With the Lieberman Defeat,
Rohatyn's DLC is Doomed
by Nancy Spannaus
The defeat of the leading Republican Bush-lover in the Democratic Party, Joe Lieberman, in the Senate Democratic primary in Connecticut on Aug. 8, has thrown a huge monkeywrench into the efforts of the Felix Rohatyn-funded Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) to stage a comeback in the runup to the November Congressional elections. The field is now wide open for the Democrats to turn to Lyndon LaRouche's leadership, especially as LaRouche has been the spearhead of the anti-Lieberman drive. Any other course is going to lead, quite predictably, to a smashing Democratic defeat in November.
LaRouche representatives in Washington, D.C. are already receiving congratulations on the Lieberman defeat, much as they did when leading Republican thug Tom DeLay of Texas was knocked out of politics. The real question is: Do the Democrats have the guts to follow up?
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.), one of the many leading Democrats who had endorsed Lieberman prior to the primary, responded to the election result with his most feisty comments in months. According to the Aug. 10 Boston Globe, Reid said: "But the perception was that he was too close to George Bush, and this election was, in many respects, a referendum on the President more than anything else. The results bode well for Democratic victories in November and our efforts to take the country in a new direction." Reid said polls show Democrats winning Republican-held Senate seats in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Montana, Missouri, and Rhode Island.
"A lot of time has gone by and the numbers haven't changed. In actuality, Ohio has gotten better. Montana has gotten better. And now we have three other seats we are looking at. We were only looking also at Tennessee and Arizona. Now we've added Virginia to the mix." Reid said.
Out of the eight Republican seats Reid mentioned, the Democrats need to win six, in order to take control of the Senate.
The Lieberman Stink
Lieberman's loss is a direct reflection of the fact that the Connecticut electorate saw him as the "kissing cousin" of George W. Bush. Like the majority of the nation, Connecticut voters are in revulsion against the brutal, no-win war in Iraq, and the complete lack of action by the current Administration and Congress on the accelerating economic and financial collapse. Challenger Ned Lamont's anti-war campaign was a plus for him, but Lieberman's negatives far outweighed them. Washington sources tell EIR that when Lieberman began to threaten the party that he would campaign as an Independent if he lost the primary, he pushed many over the edge, against him.
Lieberman comes by his thug-like behavior naturally. As LaRouche's EIR exposed in a series of mass-run offprints back in August 2002, Lieberman got his start in the Senate with the full backing of some of the most notorious right-wing fascist circles on the planet, including avowed Carlist William F. Buckley. Buckley not only waged a propaganda campaign against Lieberman's opponent, Lowell Weicker, in the Senate race of 1988, but bailed Lieberman out financially by steering him to the Cuban exile community in Miami. Lieberman maintained the close connections with the Cuban right wing, at least up through the 2000 Presidential election, when he was known as "Gore's Man in Little Havana." (See "Fascist William Buckley Put Joe Lieberman in the Senate," EIR, July 26, 2002.)
Then there are Lieberman's mob connections, starting with Michael Steinhardt, the chairman and bankroller of the DLC when it was launched out of Pam Harriman's "Democrats for the 80s" late in that decade. Steinhardt, the son of the leading jewel fence for the Meyer Lansky syndicate, ran one of the filthiest hedge funds on Wall Street during the 1980s and 1990s. After he shut down his hedge fund in the wake of his company being involved in a scam over Treasury bonds, Steinhardt emerged as a major player in the Edgar Bronfman-founded Mega Group.
Steinhardt, who now funds the neo-con New York Sun newspaper, has continued to be close to Lieberman. The two collaborated in the infamous September 1998 effort to carry out a coup d'état against the Clinton Administration, by trying to get President Clinton to resign in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky affair. Indeed, Lieberman is known in some Washington political circles as the "Senator from Mega," a testament to his closeness to the circles of Bronfman and Steinhardt.
Indeed, Lieberman, and his close colleague John McCain, teamed up in 2002 to demand that President Bush launch an attack on Iraq, and providing political cover for the Cheney-controlled apparatus of hoked-up intelligence which was used to intimidate the Senate into approving the ongoing disastrous war. (See "Knock Out Lieberman and McCain To Save the Republic," EIR, Aug. 2, 2002.)
Will Cheney's Support Help?
Lieberman's immediate announcement that he would run as an Independent against Lamont (who won the primary by a respectable margin of 52 to 48%), has brought him a wave of support—from Cheneyac Republicans. None other than Cheney himself came forward to complain about the Democrats having "purged" their party, and to assert that Lieberman's defeat would benefit "al-Qaeda types."
While Cheney denied that the White House is actually supporting Lieberman in his "independent" Senate bid, it's probably true. Cheney lies.
There have been reports from a Lieberman aide, coming through journalist George Stephanopoulos, that Karl Rove, Bush's master election strategist, has told Lieberman that he would help him in any way he could. Rove would only confirm that he called to congratulate Lieberman, but at least one Republican Senate candidate, Mark Kennedy of Minnesota, has declared that he will support him.
For his part, Connecticut Democratic nominee Ned Lamont responded to Lieberman's attack on him for being "soft on terror" by saying: "Wow, that comment sounds an awful lot like Vice President Cheney's comment on Wednesday. Both of them believe our invasion of Iraq has a lot to do with 9/11. That's a false premise."
Moving Toward a Solution
For the Democrats to prevail nationally, however, it will not be enough to just attack the war, or even Cheney and the pro-war synarchist agents inside the Democratic Party. The electorate is in a white-hot rage against the inaction of the Congress, particularly on life-and-death questions of economics, such as the shutdown of the auto industry. Even more damning is the fact that LaRouche has put the solution to the crisis on the table—only to be shunned and ignored, while the Democrats concentrate on getting support from DLC moneybags like Felix Rohatyn.
The LaRouche Youth Movement is concentrating on getting this message out: Are you going to act on LaRouche's program, or are you going to continue to be corrupted and bribed by Rohatyn et al.'s money? Not only political careers are at stake. This is a matter of the survival of the United States.
