Michael’s cover story on the strange tale of Lieberman is a good read, and the article explains what drives Lieberman better than just about anything else I’ve read.  There are many things to say about the article, but one of the things I would have liked to see Michael push a bit more was the basic zaniness of Lieberman’s critique of his own party as one in thrall to neo-McGovernism, which is so wildly wrong that it would have driven home just how distorting Lieberman’s ideological lenses are.  Lieberman’s reaction to Obama’s foreign policy is the same reaction that virtually all interventionist hawks have when presented with a policy that does not endorse every single hawkish position: hilariously exaggerated and fairly hysterical.  Fail to support the most maximalist position on using force anywhere and everywhere, and you become another “isolationist” and “dove.”  Thus the candidate who has won praise from Robert Kagan, Marty Peretz and the almost comically hawkish Post editorial page under Fred Hiatt is treated by Lieberman as the second coming of George McGovern.  Perhaps the silliness of his position is so obvious that it doesn’t need to be articulated, but I think antiwar voters could be misled and set up for severe disappointment if they think that the choice in this election is really so stark as this. 

Michael concluded with these lines:

And while Lieberman may never again influence his party in a direct manner, a McCain victory in November, aided by Lieberman, could be used to frighten Democrats into accepting the neoconservative view of history: that doves will always lose, that America is fundamentally an activist nation. It’s up to Democrats to prove him wrong.

Certainly, Lieberman is wrong, but I’m not sure how the Democrats can prove it with an Obama victory.  The Democratic nominee is “dovish” only in the sense that he opposed invading Iraq, but not in any other way.  Yes, in the context of the Iraq debate, that aligns him with the “doves,” if you like, but he is the most activist and interventionist “dove” anyone has ever seen.  You can be sure that the neocons and Lieberman will be singing a different tune after the election, should their candidate lose, since they will then have every incentive to deny that their activist, hawkish foreign policy had been rejected by the country.  Just as they started doing as long ago as 2004 (and perhaps even earlier), when they declared that Mr. Bush flailed and failed in foreign policy because he wasn’t hawkish enough, they will say that the voters in 2008 elected another activist, interventionist President in Obama.  They will unfortunately have the evidence on their side (for once). 

This is what makes Lieberman’s journey truly bizarre, and this is what is so remarkable about the ideological blinders that he wears.  According to Lieberman, the candidate who wants to expand NATO’s borders to Pankisi Gorge and who endorsed the bombardment of Lebanon is the heir to McGovern.  Had the Democrats nominated a Dennis Kucinich, you might at least understand that Lieberman has significant differences on policy with the nominee, but that didn’t and was never going to happen.  The Democratic Party has swung so far to the “right” (as these things are convetionally defined) on foreign policy during Lieberman’s tenure in the Senate that figures such as Kucinich, perhaps the only candidate who deserved the mantle of McGovernite in this area, are essentially survivors from another era, reduced to the backbench rump that (more or less) consistently opposes U.S. entry into wars and infringement on civil liberties.  That this rump doesn’t call the shots on anything important was revealed most recently in the FISA vote, and it has been demonstrated again and again over the last five years.