The e-mail was short, to the point and, frankly, a little bit rabid; but that might be only because the writer is a friend and I could feel his outrage oozing from the screen: "Joe Lieberman is going to be the Zell Miller of 2008. I could see him now, at the Republican Convention talking about how extremists are killing the Democratic Party."
It would not have occurred to me to compare the two men: Except for their penchant for quoting their mothers, I could hardly think of anything that Lieberman and Miller share, either in their politics or in their personal style. One is a Yalie Orthodox Jew who likes to tell bad jokes, the other is a folksy history teacher from Young Harris, Georgia, and former marine who can't take a joke.
Still, there was something instantly and overwhelmingly plausible about the notion of a resentful Joe Lieberman at the GOP convention, maybe in Florida, trashing Democrats for not being tough enough on terror and being too hatefully partisan. Think of all the love he would get -- is already getting -- from the GOP side of the aisle, and you understand why it could happen. Even aside from the purely depressing elements of such a set of circumstances, the thought of a flipped, crusading Lieberman ought to terrify Democrats; because a re-elected and voluble Joe Lieberman will be just one more thing Democrats won't need in the summer of 2008. The Lieberman Conundrum is an urgent reminder that Democrats have yet to resolve their own set of issues around the Iraq War.
Despite the political swamp in which the administration finds itself over Iraq, Democrats have not demonstrated any decisive ability to turn Iraq to their political advantage; that is because so many of them are implicated in the decision to go to war and remain ambiguously positioned on the choices ahead. And therein lies the heart of the Lieberman problem for Democrats: The only person punished politically so far the war in Iraq is a Democratic senator. With that in mind, it would be reasonable for Democrats to worry about whether the president's war will end up haunting them more that it does the GOP. It's happened before.
Say, for example, Lieberman wins in November. The Democratic Party's approach to the war then becomes an unresolved argument inside the party that dogs them into the 2008 cycle. Despite the narrow margins, Lieberman's primary defeat was an unequivocal triumph for the idea that the war is discredited, both in its rationale and its prosecution. But the victory is anything but final. A re-elected Joe Lieberman will be more than just a resentful, scorned suitor who gets the last laugh. He becomes the phoenix, a holy man who has survived the hell-fires of partisanship. Suddenly he's Eliot's Lazarus, "come from the dead, come back to tell you all…"
With a career prolonged by re-election, his self-righteousness vindicated and his credibility burnished, Lieberman emerges as the living expert on Democratic pathology: He becomes the go-to guy on what's wrong with Democrats -- their ambivalence on national security or problems with people of faith, their consuming partisanship, and their unfitness to govern the country. He'll be the darling of the conservative commentariat, and who can deny the dazzle of a new romance?
That is why the Lieberman race is so critical to Democratic fortunes this November. Polls show him either leading or in a dead-heat with Ned Lamont. With the Republican candidate in the race barely registering any life in the polls, Lieberman becomes the choice of Republicans looking for something to vote against, and the usual scramble to the middle to attract independents after a tough primary battle is, for Lieberman, not even a two-step shuffle.
This fall, for the Democrats to achieve anything resembling success, they will have to beat Joe Lieberman. It's not just a matter of whom he would vote with when the Senate is convened; or whether he gets to keep his committee assignments and seniority. It is 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.
Terence Samuel is a political writer in Washington, D.C.
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