Tuesday, October 24, 2006

I’ve been calling myself a Democrat since I was ten years old, when I marched around the schoolyard in fifth grade chanting “Jerry Brown! Jerry Brown!” and, later, played the part of Bill Clinton in a sixth-grade mock debate. At the age of 13, I threw my hands up in dismay when the GOP took over Congress. When I turned 18, I registered without hesitation as a Democrat. I proudly cast my ballot for Al Gore in 2000, and — somewhat less proudly — for John Kerry in 2004. In recent years, I’ve seen the “base” of the Democratic Party drifting away from sense and sanity, and at the same time, I’ve felt my own ideological compass pulled somewhat to the right by world events. Yet I remain profoundly uncomfortable with the Republican Party for a variety of reasons, and I’ve never much liked the idea of being an “independent,” considering it — with all due respect to those who wear the label proudly — something of a cop-out in many cases.

But now the voters have spoken. Lieberman may still consider himself a Democrat — he says that, if elected as an independent, he’ll vote to organize with the Dems, and I believe him — but the Democrats don’t consider Lieberman a Democrat anymore. That’s the cold, hard truth of today’s results. He’s been kicked out of the “big tent” because his loyalty wasn’t blind enough, because his conscience wasn’t pliable enough. He’s been replaced by the shiny new millionaire who said all the right things to win over the hearts and minds of the netroots. The war in Iraq is wrong, wrong, wrong; President Bush is bad, bad, bad; and Joe Lieberman is a traitor, a traitor, a traitor. That’s the undeniable message that Democratic voters from my home state have sent out across the land this fateful day.

Well, if there’s no room in the Democratic Party for Joe Lieberman, then there’s no room in it for me.

So I’m done. I’m out. See ya later. Sayonara.

Well, I don’t see the point is holding out hope anymore. It’s official now: the Democrats have jumped off the cliff, and are in free fall toward a richly deserved oblivion. I’ll continue to vote for Democratic candidates when and if they’re the best for the job. I might even continue to root for a Democratic takeover of the House and Senate this November, if only to shake things up and rebuke the Republicans for their corruption, their lies and their failures. But my “default” setting in the voting booth is no longer the Democratic column. As of today, I’m an independent.

P.S. If you get the sense that I’ve been working on this post for a while… I have. I started drafting it when it became clear that Lieberman was trailing badly in the polls and was very likely to lose. I sincerely hoped that I wouldn’t have to post it. But here we are. Democratic voters have just given a big, unambiguous “f*** you” to moderates like me, and you know what? I can take a hint. You don’t want me in your party anymore. I get it. I’m going. Bye.

Me? I’ll be voting for the Democrat for my local, hotly contested House race. (Heaven help the Democrats if Pelosi breaks her anti-impeachment pledge, because I’m depending on that, and they’ll lose my vote for a long, long time if they’re lying to me.) As for the Senate, there is no Democratic nominee running against Dick Lugar (R), so I have to decide whether to vote for Lugar, vote for Libertarian candidate Steve Osborn, or cast a write-in vote for Joe Lieberman — a protest vote, of sorts, against both major parties. At the moment, I’m leaning toward the latter option. After all, I did introduce myself to the senator last week as “the inaugural member of the ‘Indiana for Lieberman’ party.” :)