Townhall's Matt Vespa, representing an organization that has its own disagreements with the Permanent Bipartisan Establishment, at least manages to report those facts without dancing on the late senator's grave.
First elected in 1988, Lieberman was essentially the Democratic version of John McCain, being solidly liberal on core issues but never afraid to stray away from the party line. In 2000, Vice President Al Gore chose Lieberman as his running mate, making him the first Jewish candidate on a national ticket.I read Common Dreams so Matt Vespa doesn't have to. "There are still anti-war progressives who continue to rant about [his Iraq authorization of force] vote, so there might be some grave-dancing on social media."
Being more of a foreign policy hawk led to Lieberman disagreeing with his party on national security and foreign policy issues. Does this sound familiar? It’s no wonder Mr. Lieberman endorsed John McCain in the 2008 election. He even addressed the Republican National Convention that year, which undoubtedly gave heartburn to many of his Democratic colleagues in the US Senate. His foreign policy disagreements led to a primary challenge two years prior, especially when the Iraq War went poorly.
It's up to Commentary's John Podhoretz to offer the proper encomia.
It is a mark of his amused and amusing character that he appeared at a COMMENTARY roast to pay tribute to the opposite number who had prevailed in that 2000 contest, Dick Cheney—and that Cheney returned the favor with comparable graciousness and high good humor when we roasted Joe two years later.The senator may have erred in his belief that Washington is where people "bridge gaps and seek to find solutions to social and political problems besetting America," and in so doing, made the quest of the True Believers to gain control of the elected national government and the administrative state take on greater import. And yet a civil politics, even if the aspirations are futile, looks better than the unlimited food fight the True Believers have made of politics in the past quarter century.
Indeed, the Lieberman-Cheney debate in 2000 was one of the last genuinely civil exchanges on the highest planes of American politics. And the memory of it stings—because we have spent the last quarter century doing what we can to rid Washington of exactly the kind of civility and respect Joe Lieberman extended across ideological and partisan boundaries.
Indeed, his career proved an early example of the nightmarish direction in which American politics was heading when, in 2006, he was targeted by leftists in his own party for defeat—even though he was the sitting senator from the state of Connecticut, only six years removed from his vice presidential candidacy, and only three years removed from his own bid for the presidency in 2004.
James Joyner of the establishmentarian Outside the Beltway offers a similar observation.
Lieberman is perhaps the archetype of the dramatic shifts that have taken place in our parties over the last quarter century. He went from being his party’s vice presidential nominee in 2000 to losing in his party’s Senate primary in 2006 to endorsing the other party’s presidential nominee in 2008.* It’s hard to think of a figure so prominent in his party who became an outcast with shifting ties so quickly. Mitt Romney, perhaps?Sometimes, the prudent pundit, if he can't say something nice, might better say nothing at all. R. I. P.
Then again, the editors of National Review remind me that Lieberman first got elected to the Senate with some help from that magazine’s founder, William F. Buckley, Jr. It’s perhaps fitting that he’s remembered more fondly in that magazine than those on the left. Indeed, as of this writing, neither The New Republic nor The Nation mention his passing at all.
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