Home > Lieberman’s Real Problem
By Harold Meyerson
I am about to become a traitor to my class. Among my
estimable colleagues in the Washington commentariat,
the idea that Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman is facing
a serious challenge from a fellow Democrat over
Lieberman’s support for the Iraq war seems to evoke
incredulity and exasperation. On the op-ed pages of
leading newspapers, we read that Lieberman is "the most
kind-hearted and well-intentioned of men" (that’s from
the New York Times’ David Brooks), a judgment that
cannot credibly be disputed — though if ever a road to
hell was paved with good intentions, it would start
with the anti-Saddam Hussein interventionism of pro-
democracy advocates and end in downtown Baghdad today.
My colleagues also finger those crazy lefty bloggers as
the culprits behind the drive to purge Lieberman from
Democratic ranks. (The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait
recently wrote that in the Los Angeles Times.) They see
a self-destructive urge for party purification sweeping
over Democratic liberals, to the detriment of
Democratic prospects.
Lieberman himself certainly does. My Post colleague
Ruth Marcus recently spent some time on the campaign
trail with Lieberman and reported on a talk he gave in
Danbury. "Are the extremes going to dominate?"
Lieberman asked. "Do you have to be 100 percent in
agreement with an elected official or it’s not good
enough?"
Well. I don’t blog; I columnize. But count me with the
bloggers on this one. No great mystery enshrouds the
challenge to Lieberman, nor is the campaign of his
challenger, Ned Lamont, a jihad of crazed nit-pickers.
Lieberman has simply and rightly been caught up in the
fundamental dynamics of Politics 2006, in which
Democrats are doing their damnedest to unseat all the
president’s enablers in this year’s elections. As well,
Lieberman’s broader politics are at odds with those of
his fellow Northeastern Democrats. He is not being
opposed because he doesn’t reflect the views of his
Democratic constituents 100 percent of the time. He is
being opposed because he leads causes many of them find
repugnant.
As early as December 2001 Lieberman signed a letter to
President Bush asking him to make Saddam Hussein’s Iraq
our next stop in the war against terrorism. As recently
as last month, he opposed two Democratic resolutions to
scale back our involvement in the war. And just last
week Lieberman characterized the progress of the war as
"a lot better" than it was a year ago, adding, "They’re
on the way to building a free and independent Iraq."
So, why the surprise if Connecticut voters, listening
to Lieberman and looking at his record, conclude that
they cannot trust his judgment on the single most
important issue of the day? That’s not mandating
purity; it’s opting for a senator who pays more
attention to the war on the ground than to the war in
his head.
Indeed, across Connecticut and neighboring states,
Republican legislators whose support for the war has
been less avid than Lieberman’s are in trouble this
year precisely because they’ve allowed Bush (even if
only by virtue of their support for Republican control
of Congress) to press on with the war. Connecticut’s
three Republican House members are scrambling for their
political lives for fundamentally the same reasons that
Lieberman is. In neighboring Rhode Island, Republican
Sen. Lincoln Chafee — the most anti-Bush, antiwar
Republican in the Senate — may well be defeated
because to be a Bush-era Republican of any stripe in
the Northeast these days is a formula for political
oblivion.
Of all Northeastern senators, moreover, Chafee is the
one whose political profile most closely matches
Lieberman’s. Over the past three years, Chafee has run
up a 65 percent voting record on the scorecard of the
liberal Americans for Democratic Action (ADA).
Lieberman’s score is 75 percent. The six other
Democrats from the nearest states — Jack Reed from
Rhode Island, Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton from
New York, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry from
Massachusetts, Patrick Leahy from Vermont — averaged
97 percent during those three years. Lieberman’s ADA
rating of 80 percent last year tied Florida’s Bill
Nelson for the second-lowest among Senate Democrats.
The issue here isn’t that Lieberman is not 100 percent.
It’s that his positions — not just on foreign policy
but on trade, Social Security and other key issues —
are often out of sync with those of Democrats in his
part of the country. To expect his region’s voters to
dump the area’s moderate Republicans but back Lieberman
is to expect that they will adopt a double standard in
this year’s elections.
Lieberman’s ultimate problem isn’t fanatical bloggers,
any more than Lyndon Johnson’s was crazy, antiwar
Democrats. His problem is that Bush, and the war that
both he and Bush have championed, is speeding the
ongoing realignment of the Northeast. His problem, dear
colleagues, is Connecticut.
meyersonh@washpost.com
(c) 2006 The Washington Post Company
Lieberman Earns A "C" View Senator Joseph Lieberman’s
middle-class voting record here