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Lieberman Has Always Been Predictable

Peter Beinart is right when he says that Lieberman’s opposition to the public option is driven to a large degree by personal bitterness, but he begins with the odd claim that Lieberman was once an “interesting” “iconoclast” and has now become a “right-wing pol.” I suppose there was a relatively brief time when Lieberman’s combination […]

Peter Beinart is right when he says that Lieberman’s opposition to the public option is driven to a large degree by personal bitterness, but he begins with the odd claim that Lieberman was once an “interesting” “iconoclast” and has now become a “right-wing pol.” I suppose there was a relatively brief time when Lieberman’s combination of domestic liberalism and hawkishness abroad was different and interesting inside the Democratic Party, but most of Lieberman’s career has spanned the last two decades when this combination has been more or less the one preferred by party leaders.

Looked at from either side of the spectrum, Lieberman has been anything but interesting. He has been the reliable defender of the “centrist” consensus established in the ’90s that finally accepted welfare reform and insisted on U.S. hegemony abroad. In practice, this “centrism” can be used to justify the most extreme, violent and destructive policies, but it is considered reasonable and acceptable because it does not partake of “fringe” ideas and enjoys the support of respectable, “serious” people. The trouble for liberals who accept this consensus is that they feel a constant pull to align themselves with corporate and financial interests in addition to endorsing every military action and security measure imaginable.

What has embittered Lieberman was not just the decline in his personal political fortunes inside his party, but it was also his recognition that the party that had been dominated by New Democrats was increasingly coming under the influence of progressives. Even if the increase was minimal, Lieberman found it intolerable, and he has penned more than a couple of op-eds decrying the supposed abandonment of his party’s national security tradition. In fact, the shift in the party’s foreign policy has been negligible, and Lieberman’s tantrums have been unnecessary, but this is what has pushed him in the direction he has gone. While most on the left were in some respects radicalized during the Bush years and even many liberal hawks were forced to question some of their assumptions, Lieberman showed time and again that his priority was always the promotion of his deeply misguided foreign policy views, and in practice this meant identifying closely with the Bush administration and its supporters. It was this, along with his own pride and ambition, that drove him to run an independent Senate campaign in 2006 (because the antiwar Lamont had to be stopped), and it was the same thing that led him into McCain’s presidential campaign.

Over time, he found that all of his strongest defenders were to be found among hawks in the GOP, and most of his fiercest critics were within his own party. It has become easier to side with his new friends rather than with other Democrats. In this way, Lieberman is just like McCain, whose flirtations with the Democratic Party and the occasional liberal legislative initiative were similarly driven by bitterness over his experience in the 2000 primaries. Arguably, the health care fight ought to have pulled Lieberman back into his party’s orbit and could have won him new respect among the party rank-and-file, but the problem is that he is too much like McCain. They both have an unusually inflated estimate of their own importance, they both tend towards sanctimonious moralizing, and they enjoy the attention they receive for breaking with their party leaders. The more contentious the issue, and the more the party’s base wants something, the more attractive breaking ranks becomes. The health care debate was too tempting.

Domestic policy is secondary to both McCain and Lieberman, and they take their positions on it based on what will make them appear “independent-minded” and secure their “centrist” reputations. He cannot emphasize his unflagging hawkishness as McCain did when the latter needed to rehabilitate himself with Republican primary voters, and the habits of years of hewing to the “centrist” line have finally made it impossible for him to align himself with progressives in a major domestic policy debate.

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