American politics this year has been running on two divergent tracks. The first is intensified partisan combat in advance of a critical midterm election. The second is growing disaffection among many voters with a national capital seen as stalemated by polarization and distrust between the two political parties.
That makes the coming campaign between antiwar Democrat Ned Lamont and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, who lost last week's primary and is now running in the general election as an independent, an intriguing laboratory for what might emerge in the 2008 presidential campaign.
Will Lieberman's campaign prove to be a forerunner for a message of civility and bipartisanship that emerges nationally in 2008, or simply be remembered as an obsolete refrain from a politician living in an idealized past and that serves only to deepen partisan divisions?
The Lieberman-Lamont primary became the latest stage for the politics of anger that has dominated since President Bush took office after the disputed election of 2000. Lieberman hopes to make the general election a template for civility in politics and a return to some measure of bipartisan cooperation in Washington.
The war in Iraq and the architecture of Republican electoral victories in 2002 and 2004 have persuaded many strategists in both parties that the key to victory is to maximize support of the most ideological of their followers, rather than appealing to less-partisan swing voters.
Turning away from partisan politics?
Still, long before the Connecticut Senate race, prospective 2008 candidates, including the two early front-runners for their parties' nominations, have been examining the question of whether the public is ready to turn away from the partisan style of politics that has dominated the Bush presidency.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), despite his recent efforts to make himself more attractive to party conservatives and Bush loyalists, has asked more than once whether voters in 2008 will be looking for a candidate with the attributes he has long exhibited: independence and a willingness to work across party lines.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), a polarizing figure by any measure, nonetheless has spent much of her six years in the Senate developing a record of cooperation with Republican senators that she could take to the voters in 2008, should she decide to run for president.
At the same time, veteran Republican strategist Doug Bailey, Carter administration veterans Hamilton Jordan and Gerald Rafshoon and former independent governor Angus King of Maine, among others, have launched a Web-based organization called Unity08. They are urging Americans turned off by partisan combat to help break the current model by using online voting to nominate a bipartisan ticket next year as an alternative to the two major party nominees.
Establishment figure
Those stirrings lead directly back to Connecticut's Senate race. Political strategists, however, say Lieberman may be an imperfect vehicle for testing this message. He is a three-term incumbent, a Washington insider and an establishment politician of the first rank -- in short, hardly the kind of person to argue that he can change the tone in Washington.
"Whenever there is disillusionment with Washington, there is interest or potential appeal for a third force in politics -- an outsider," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center. "The problem with Lieberman is he represents the establishment when he will be running as an independent."
Beyond that, the opening stage of his campaign has delivered a decidedly mixed message. Lieberman's first post-primary television ad promises an era of "unity and purpose." His first post-primary campaign appearance featured a slashing attack on Lamont in which he claimed that success by his rival in November would be "taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England."
Lieberman long has preached the politics of civility and calm rhetoric, but he appears to be ready to set that history aside to defeat Lamont in November. It was his willingness to work with and support Bush on the Iraq war that helped bring about his loss in the primary to a political neophyte who ran as an opponent of the war and a critic of Lieberman's repeated support for the president.
The aftertaste of that experience produced a concession statement in which Lieberman appeared defiant -- and liberated at the prospect of running against the antiwar rage directed toward him in his primary campaign. "People . . . and not just the Democrats are angry at the direction of this country -- so am I," he told supporters last Tuesday night. "People are fed up with the petty partisanship and angry vitriol in Washington. Let me tell you, I have been there, and I am fed up, too."
Lieberman went on to complain of a brand of politics in which disagreement is viewed as disloyalty and opponents are branded as evil. "It is time for our elected leaders to stop playing political games, so we can get things done for the people who are good enough to send us to Washington to serve them," he said.
Those are sentiments often heard throughout the country, from ordinary citizens and from state and local elected officials who have come to see Washington as stalemated by partisanship and incapable of dealing with pressing issues. Whether such sentiments will attract a champion in 2008 is a question many strategists and analysts are beginning to ask.
Out of fashion for strategists
Bipartisanship is out of fashion among strategists who plan and execute campaigns. Democrats believe Bush's presidency has ushered in an opposite style of politics, one designed to energize partisans by exploiting the sharp divisions that now exist on the war, on social issues and on Bush himself.
A number of the prospective 2008 Democratic candidates -- Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), former senator John Edwards (N.C.), Sen. Russell Feingold (Wis.), retired Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark -- have stepped up their attacks on the administration's policies on the war and other issues. Months before the 2008 campaign gets into high gear, they are at the barricades, hoping to attract the activists in their party.
Others, such as Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) and former Virginia governor Mark R. Warner, have been testing themes that include lowering the temperature of political rhetoric.
Party strategists believe the crop of presidential candidates will have trouble winning the nomination with a message of working across party lines. "There is a strong antipathy toward what people regard as accommodation and capitulation to Republicans," said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. "Anybody who tries to [deliver a] message against that grain is going to have a very hard time. Frankly, I think it's true on the Republican side, as well."
Simon Rosenberg, founder of the Democratic group NDN that has sought to be a bridge between centrist Democrats and the more liberal world of bloggers and Internet activists, said: "Lieberman's calculation here that there is a revulsion against Washington is not correct. There's revulsion at Republican governance."
Eli Pariser, executive director of the MoveOn.org political action committee that supported Lamont, argued that Lieberman's general election message is a fundamental misreading of what happened to him in the primary. "I think because the Connecticut primary was driven by real, deep issues that our nation should be grappling with, it's exactly what our politics ought to be like, rather than nasty, gotcha bickering," he said. "It was about big ideas and big challenges facing the country."
Some strategists looking ahead already believe a successful candidate will have to find a message that can reassure hyper-partisans that core principles matter, while appealing to disaffected swing voters with a message that compromise is not always a dirty word. Connecticut's Senate race, flawed as it may be, could produce some early clues about what may be coming in 2008.