The Living Room Times

In a post titled “Bitter, Party Of One,” Andrew Sullivan links to an article by Peter Beinart about the junior senator from Connecticut, “Independent Democrat” Joe Lieberman, whose 2006 re-election campaign I turned into a personal blog crusade. Indeed, longtime readers will recall that I used Lieberman’s Democratic-primary loss as inspiration to declare myself an independent (as did my mom), creating some great “conversion story” fodder for InstaPundit and others on the Right. (I recall someone using the term “conversion porn,” which is pretty funny, though I can’t find the link now.)

That all feels like a very long time ago now, and seems increasingly misguided in retrospect. Anyway, Beinart writes:

Once upon a time, Joe Lieberman was interesting—not always correct, in my view, but interesting. He was interesting because he thought for himself. On most issues, most senators line up pretty automatically with their party. A few others, the moderates—often Southern or prairie Democrats or Northeastern Republicans—split the difference: If Democrats want to spend $1 billion on some domestic program, and Republicans want to spend nothing, they furrow their brows, beat their breasts and then propose spending $500 million. The moderates generally annoy party activists and impress Washington pundits who view moderation as good in and of itself. But they’re just as conventional as the liberals and conservatives. It’s no more interesting to be predictably purple than it is to be predictably red or blue.

That’s why Lieberman stood out. On domestic issues, he was fairly liberal: supporting abortion rights, a larger social safety net and environmental protection. On foreign policy, he was a fervent hawk. He didn’t split the difference between left and right: He idiosyncratically mixed and matched. He hewed to an older ideological tradition—both pro-welfare and pro-warfare—that flourished in the industrial north before Vietnam. That’s what made Lieberman interesting. And that’s why his declaration last week that he would filibuster a “public option” on health-care reform is so depressing. It’s not just that his arguments make no sense. They show that he’s morphing from an iconoclast into just another right-wing pol. …

For close to a decade, [Lieberman] got nearly perfect scores from the American Public Health Association, which backs a single-payer health-care system, and in lieu of that, the “public option.” Now, all of a sudden, he’s so outraged by a public option that he’s threatening to filibuster any bill that contains it. The arguments he makes on behalf of his new position are remarkably weak: He says the public option will raise costs, even though the Congressional Budget Office has said no such thing, and even though logic suggests that by competing with private insurers, a government plan will actually drive costs down. Some have accused Lieberman of shifting right in order to win backing from the insurance industry in preparation for a 2012 reelection run. But, in fact, he gets relatively little insurance money, and Connecticut politicos mostly think he won’t run.

So why is he doing this? Because he’s bitter. According to former staffers and associates, he was upset by his dismal showing in the 2004 Democratic presidential primary. And he was enraged by the tepid support he got from many party leaders in 2006, when he lost the Democratic primary to an anti-war activist and won reelection as an independent. Gradually, this personal alienation has eaten away at his liberal domestic views. His staff has grown markedly more conservative in recent years, and his closest friends in Congress are now Republicans John McCain and Lindsey Graham. For Lieberman, the personal has become political, and it has pushed him further to the right.

The irony is that when Lieberman was officially a Democrat, he was ideologically independent—a living manifestation of the Humphrey-Jackson tradition. Now that he’s technically an independent, he’s becoming a standard-issue conservative. For people who believe—as Lieberman himself once did—in progressive health-care reform, it’s a tragic shift. It’s also boring. Another interesting senator bites the dust.

Regardless of what one thinks about health-care reform — I’m honestly not sure if the plans now in Congress will make things somewhat better, roughly maintain the miserable status quo, or make them even worse; and I’m likewise uncertain whether the “public option” will do much good (though it obviously isn’t the end-of-the-world socialist apocalypse the Right would have us believe) — this analysis of Lieberman’s post-2006 shift rings true. And that’s sad.

It’s also ironic: the Left was actually wrong, back in 2006, when they branded Joe as a DINO, a Republican in Democrat’s clothing, etc. He wasn’t those things — yet. He was a conventional Democrat who happened to be a hawk on Iraq, and a dissenter on a few other issues here and there. But he was unmistakably a Democrat, back then.

The Left was also mostly wrong, I think, in declaring that Lieberman’s record, up until that point, proved he had no principles and was just another power-hungry and frequently dishonest attention whore. Maybe there were increasing hints, post-2004, of his whoreish tendencies — hints that I and other Joementum-philes ignored, dismissed or explained away because of Lieberman’s long prior history of being a principled iconoclast. But he certainly had not yet fully morphed into the strange creature he now seems to have become.

What appears to have pushed him over the edge, as Beinart says, is the beating he took in ’06, and the lack of support from his erstwhile allies. Thus, the anti-Lieberman Left has, in a certain sense, created the villain whom they prematurely condemned. Not that I’m blaming them: to the extent that Lieberman has talked himself into abandoning his principles out of personal pique (having doubtless persuaded himself, through mental sophistry, that he’s serving some higher purpose), it’s his fault, not his adversaries’. He, and he alone, is responsible for his own positions, actions and statements — and putting one’s personal feelings about political slights ahead of one’s honest beliefs about the nation’s best interests is indefensible (if all too common) among those whom we, the people, have given the power to govern us.

Still: what has occurred is a fascinating, distressing irony. Lieberman is proving to be a far smaller man than I thought, but it took the over-the-top attacks of overzealous — yet now vindicated! — ideological enemies to fully reveal his pettiness. An odd situation, and a sad one. And a embarrassing one, for me. Sigh.

P.S. Oh: and yes, if he filibusters the health care bill, he should certainly be stripped of his committee assignments and whatnot. That’s clearly a bridge too far, from the Democrats’ perspective. Opposing it on the merits is fine, but filibustering the central piece of Obama’s agenda — the agenda he was elected to enact — would mean that Lieberman is basically a useless “60th vote.” Joe Must Go, if he does that.