Obama And Lieberman
The blog world is abuzz with the “woodshed” meeting between Harry Reid and Joe Lieberman. Lefty anti-Liebermanites are giddy with the prospect that Lieberman could be not only stripped of his chairman position on the Homeland Security committee, but also kicked out of the Democratic caucuss. Locally, Brian Lockhart even went so far as to reach into the back closet of Democratic campaigns past, and dusted off the lint of empty suit, Ned Lamont, to get some perspective on the issue in a recent Advocate article.
The result of the Lieberman Reid meeting has left Lieberman reviewing his “options.” Much of the fury over Lieberman’s recent tilt to the GOP is a direct result of the public pillory, set up by crazed anti-war zealots. Enough is enough. Let’s see what Obama has had to say about going after fellow senators:
“We have a tendency to demonize and jump on and make mockery of each other across the aisle, and that is particularly pronounced when we make mistakes. Each and every one of us is going to make a mistake once in a while…and what we hope is that our track record of service, the scope of how we’ve operated and interacted with people, will override whatever particular mistake we make.”
Obama said this in 2006, shortly after he came to Connecticut to speak at the JJB, and defended his Senate mentor, Joe Lieberman. He wasn’t referring to Lieberman then, the 2006 campaign for Senate hadn’t kicked into a frenzy of Lieberman bashing. He was speaking about Illinois senior Senator Dick Durbin, who was pilloried on the Senate floor for likening Guantánamo to a Nazi or Stalin-era concentration camp. Durbin is the Senate assistant majority leader to Reid.
Lieberman, unlike many of the anti-Lieberman forces, has a long history of support for the civil rights movement. And that support didn’t come from political expedience, as this 2000 NYTimes article reveals:
And yet some of those same black leaders also question how someone who marched with Dr. King and risked a trip to Mississippi could have later questioned the viability of affirmative action and supported a voucher experiment that black leaders broadly oppose.
Indeed, when Mr. Lieberman said in 1995 that he could no longer defend policies that were ”based on group preference instead of individual merit,” Mr. Bond wrote a scathing rebuke for the op-ed page of The Hartford Courant.
”Perhaps Senator Joseph I. Lieberman has forgotten that trip south three decades ago,” wrote Mr. Bond, himself a civil rights leader who now teaches the history of the movement. ”Perhaps he believes 32 years is long enough to overcome a 300-year-old system of inequality.”
That critique stung, Mr. Lieberman said. ”It was the first time in my life that I recall, certainly the first significant time,” he said, ”when people I respected, like Julian Bond, but also just generally the civil rights community, was on the other side from me.”
Since joining Mr. Gore’s ticket, Mr. Lieberman has said he now supports affirmative action. He plays down the rather explicit opposition he expressed in 1995, saying it must be viewed through the prism of a Supreme Court decision that prompted a national re-examination of the issue that year.
”I raised some questions,” he said, ”and perhaps, as has been my tendency, thought out loud more than some public figures do.”
Obama, when elected to the Senate, in 2005 selected Lieberman as his Senate mentor. It’ll be interesting to see what options are really on the table, and if Lieberman can stop flaming the fires nipping at his self inflicted burning at the idealogue stake. There’s much to be said for stamping out the voices that keep those flames a burning. The French Revolution gave way to the Reign of Terror precisely because those that set the bar for idealogical purity couldn’t stop. Lieberman might want to review that bit of history as part of his options.
