How Joe went wrong
The Times' endorsement of his challenger is more bad news for Lieberman. But Connecticut Democrats have been thinking about a divorce for years.
By Colin McEnroe
Jul. 31, 2006 | ... In 1979, Joe Lieberman was the majority leader of the Connecticut state Senate. That august body took up, as it did every year, a bill that would have allowed people to create living wills so that their families would know their wishes as they lay dying. The lobbying arm of the Catholic Church fought and beat the bill every year. During the long-winded 1979 debate, as Joe Lieberman sat listening to a Catholic colleague denounce the bill as "man playing God," a 25-year-old newspaper reporter plopped down in a chair next to him. "Why does it always break down that way?" the reporter whispered. "The more conservative argument always invokes God. The liberals always insist that God has no place in a debate in an American state legislature." (Lieberman was playing nanny that year to a group of rookie liberal senators, mostly disciples of Rep. Toby Moffett, and one after the other they were rising to argue for separation of church and state.)
Lieberman whispered back and forth with the reporter. "Why doesn't somebody make the argument," the reporter asked Lieberman, "that medical science has exceeded the will of God by keeping people alive when they're supposed to be dead? Why not suggest that living wills represent a kind of restoration, allowing people to live in communion with the will of their Maker?" At that, Lieberman fixed the reporter with a serious look and said, "That's the most interesting thing anybody has said to me all session." The reporter brightened at such praise, only to watch in disappointment as Lieberman voted against the bill, which failed again. I was that young reporter. Call it the beginning of my education about Joe Lieberman. Sometimes what he says has nothing to do with how he'll vote ...
Lieberman's reputation in Connecticut is not purely that of an out-of-step conservative. It's much more complicated, and frustrating, than that. He's a serial raiser and dasher and re-raiser of hopes. Gays trust him because he's voted with them on a lot of big issues, but they don't trust him because he voted for the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996. Once he even collaborated with Sen. Jesse Helms on a measure that would have stripped federal funding from public schools that counseled suicidal gay teens that their lifestyle was OK. Women trust him because he's a reliable vote for abortion rights and don't trust him because he went off the reservation for the only significant vote (cloture) on the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel Alito. During the recent debate over requiring hospitals to provide emergency contraception for rape victims, Lieberman emitted a shockingly callous, and now famous, sound bite. He said it's never more than "a short car ride" in crowded Connecticut to a more accommodating hospital.
That's just the beginning of the catalog of gripes. Long before there were those TV love fests with Fox's Sean Hannity that so enrage lefty bloggers there were earlier love fests with none other than Pat Robertson. On the apocalyptic evangelist's "700 Club," Lieberman complained about moral relativism, said there was too little religion in public life, and said he was pleased that people of faith were taking their principles into the political arena. In 2003, Connecticut political writer Paul Bass chronicled the scramble by the senator's staff to scrub his image from a fundraising infomercial (also starring Robertson and Jerry Falwell) for a conservative religious group with which he had been involved. His 2004 campaign for the presidential nomination was so pitched toward the conservative, moralistic, Southern elements of the party that I jokingly suggested the slogan: "He may be a Jew, but he's a better Christian than you are." Then there's his famous 1998 denunciation of President Clinton, followed by his relatively hands-off approach to the darker, ultimately criminal scandals embroiling Connecticut Gov. John G. Rowland, with whom Lieberman maintained one of his famous bipartisan friendships. Nobody talks about it much, but there's also a sour feeling among Democratic state office-seekers that Lieberman's campaign help was often not to be found, especially as his own ambitions turned national. "Let's put it this way," one politician said to me. "There aren't a lot of people who use the phrase 'after all he's done for me' in explaining why they support Joe." ...
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/07/31/lieberman_times/--------------------------------------------------------
Joe, STEP ASIDE.
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