Joementum!

Harold Meyerson gets it:

Now, maybe I've had this backward all my life, but I thought that elections were held to enable voters to choose between candidates espousing different points of view on the most important issues. Lieberman seems to believe that elections exist to enable voters not to choose -- indeed, to "accept diversity of opinion." And that if voters have the temerity to go ahead and choose anyway, they have crossed the line between party and sect in their zeal "to have everybody toe the line."

[...]

In talking with Broder, Lieberman also expressed a kind of wry nostalgia for the pre-primary days when political bosses could assemble slates of candidates essentially by themselves. But the last stand of the bosses came in 1968, when machine-appointed delegates to the Democratic National Convention nominated Hubert Humphrey for president even though the voters in those states that had held primaries had favored the anti-Vietnam War candidacies of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy. Thereafter, delegates in every state were selected in primaries and caucuses, as party leaders concluded that voters would demand -- and even deserved -- a say on issues as fundamental as Vietnam. To Joe Lieberman's apparent dismay, Iraq is just such an issue, and the voters of his state are just irresponsible enough to judge him on it.

Joe would have gotten away with it if it weren't for those meddling voters!


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