A newsman pressed me a couple of days ago on the matter of the
Senate election in Connecticut. Whom would I vote for? That's an
improper question, as we all know: that's why voting is done in
private. But I had been noisy on the subject of Joe Lieberman and
could hardly, at this moment, plead the superordination of
privacy. So I said, "Lieberman." And he said, Why? And I said, "I
like Lieberman," and politely declined amplification.
Years ago I argued in favor of Al Lowenstein, a prominent New
York liberal, for Congress, and received the same bemused
interrogation from the press. On that occasion I said simply that
I was defying my principled opposition to many of Lowenstein's
positions in order to vote for a human being I thought superior.
On the matter of Lieberman, there is more there than a personal
attraction to the individual. Republican candidate Alan
Schlesinger commented on my choice, "I think it's ironic that
anyone as conservative as Bill Buckley would help someone as
liberal as Joe Lieberman." But Schlesinger misses the point.
The important contention next Tuesday doesn't involve the
Republican candidate. It is Lieberman vs. Ned Lamont, the other
Democrat. And the political drama in Connecticut isn't just among
the candidates. It has to do with the future of the Democratic
Party -- and that future affects everyone.
What happened in this campaign was the materialization on Aug.
8 of an ideological posse. Its mission was to punish a Democrat
for the sin of backing President Bush in the Iraqi war.
Now it gets a little complicated because there are many
Americans who oppose the war as it has evolved. If you promise
not to tell anybody, my own conviction is that if George Bush
ever took to the bottle again, he might confide that he wishes he
had never got into war in Iraq. I too wish he hadn't, but that's
not because he was wrong in going in. He was moved by a
conviction that Saddam Hussein was productively engaged in
manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, that he was in league
with a terrorist movement that threatened the Middle East, and
that the United States needed to demonstrate its willingness to
use its own resources to fight against incipient threats to
regional and national security.
Joe Lieberman agreed. He was hardly the only Democrat to back
Bush in 2003, but his special prominence -- he had, after all,
been Al Gore's running mate in the campaign of 2000 -- attracted
attention to his continued backing of Bush on foreign policy. The
especially sibilant left set out to make the backing of Bush an
excommunicable offense. So that when a pleasant and wealthy young
man in Greenwich, Conn., volunteered to head up the posse, he got
the backing of the Democratic left. And when the showdown came,
the ideological avengers won the day. Lieberman was defeated in
the Democratic primary.
This meant to the population at large that hard-bitten
Democratic leftists were bidding for control of the party and had
scored a huge victory in a critical exchange by defeating a
three-term senator who once ran for vice president. The bigger
they are ... the harder they fall. So there was much rejoicing in
the Jacobin camp when Lieberman lost.
But of course almost immediately Lieberman announced that he
would run as an independent. This gave the dissenters in
Connecticut -- Democratic, Republican and independent -- an
opportunity to vote against the execution of the prominent and
effective incumbent, who has thought and acted in what he
believed the national interest, never mind that the commander in
chief was a Republican.
The features of the Democratic leadership are not yet set. The
left is eager to assert itself as the true heir of the Democratic
tradition, even as in 1948, under the leadership of Henry
Wallace, the left attempted to take over the party of FDR and
Harry Truman. It failed, and may fail again. But much depends on
how much life there is in the opposition, and the first challenge
is to vote to retain Joe Lieberman in office. |