"But the fact that the spokesperson for Hamas would say they would welcome the election of Senator Obama really does raise the question, 'Why?' And it suggests the difference between these two candidates." -- Joe Lieberman on CNN, May 11, 2008
The regression of Joe Lieberman into an overzealous, indiscriminate attack dog on behalf of John McCain was a tragedy foretold. Right here, in the summer of 2006, we predicted that if he won re-election as an independent after losing the Democratic primary, he would make trouble for Democrats and might even go to the Republican Convention and trash the Democratic nominee in 2008.
I worried about "the damage he could visit on the party from his perch on the Sunday morning talk shows and from the elevated moral high-ground. Or from the podium at the GOP convention in 2008."
What I could not have anticipated was the slimy sheen he would bring to the effort, because whatever else we thought of Lieberman, slimy was not among the epithets we would have applied. Self-righteous? Yes. Single-minded? Sure. Erratic? Sometimes. But not slimy. Obviously, all of that changed during the last few months of the presidential campaign. When he suggested in May that there were legitimate reasons why Hamas would find Barack Obama more attractive than John McCain, it was clear that Joe the Traitor had completely lost his bearings. This, after all, was not a claim about Obama's inexperience or tax policy, or even about their difference on Iraq. By suggesting that there were things about Obama that terrorists could love, Joe Lieberman was playing dirty, slime-ball politics with the one issue he claims to care the most about -- our dealings in the Middle East.
By abandoning so much of what he had fought for in public life to support John McCain, Lieberman embarrassed himself repeatedly during the campaign. This week he added disgrace to the embarrassment by saying he didn't really mean it. "Some of the things that people have said I said about Senator Obama are simply not true," he said on Tuesday, standing outside the Senate Chamber after Senate Democrats had chosen the path of least retribution against him. "There are other statements that I made that I wish I had made more clearly. And there are some that I made that I wish I had not made at all. And obviously in the heat of campaigns, that happens to all of us. But I regret that. And now it's time to move on."
His let's-move-on mea culpa was part recantation, part apology and part plea of no-contest to charges that he had turned into a political skunk, but it reeked of political mendicancy. Relieved that he was allowed to remain as chair of the Homeland Security Committee, Lieberman insisted that his long tenure as a "member in good standing" of the Democratic caucus was one of the reasons he survived. The question now for Lieberman is the one Rick Blaine asks Ilse Lund in Casablanca in the days before Paris falls: "Who are you really, and what were you before?" Where will Lieberman's "independence of mind" lead him next?
My suspicion is nowhere, because whatever vestiges of self-respect Lieberman had left fell away entirely this week. At least standing beside McCain as firmly as he did -- under intensely hostile fire from Democrats -- made him seem, in his own way, courageous and principled. For him to now say, "I didn't mean it," that it was just the "heat of the campaign" seems craven and weak.
Still the narrative that emerged this week was that Lieberman's shape-shifting abilities had saved him yet again. He was the survivor. But while he will chair a powerful and important committee, Lieberman has no margin for error. While Harry Reid and Democrats -- salivating over the potential of having 60 filibuster-busting votes -- made their deal with the devil to preserve the possibility, Lieberman has tied his fate to the whims of a Democratic caucus that will regard him with an unstable mix of caution and suspicion. His days as a free agent are over.
Even if they get it, the 60-vote threshold will not be as critical as Democrats hope. But pretend for a moment that the undecided Senate races in Minnesota and Georgia turn in the Democrats' favor, and they get their 60 votes with Lieberman and Bernie Sanders. How often would Lieberman be allowed to defy the wishes of the party to follow his "independence of mind?"
Approximately none.
For now though, Lieberman is one of the early beneficiaries of the new spirit of bipartisanship in Washington. He eagerly invoked "the appeal from President-elect Obama himself that the nation now unite to confront our very serious problems" as one of the reasons he was able to hang on to his committee chairmanship. Majority Leader Harry Reid could not have been more encouraging to Lieberman, praising him before reporters and colleagues alike as a crucial part of the Democrats' success over the past two years.
"Let's look at a little bit of history, everybody," Reid said. "We could not have had a Democratic majority for the last two years but for Joe Lieberman."
Reid knows what the stakes are: "The question is, do I trust Senator Lieberman?" he said. "The answer is yes, I trust Senator Lieberman."
Right question, wrong answer!
