Lieberman’s Last Stand

On a brain-foggingly hot Sunday afternoon in July, a wistful Senator Joseph Lieberman tried to summon his inner Samuel Gompers as he accepted the Connecticut AFL-CIO’s endorsement in his dead-heat primary campaign against the aristocratic antiwar upstart Ned Lamont. “Sometimes you work hard, and people forget,” he said, thanking a straggly crowd of union leaders for remembering the picket lines he’d walked over the years. “My folks were working people. I grew up thinking that people who work deserve a fair deal. It takes government to ensure …” and so on. He was, of course, avoiding the subject. A giant papier-mâché statue of George W. Bush kissing Lieberman on the cheek–the Senator’s famed Britney-Madonna moment, which transpired after Bush finished his 2005 State of the Union address–sat on the back of a nearby pickup truck, thoughtfully provided by a group called Connecticut Bloggers. There was no mention from Lieberman of the elephant in the truck, no explanation of his alliance with the President over the war in Iraq. Just an oblique plea that this should not be a one-issue campaign.

But it is, even though both candidates have decided to talk mostly about other things–a metaphor, perhaps, for the nation’s traumatic paralysis over the Mesopotamian disaster. Lieberman’s diffidence is understandable. His unflinching support for the war isn’t very popular with even his strongest supporters. But Lamont seems almost as reticent. A few days earlier, I’d watched the challenger chug through an entire speech to an Indian-American group without talking about Iraq. “I didn’t even talk about the war!” he said with pseudo amazement when he began to take questions. The challenger obviously is out to prove he is more than a single issue anti-Joe. That will be a tough sell, since Lamont’s positions on most other issues seem standard cardboard purchased from the Democratic Campaign Depot store. And there is no getting away from the war. The first few questions from the Indian Americans were about Iraq. In answering them, Lamont revealed an additional weakness. He doesn’t have a clue about what he’d do about the war beyond a general let’s-get-outta-there body language. It’s a forgivable offense. At this point, Lieberman is not offering much more than stay-the-course body language.

Let’s stipulate that Lieberman’s position is honorable, heartfelt and politically courageous. But it is annoying, nonetheless. After his AFL-CIO speech, I asked the Senator, “If you believe that winning this war is so crucial, why haven’t you been tougher on the Bush Administration’s inept prosecution of it?” Lieberman replied, mildly, that he had criticized the Bush Administration in the past. And then he did a curious thing. “I think we may have wasted the first year in Iraq,” he offered, then retreated, “Well, that may be a little hard … Maybe I should say we lost opportunities,” and then, noticing that I was about to splutter with indignation, he retracted his retraction. “No, we wasted it.” To say the least!

The mildness is mystifying. There are those who believe the Senator’s unwillingness to criticize Bush has its roots in politics. “He flew too close to the sun,” said a Connecticut Democrat who believes that Lieberman played nice with the President in the hope of securing both the Democratic and the Republican nominations for Senate this year. (The G.O.P. seems intent on running a hapless benchwarmer named Alan Schlesinger for the seat.) No politician is exempt from hubris, and so there may be something to the theory. But an almost saintly civility has always been part of Lieberman’s modus operandi. His unflappable strength in facing down extremists of both parties–on issues ranging from welfare reform to immigration, the environment, education reform and Hollywood’s frequent excesses–has been an elegant demonstration of political independence and flagrant humanity over the years. The real problem with Lieberman’s position on Iraq isn’t overweening civility, however. It is that he has abandoned his native moderation for utopian neoconservatism. His support for the invasion wasn’t reluctant, nuanced or judicious; he saw a better world coming. Before the war, he told me that he hoped Saddam’s fall would touch off a wave of democratic reform in the region. Given that the entire Middle East seems ready to collapse into chaos this summer, it might seem an appropriate time to revise or extend those remarks–to regret his naiveté or defend his long-term vision or slam Bush for carelessly betraying that vision … or something. But the Senator isn’t doing that. Indeed, it sometimes seems his position is more reflexive than thoughtful. He still insists that progress is being made in Iraq. “What progress?” I asked. “There’s an elected national-unity government,” he said. “I don’t want to overstate it, but we’re beginning to reach out to the Sunni insurgency.”

Joe Lieberman is, without question, one of the finest men I’ve known in public life. I could never imagine myself voting against him. But he was profoundly wrong about the most important issue of the past five years–and now, at the very least, he has to acknowledge that there’s an elephant sitting in the pickup truck.

> To see a collection of Joe Klein’s recent columns, visit time.com/klein