Word: liebermanically
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...That's why, even as the DLC was laying out its agenda in Denver, the real test of the party's direction has been playing out more than 1,600 miles away in Waterbury, Connecticut. There, Bill Clinton was campaigning to help Senator Joe Lieberman - who, like Hillary Clinton, voted in favor of the Iraq invasion - hold onto his job against anti-war challenger Ned Lamont. (Both Clintons have said that they will ultimately support the winner of the primary...
...Senior Fellow Marshall Wittmann, who was wearing a Lieberman pin attached to his DLC name tag at the Denver meeting, warned that if Lieberman - the Democrats' 2000 vice presidential nominee - falls victim to the party's angry, netroots-driven forces, "it will likely have the result of driving the Democratic presidential primaries to the left in 2008." In that case, he and others worry, the kind of middle-class-oriented ideas that were being offered by the DLC as its "American Dream Initiative" would likely get lost in the larger political currents. "The question is," he says, "will the activist...
...stipulate that Lieberman's position is honorable, heartfelt and politically courageous. But it is annoying, nonetheless. After his AFL-CIO speech, I asked the Senator, "If you believe that winning this war is so crucial, why haven't you been tougher on the Bush Administration's inept prosecution of it?" Lieberman replied, mildly, that he had criticized the Bush Administration in the past. And then he did a curious thing. "I think we may have wasted the first year in Iraq," he offered, then retreated, "Well, that may be a little hard ... Maybe I should say we lost opportunities...
...mildness is mystifying. There are those who believe the Senator's unwillingness to criticize Bush has its roots in politics. "He flew too close to the sun," said a Connecticut Democrat who believes that Lieberman played nice with the President in the hope of securing both the Democratic and the Republican nominations for Senate this year. (The G.O.P. seems intent on running a hapless benchwarmer named Alan Schlesinger for the seat.) No politician is exempt from hubris, and so there may be something to the theory. But an almost saintly civility has always been part of Lieberman's modus operandi...
...Lieberman is, without question, one of the finest men I've known in public life. I could never imagine myself voting against him. But he was profoundly wrong about the most important issue of the past five years-and now, at the very least, he has to acknowledge that there's an elephant sitting in the pickup truck...