A very short story in The Politico (via Jim Antle) about Lieberman has gotten a fair amount of attention today, because it contains the hint that he might switch parties if the Dems defunded the war.  Since we have good reason to think that they won’t do this, Joementum is just engaged in more public posturing about his alleged moral superiority.  But the reaction to the story has been intriguing.  For instance, Wlady at AmSpec‘s blog writes:

Jim, the only question is what’s taking Joe so long. The writing’s been on the wall for months that his own party at least has no use for Lieberman. Final confirmation came in Jeffrey Golberg’s cruel slap at at Lieberman in the New Yorker‘s February 12 issue. You could just see Goldberg and everyone else rolling their eyes over every defense Lieberman attempted of his Iraq views. For good measure, the piece closed with a self-satisfied reminder of how badly Lieberman did trying for the presidency in 2004, as if already then he was beyond the pale. As one Strafford County operative says in the article’s final sentence, making Joe’s excommunication official and irreversible: “People don’t think of Lieberman as a Democrat.” Again, what are he and the Republicans waiting for? Proof that he’s a bigger spender than they are?

This caught my attention because I read that New Yorker piece and didn’t come away with the sense that Goldberg was mocking or cruelly slapping Lieberman.  I read this piece back during the period when I was pretending I was still on hiatus–I think we can all see that I have given up that particular pretense–so I didn’t write about it (what discipline!), but it certainly struck me then and now as a mostly sympathetic piece that showed Lieberman a lot more respect than he would probably get in any magazine to the left of The New Republic. 

Most progressives today seem to assume that Lieberman is a profoundly malevolent man, at least when it comes to foreign policy, or at least unforgiveably mistaken about the war, and to give his self-perception anything like a fair shake would appear to them to be disgusting collaboration with the administration.  The New Yorker did give Lieberman a fair shake, and in my view it was probably more than he deserved.  Certainly, in the telling of the Iraq war in future years, Lieberman will, along with Blair and a few others, be judged for their special roles in lending this war a broader level of support and credibility than it would have otherwise had and so possess some extra responsibility for it in ways that many others do not.  The days are coming when people will be amazed that anyone could have ever written so generously and kindly about Lieberman as Jeffrey Goldberg did.  But I digress. 

The treatment Lieberman received appeared so generous that it offended Matt Yglesias, who was so put off by it that he got a bit carried away and complained about a pervasive hawkish bias (the exact phrase was “bizarre hawkish monomania”) at The New Yorker (which he later heavily, heavily qualified).    Now maybe being antiwar makes me have the same low opinion of Lieberman that many on the left have.  It is certainly the case that I have become so accustomed to seeing neocon paeans to the man’s greatness that I can detect Liebermanliebe at fifty paces, so I am probably more sensitive to any positive treatment of Lieberman.  Nonetheless, the profile highlighted his alienation from the Democrats, but it also gave him an opportunity to put forward his view of what he’s trying to do.  The profile conveys how very sad Lieberman’s position is, and if you can set aside your fiery contempt for this appalling politician for a moment it is understandable how you can recognise the sadness of his story.  Indeed, pathetic might be the best word for it, but not to be used in a simply dismissive way. 

It is literally pathetic, something painful, and it is a product of the sort of experience that someone has when, whether rightly or wrongly, he believes that he has been abandoned and betrayed by virtually everyone he trusted.  That it is almost always the person who has abandoned or betrayed everyone he trusted is beside the point–from his perspective, they have left him.  He does not even fully understand the reason for why he has been abandoned, which always tends to encourage denial about one’s own faults and failures. 

Those of us who grew up on the early wave of environmental PC education remember The Lorax as our moral lesson about the preservation of the environment, and so it is telling that Goldberg includes the quote from Lieberman where he likens himself to that character:

Lieberman says that he does, at times, feel isolated. He is a liberal on social policy and a conservative on defense, in the bygone style of the late Senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson. “I’m the Lorax,” he said. “I’m saving that one tree.”

It was obvious to me that a profile that included this line could not really be trying to mock Lieberman (though the image is laughable in its way).  It allowed him to try to cast himself as a sympathetic guardian figure.  Whether or not Goldberg or anyone else bought this idea, that they let this ridiculous comment past without any clever remark about how the Lorax probably wouldn’t support, say, aggressive war tells us that the author really wanted to humanise Lieberman and make him into a real person rather than either the hate figure he has become for antiwar activists or the ridiculous pseudo-Churchill that some on the right want to make him into.