The morning after the 2006 mid-term election, the professor I was assisting for Intro to Political Science that semester asked me to briefly address our class to explain what had happened the night before. I had been up until about 6am waiting for the Montana Senate returns to come in (Go Tester!) and the class was at 9am, so I was running on little more than 1 hour sleep. Most of what I said that morning remains a blur, but there is one moment that stuck with me.
As I was discussing the prospect of a Democratic Senate, I mentioned that it wouldn't surprise me in the least to see Sen. Joe Lieberman drop his Independent/Connecticut for Lieberman affiliation in favor of a more honest Republican one. It might not happen right away, but I predicted it was only a matter of time before he betrayed the voters in his state and left the party.
Getting a rise out of people at 9am is tough, but that comment did the trick. In the back of the room a hand shot up, and I quickly learned that it belonged to a student who had spent the previous day traveling to and from her home in Connecticut. She had gone home specifically to vote for Sen. Lieberman, and she was outraged that I would suggest the good and honorable Senator would ever do something so dishonest. He had run as an independent but promised to govern as a Democrat, and there was just no way he would turn his back on the voters of his state like that. Judging from the nodding heads and smiling faces, many of her fellow students agreed. It was just a prediction, I assured her, and it was entirely possible I might end up looking foolish, but... well... we'd just have to wait and see.
All of which is a very long way of getting to this:
Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Connecticut, compared presumptive Republican nominee John McCain to a surprising figure on Sunday -- Democratic icon John F. Kennedy.
"I'm a Democrat who came to the party in the era of President John F. Kennedy," Lieberman told George Stephanopoulos on ABC's "This Week. "It's a strange turn of the road when I find among the candidates running this year that the one, in my opinion, closest to the Kennedy legacy, the John F. Kennedy legacy, is John S. McCain."The Democrat-turned Independent endorsed McCain in early February, surprising many in the Democratic party. Lieberman, who ran with Al Gore on the Democratic presidential ticket eight years ago, insisted that his views have remained consistent while the Democratic Party changed.
"The Democratic Party today was not the party it was in 2000. It's been effectively taken over by a small group on the left of the party that is protectionist, isolationist and basically... very, very hyperpartisan. So it pains me," he said.
A staunch supporter of the Iraq war, Lieberman recently traveled to Baghdad with McCain and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina. Though he commended Hillary Clinton for her vote on declaring the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist group, he slammed both Democratic presidential candidates on their foreign policy positions.
"The Democratic candidates have spent most of their time attacking the war in Iraq... they've honestly not done anything substantial to advance our cause in Afghanistan or against Al Qaeda."
Three thoughts and two suggestions:
Thought One: He hasn't formally left the party yet, but so what? Clearly he's already gone. Goodbye and good riddance, I say.
Thought Two: McCain as JFK? Is he delusional? This is so insane I can't even think of something snarky to say. I mean.... just wow.
Thought Three: It's not Joe that has changed, but the rest of the party? Millions of people moved left, while he and he alone remained unchanged? What an amazingly self centered, egotistical, narcissistic view of this country and its citizens. Who does he think he is, the Pope? Unlike the rest of us mere mortals, he's infallible and unchangeable?
On to my two suggestions:
Suggestion One: Senate Democrats should elect Sen. Chris Dodd as the new Majority Leader in 2009. That Sen. Reid would continue to allow this man to serve in important positions of power is enough that I cannot continue to support his leadership role.
Suggestion Two: Senate Majority Leader Chris Dodd should as his first order of business strip Sen. Lieberman of all of the privileges associated with his seniority in the Democratic caucus, and then he should bar him from all caucus events. Because I don't care what he says, he is not a Democrat. If Joe isn't a strong enough leader to take that step on his own, then his party should make it for him.
UPDATE: This is pretty funny. More from Lieberman today:
On ABC's This Week today, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) falsely claimed that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) "is not for the private accounts to take the place of social security." "He's for what Bill Clinton used to call Social Security plus," said Lieberman.
Lieberman didn't disagree, however, when host George Stephanopoulos pointed out that McCain had "disputed that in the Wall Street Journal" recently. Instead, he brushed the contradiction aside and changed the subject.
Lieberman falsely praises McCain for supporting something like "Social Security plus?" Are you kidding me? Over the past 9 years, the US stock market is essentially flat. Even super safe Treasury Bills outperformed the market. Had we done what Clinton and Lieberman wanted, the Social Security trust fund would have come out behind over the past decade.
This is what McCain takes as a sign of positive leadership? A proposal that has been shown to produce a net loss for the nation relative to the system as it currently stands?
The truth is that even McCain abandoned this idea. Unfortunately for all of us, his new proposal is a system of private accounts. That's the very same proposal that one Sen. Joseph Lieberman called "a very risky thing to do" back in 2005! Such leadership! Such consistency!
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