Listen to the leftist shouts as Democrat Joe Lieberman faces serious political trouble in his re-election bid for a Connecticut Senate seat, and you would think you were watching one of those movies about a gallant gladiator going down in the Roman Coliseum.
The hero is wounded, on one knee, and the frenzied, blood-thirsty, bug-eyed mob wants him finished off. “Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill,” the people are chanting.
Why such fervor, such anger, such unblinking intent to get this mild-mannered, temperate man out of office? I think the answer is easy, and it is not only that Lieberman has backed the war in Iraq and has made sound and sometimes withering arguments against the Democratic efforts to set timetables for withdrawal of our troops.
It is that Lieberman’s integrity on this issue is unassailable, and that many of the left cannot deal with that. It’s not their style to argue issues on their merits. They must forever make it seem that they are moral wonders — superior people, the next thing to angels — while the other side is vile and corrupt. The trouble is that you can’t convincingly blacken someone as reasonable, courageous, upright, consistent and informed as Lieberman.
The left likes more vulnerable targets, and has had one in the inarticulate President Bush and a PR-disabled White House. Forgetting that an easily made mistake sure to be found out can hardly be a lie, the left lies that Bush lied about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction. Displaying absolutely no comprehension of oil economics, the left says the war is all about enriching American oil companies — and then attempts to confer credibility on its confusion with the irrelevant observation that Bush, after all, was once an oil man. The left says Bush has simply used the war to enhance his power — another visit to loony land.
None of this stuff works with Lieberman, who has not been made more powerful by the war, but less liked in astate where his convictions are contrary to those of vast numbers of constituents. He knows as much, and has stuck to his position anyway, putting himself so much at risk that there now appears to be a real chance that this man who was the vice presidential candidate on the national Democratic ticket in 2000 may lose a Democratic primary to a virtual unknown.
Some Democrats are coming to Lieberman’s rescue. Mostly they are those who tend toward the center in political debate, a precious few within the party.
The frightening fact is that Lieberman was one of just six Democrats in the Senate to vote recently against surrender in Iraq. Technically, the vote was on whether to dictate the start of troop withdrawals this year, but while such withdrawals might in fact prove prudent, only events can make that clear. To make such decisions without confident knowledge of what those events will be is to court disaster and defeat when neither is otherwise obvious.
If he loses the primary, Lieberman says, he will run as an Independent, which upsets his opponents that much more because, well, you ought to put party above everything or, if that line of reasoning doesn’t work, you ought to sell out your beliefs when in difficulty, or if that isn’t any better, you ought to deliver them from having to confront substance and intellectual honesty. Lieberman has no intention of making life merrier for the ad hominem artists now trying to crush him, however. He may be on one knee, but he has not given up, and just may rise up and win this fight. Let’s hope he does.
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies.
