For all the talk about the conservative activists being the intolerant ones, they cannot hold a candle to the Left when it comes to ideological purity and litmus tests. Lieberman’s biggest failings to them was his support of the Iraq war, followed by his skepticism about the public option. He was challenged (and defeated) by a left wing billionaire loon named Ned Lamont in the Democratic primary (although he won in the general election) and even Al Gore his running mate in 2000 refused to endorse him. He endorsed John McCain over Barack Obama in 2008. Outside of that he is a conventional old fashioned liberal Democrat. Although I disagree with Lieberman on several issues, the country could use more Joe Lieberman’s – a man who tries to put the country first.
by Jennifer Rubin
Both political parties wrestle with an inherent tension: balancing the desire for ideological coherence with the need to build a broad-based coalition that can win elections and form a governing majority. Although the mainstream media focus almost obsessively in this regard on the Republican party—dwelling on one stray conservative activist’s 10-point “purity test” (which was roundly rejected by nearly every elected official) and fixating on daily spats between radio talk-show hosts and elected Republicans who must cater to less-conservative constituents—the most vivid example of this phenomenon in recent political history comes from the Democratic party.
It was the Democratic Left that sought to drive Joseph I. Lieberman, a sitting senator and former vice-presidential candidate, from the party and from office because of his ideological heresy. In doing so—and in continuing its assault against him even after his successful re-election to the Senate in 2006—the Left helped highlight, if not hasten, the demise of its most ardently desired domestic policy goal: government-administered universal health care (the so-called public option). And in its ideological fervor to ostracize Lieberman, the Left exposed and widened fault lines in the Democratic party just in time for a critical Senate election that went disastrously for it.
Lieberman is an odd target for the Left. Pro-choice and politically liberal on an array of domestic issues, he has been a fixture in the Democratic party for four decades. There are Democratic politicians more conservative than Lieberman on contentious issues such as abortion, as well as some who have less distinguished records in pursuing their party’s domestic policy goals. He has, however, ever since his first Senate race in 1988, raised the ire of liberal purists. In that year, from his elected perch as Connecticut’s attorney general, Lieberman ran to the right of the liberal Republican Lowell Weicker Jr., with visible backing from conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr.
He was thereafter viewed with some suspicion as a political chameleon with friends on the “other side,” politicians and public figures who were anathema to his party’s base. If politicians, as the adage goes, are defined by their enemies, Democratic purists were chagrined to find out that they did not share a common roster of foes with Lieberman. And that would become increasingly problematic when ideological battle lines hardened during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama presidencies.
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The Left’s decision to reactivate the war against Lieberman in 2009 may have been the harbinger of an internecine political calamity for Democrats, and the unraveling of the uneasy coalition they had painstakingly assembled over the course of two elections, which enabled them to capture both houses of Congress and the White House. The price for ideological purity and the vilification of less-than-pristine political allies may well be a steep one, measured in lost seats, reduced fundraising, and declining voter enthusiasm. In that sense, the Left’s obsessive pursuit of Joseph I. Lieberman may prove to be the undoing of the fortunes of the party in which this faction has come to occupy such an influential role.
Read the rest:
Going After Joe Lieberman
