Democrats Should Heed Lieberman, Not Vilify Him
Published on
December 17, 2009
By John Feehery | CNN Opinion
Washington, D.C. (CNN) -- Winston Churchill once exclaimed, "Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result."
Joe Lieberman knows that exhilaration better than most.
In 2006, the Democratic establishment took a shot at Mr. Lieberman, and it missed.
Now, the Connecticut senator is dictating the terms of a health care package that could determine the political future of the party that tried to end his career.
Predictably, the left wing of the party has decided to attack, with all of its might, their former vice presidential standard bearer. They have called him a traitor, sell-out and worse.
They have attacked his wife's career -- she lobbies for funding to end breast cancer and formerly worked for insurance companies.
Think Progress, a left-wing group, has launched a campaign to get Harry Reid to strip Lieberman of his committee chairmanship.
The Washington Post's Ezra Klein writes Lieberman "seems willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score."
John McCain, Lieberman's closest friend in the Senate, has called these attacks a "disgrace."
Lieberman says that all he wants to do is keep faith with the president's health care goals. "I am for reform," he says. He wants a new deal that won't include either a public option or an expansion of Medicare to those aged 55.
He also wants a health care reform package that actually bends the cost curve down. While McCain ran as a maverick in last year's presidential campaign, it is Lieberman who is the real McCoy when it comes to who is more "mavericky."
You probably have to stretch back to Teddy Roosevelt to see a comparable shift from Lieberman's status from standard bearer to subversive.
Roosevelt, after serving two terms as president, grew frustrated with his successor's policies -- which he deemed not progressive enough -- and ran a third party candidacy against him. Roosevelt lost, but so did William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson ascended to the White House.
Lieberman, who only nine years ago campaigned as the Democratic vice presidential nominee, last year was seriously considered as a possible Republican vice presidential nominee -- and perhaps would have been a better choice for John McCain than Sarah Palin.
In 2000, Lieberman supported the Medicare buy-in. Now, the left, and some in the media, are calling him a hypocrite for changing his position on Medicare eligibility. But Lieberman says that times change, and we can't afford that idea anymore. But that explanation, not matter how true, hasn't mollified the liberal blogosphere.
And now, he holds the fate of President Obama's key legislative initiative -- a president he campaigned so hard to defeat -- in the palm of his hands.
That can't be a comforting thought to the White House or to liberal Democrats who still can't figure out what happened to the liberal paradise they thought would be opened to them with the big electoral wins in 2008.
The best thing that the Democrats could do for their own political health is to take Lieberman's advice and dramatically scale back the health care legislation. According to most polls, the support for the president's health care plan has been dropping.
According to a new poll completed by Resurgent Republic, a conservative Republican organization, "voters age 55 and older oppose the health care reforms being debated in Congress by 48 to 39 percent."
These voters think that the proposals will increase their taxes, make their health care costs more expensive, increase their premiums and increase the debt.