November 13, 2008 09:39 PM UTC

The Ghost of Mike Miles

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• by: Colorado Pols

In the spirit of yesterday’s lively discussion, we received this email today:

Fellow Democrat, did you know that Ken Salazar is campaigning on behalf of Joe Lieberman right now? Salazar thinks that Lieberman should keep his charimanship on the Senate Homeland Security committee to keep pushing his neo-con agenda.

We at ProgressivePartner.org invite you to examine Sen. Salazar’s un-Democratic record…

Colorado can now officially be called a blue state. Barack Obama has won in a landslide. It is a good time to be a good progressive Democrat. So, with progressivism on the march in the Centennial State and Obama in the White House, isn’t it time to give President Obama a true progressive partner in the United States Senate?

Make no mistake, there will be a progressive alternative to Ken Salazar in 2010. In order to pave the way, we need you to pass this site and the information here along to your friends and family who may participate in the 2010 Democratic caucuses and primary. Invite them to examine his record here on these important issues and help them to realize that Ken Salazar is no progressive and a relic of the Bush era.

Our view: Poppycock. Let’s start with the much-vilified Sen. Joe (I) Lieberman. It’s true that he showed more or less the opposite of party unity in vociferously campaigning for GOP presidential candidate John McCain, and vengeful partisan Democrats are demanding a price be paid–in the form of Lieberman losing his Senate committee chairmanships. Doing so would almost certainly push Lieberman into formally switching to the Republican Party, or failing that at least caucusing with the GOP (he is nominally counted with the Democratic majority based on his caucus preference).

But for all the rage steaming off the pages of Daily Kos and other leading “netroots” communities, President-elect Barack Obama doesn’t agree that Lieberman should be reprimanded in a way that pushes him out of the caucus. Nor does Salazar’s new Colorado colleague Senator-elect Mark Udall. Or other Democratic Senate leaders like Dick Durbin and Majority Leader Harry Reid. The Senate Dems will decide next Tuesday whether Lieberman should be stripped of his Homeland Security Committee chairmanship: if he can be replaced in a way that lets everybody save face and keeps him in the caucus, which is his natural preference as a reliable–on most issues–Democratic vote in the Senate, cool. If not, Dems should think carefully about what a moment’s vindictive thrill-copping could mean for getting the hard bills through the Senate.

Sen. Durbin was quoted yesterday:

“At the end of the day, we may not have the 60 votes we need to enact measures in the Senate, and we will have to build on what we have. So every vote is important. That’s the starting point. … Secondly, despite what Sen. Lieberman did in campaigning for Sen. McCain and speaking at the Republican convention, he has voted with the Democrats an overwhelming percentage of the time.”

Which echoes the word from Majority Leader Reid’s office:

…in his phone conversation “last week” with Reid, Obama “said that expelling Lieberman” from the Dem Caucus “would send the wrong signal after Obama’s promises to set partisanship aside,” according to a Senate Dem aide. [Pols emphasis]

You see, this is a test, like the test Colorado Republicans face in Steve Johnson’s state Senate replacement. It’s a test of whether or not Democrats can be inclusive in a way they were not shown when Republicans were in charge. It’s a test of whether or not the committed partisanship that drove the Democratic “netroots” to prominence can be set aside, by themselves and those over whom they hold influence, for the good of the country.

Which brings us to Ken Salazar. You like Mike Miles, don’t you? We like the guy too. What was there to dislike about the man? Nothing really, except that if he had won the 2004 primary we would have Sen. Pete Coors right now. And lest anyone forget, Miles was absolutely DRILLED in the primary against Salazar. It wasn’t even close.

We have consistently, and sometimes unpopularly, defended Salazar and other “gutless” moderate Democrats from this same contingent of activists ever since Democrats started winning in Colorado again in 2004. We do this for a very simple reason: they are why Democrats started winning in Colorado again.

Read that last sentence again. Mark Udall is not anywhere close to the “Boulder Liberal” he was unsuccessfully billed to be by the GOP–the antiwar “Mercenaries for Mark” protesters who dogged his early town halls and squatted in his office didn’t think so. But they were ultimately self-defeating: intelligent Democrats made sense of Udall’s consistently antiwar but realistic approach, and center-right independents saw the peaceniks mobbing Udall as a sign that he wasn’t such a Boulder loony after all. Double-digit win.

Bill Ritter is not your typical bleeding-heart liberal either, is he? But how many voters saw Ritter’s differences with sacrosanct Democrat planks like abortion rights as evidence of character, even if they didn’t agree on the issue? He beat a Republican in a Republican-plurality state by over 15 points.

These are all men who understand that not everyone will agree with them all the time. They respect and want to do right by the large percentage of their constituents who didn’t support them. But above all, they are–this includes Ken Salazar and Joe Lieberman alike–supportive enough of the Democratic agenda when it comes down to it that to seek their ouster is to commit the same ideological suicide we’ve seen Republicans play out in purge after purge of the “not sufficiently conservative progressive.” You know, purged in favor of people who lose.

You’d think the people who taught this lesson so well would learn it?

For all the clamoring to travel down this ruinous path by every eloquent nationally-renowned blogger superstar “thought leader” (warming up his or her 2010 primary consultancy gigs), we won’t have any part of it. And as for the “make no mistake, there will be a primary” nonsense, go for it. Ken Salazar is not losing in a primary any more than Wayne Allard would have lost in a primary, which says a hell of a lot.