FRIENDS, JOE-MANS, COUNTRYMEN, LEND ME YOUR EYES


I come not to bury Lieberman, but to praise him.


There are multiple reasons why Joe Lieberman's noble campaign for the Democratic nomination was doomed from the beginning. The primaries do not reward candidates like Lieberman who refuse to hew to party orthdoxies and exercise their independent judgment. Before the Dean implosion, it was noted that the governor had suceeded in masking his centrist record with radical tone and rhetoric, thus allowing a fiscal conservative to send leftist heart aflutter. Liberman, however, has combined centrist-leaning, but firmly mainstream Democrat policy positions with right-of-center tone and rhetoric, which makes for a forbidible combination in a general electorate, but a major weakness in the pander-thon of the Democratic primaries. Thus, Lieberman has been maligned by true-believer Democrats as a quasi-Republican.


Thus, despite Lieberman's positions on abortion, stem cell research, gay rights (not marriage granted, but that isn't a mainstream Dem position yet), working women (day care, family leave, etc.) he is lumped in with Pat Robertson & company. Why? Because of his 1) overt religiousity and 2) his efforts to regulate the entertainment industry. Thus, as applied to Lieberman and only Lieberman, keeping G-dtalk out of public discourse and letting 10-year olds buy the raunchiest video games on the market are limit tests to being a "true" Democrat. On socioeconomic issues, the differences are even more cosmetic and the charges more ridiculous. Lieberman is stalwart defender of the environment, and an advocate for tax fairness. Purists however wish to run Lieberman out of the party for taking New Democrat positions on trade and regulation.


There is one area, however, where Lieberman is tragically out-of-step with his party, and that is national security and foreign policy. Of the major candidates, only Lieberman has expressed the view that despite Bush's WMD shenanigans and post-war planning foibles, the war in Iraq was correct on both strategic and moral grounds. The reason is that only Lieberman viewed the status quo - with Hussein's genocidal tyranny intact, an increasingly crumbling and costly containment policy, and America's unhealthy entanglement with "moderate" Arab tyrannies such as Saudi Arabia - as untenable, and after 9/11, the failure to radically intervene unaccpetable. For the rest of the Democrats this is not the case. Even those Democrats, like John Kerry, who claimed to give conditional support to the war the problem was the perceived threat by Hussein to the status quo in the region, not the status quo itself, thus absent an "imminent" threat from WMDs, there would be no cause to act.


On the crucial question of whether 9/11 required a paradigm shift in American foreign policy, Lieberman is (I believe rightly) on the opposite side of the partisan divide from his fellow Democrats. However, there is still the second critical question of what such a new American foreign policy should look like. Here, Lieberman has begun to sketch out real alternatives to the more extreme unilateralist tendencies of the Bush Administration. Our political discourse on this critical issue is poorer for his departure from the primary stage.


Joe Lieberman has given the Democratic party a blueprint that is as sound politcs as it is policy: eschewing culture war by moving the "values" debate to a friendly terrain, combining fiscal responsible with progressive budget priorities, and a forward-looking Wilsonian foreign policy. For the sake of America, some day the Democrats might build of the foundation that Joe had laid.