years to come. And it happened because the so-called vast right-wing conspiracy, the intellectual and media infrastructure Rob Stein charted, had succeeded in a decades-long campaign to smear Democrats as un-American in every imaginable way -- and very specifically, after 9/11, as terrorist sympathizers and appeasers. Most disturbing to angry party insurgents, Democrats like Joe Lieberman helped them along, not only by supporting the Iraq war through today, but by going on right-wing Fox News and the Wall Street Journal wingnut editorial page attacking Democrats in exactly the same terms Republicans used.

Making sure that "no one will want to be the Joe Lieberman of 2008" wasn't, then, about naked power. It was about undoing the awful Republican war and disastrous foreign policy with which Joe Lieberman colluded -- and ensuring that Democrats, in the future, would stand for something different, or not stand as Democrats. Bai misses all of that. He revisits the low point of the blogosphere's campaign for Lamont, when Firedoglake's Jane Hamsher ran an ill-advised, kind of inexplicable photo of Lieberman in blackface. If you didn't already know Hamsher was Big Trouble, Bai telegraphs it this way: She was "a onetime Hollywood producer whose seminal work was 'Natural Born Killers,' the movie that set a new standard for senseless violence onscreen." Ah, there you have it, the marriage between amoral Hollywood and the lefty blogosphere, targeting poor Joe Lieberman.

Still, Lamont won the primary. But Lieberman won reelection running as an independent, and the lesson for Bai is clear: The bloggers behind the Lamont campaign lost interest and moved on, and other Democrats never fully warmed to Lamont, once it was clear that he "lacked a discernible agenda" beyond being not-Lieberman. (Perhaps more relevant, the neophyte candidate also took an ill-advised post-primary vacation and never got his campaign back into gear.) Connecticut voters, according to Bai, preferred the platform of their incumbent senator (who in fact lied about wanting to bring the troops home soon and his alliance with the Bush administration, all while relying on the votes of Republicans to win reelection.) That Bai draws so many wrong conclusions about the Lieberman race ruins the book.

Let me be clear: Like Bai, I would like to see more political will (the ideas are there; it's a mobilized constituency behind a few key ideas that's missing) to do something about the healthcare nightmare, the public education crisis, persistent inner-city poverty, the shock waves of globalization ... I could go on and on. I think the 2008 Democratic nominee will need to articulate and build a constituency behind a compelling vision of post-Bush America that reckons with terrorism, security and a new U.S. role in the volatile global economy. He or she may not need it to get elected, the way the Republicans are going, but they'll need it to govern and to solve the problems voters elect them to address -- as well as to get reelected.

I should also acknowledge that I've had my own issues, occasionally, with parts of the liberal blogosphere. I've asked whether they want to be new media pioneers or Democratic kingmakers; I've worried some are more interested in becoming the new gatekeepers than crashing the gate. But I've come to be happy they're around -- and that's because I remember how it was before.

Next page: "I have my knee on their vertebrae"