Connecticut Local Politics

Joe Lieberman:

“It’s not the Bill Clinton-Al Gore party, which was strong internationalists, strong on defense, pro-trade, pro-reform in our domestic government,” he said. “It’s been effectively taken over by a small group on the left of the party that is protectionist, isolationist and very, very hyperpartisan. So it pains me.”

This sounds like the Joe Lieberman who surfaced during the primary, a defensive, grouchy guy who has absolutely no idea why Democrats turned on him (hint: here are a few reasons).

If what Lieberman sees as the leftward drift of the Democratic Party was happening in some kind of vacuum, his grumblings might make more sense. But what he says completely discards the constant national crisis and trauma of the last eight years, from hanging chads to 9/11 to Iraq to Katrina to now, and the complete inability of our government to deal with any of it in a useful and productive way. Given where he was in 2000, it’s a bizarre position to take.

Then again, Lieberman has had a strange and traumatic journey over the past eight years himself. He came within a few hundred votes of being a Democratic vice president, but after that incredible high he’s run into a brick wall within his own party. He was their nominee for the second highest office in the land in 2000, only to be all but drummed out after a miserable failure of a presidential campaign and a bitter primary six years later. It isn’t that Joe Lieberman has changed… so obviously the party has.

In fact, both the Democrats and Joe Lieberman are different. But more importantly, the world shifted around them, and around us. It can never be the fall of 2000 again, that America is gone. Ralph Nader’s argument that the major parties were too alike caught on then (and cost Joe four to eight years in the Naval Observatory), but it wouldn’t now. For Lieberman, the world only shifted in one way–a new threat appeared. And that’s it. He doesn’t see the rest of it. He doesn’t see how things changed for Democrats after 2002 and 2003.

If Democrats are more partisan and more liberal, Joe has only to look to the Republicans, who have been dominated by deeply conservative and hyper-partisan groups for more than two decades, for the reason.

But I shouldn’t have to tell him that. It should be obvious. History is like science, sometimes. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Democrats have gone to the left because Republicans went to the right… because in the 1960s Democrats went to the left… because in the 1950s the country went too far to the right… and so on. It may not be healthy (or maybe it is, and that’s democracy), but it’s hardly surprising. Except that Joe Lieberman has made a name for himself by being surprised that Democrats are not the same as they were when he was a boy. That Republicans are radically different now, too, is lost on him.

Lieberman will continue on his strange, lonely road–this time as the McCain campaign’s favorite prop–and he’ll continue to be bitter, frustrated and angry. And so he’ll head forward into a dim and uncertain future, as he continues to fight to regain that which was stolen from him.

Source
“Lieberman Blasts Democrats As Protectionist, Isolationist.” WFSB 30 March, 2008.