You may remember our 1966 Game, where I tried to identify similarities between people from the cusp of the last generational crisis and today.
The 1966 election was a watershed much as this year’s election will be. In that election Republicans gained 47 House seats. They also gained three Senate seats. Despite this success, they remained an impotent minority in the next Congress — the Johnson landslide had been that big.
Today’s Democrats are much closer to real power than those Republicans were. With a change of just 15 House seats they will gain control of that chamber. The Senate’s 6 is tougher to see, but in a "wave" election like we’re about to have, all the close races go one way — even something absurd (like 8) is possible. (Wave elections, as I’ve said before, always have a result which at the time seems ludicrous.)
What separates our time from that time is one man, Joe Lieberman. Or so it seems. Perhaps no man is more hated by Netroots Democrats, the people I consider heirs to the Goldwater movement conservatives of that time. I have considered him to be most like Jacob Javits, the bete noir of the New York Conservative Party. But Javits did not lose a Republican primary until 1980, and that was down as much to his (then admitted) ALS as anything else. (He then ran as a Liberal and helped elect Al D’Amato.)
In conventional terms there seems little with which to compare this Lieberman-hate. The wildest point made in its defense (so far) is a piece at MyDD comparing Lieberman’s statements about Iraq to Nixon’s about Vietnam. That’s interesting because, when Nixon made his statements his view was in the ascendent (as the last 40 years of history have proven), while Lieberman is embracing the falling star of Bush-ism.
There is also little to compare the elections electorally.
In the case of Lieberman, he has already lost a Democratic primary. Yet
he seems poised (according to polls) to win re-election anyway as the
candidate of Connecticut for Lieberman.
So who was Lieberman then? Our question becomes, can you find an election from that year in which someone from the descending order created such havoc among the people then rising to power?
I’ll give you my answer next week. Just remember that in games like this there are no wrong answers, just theories.
