If the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol had not been agitating for the replacement of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld since the summer of 2001, there could be something to a Bush cabinet office reserved for Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman — yesterday challenged and bereft of Democratic endorsement for his incumbency. Presently Joe's choices are a retreat from politics and an independent candidacy: Joe as apostate, Joe as mugwump.
Should Joe run, the state electorate will have three choices: Joe Lieberman, primary victor Ned Lamont and a Republican whose name — perhaps like all Republican senatorial contestants from Connecticut since Lowell Weicker and James Buckley — dwells in obscurity. Assuming that this last one, a dark horse, is so dark that nobody can find him through November 7th, contention will really be between Joe and Ned.
Why no Joe? He is steadfast — those Democrats against him would say pertinacious — in his arguments for militarily engaging the non-state predation of terrorism, especially by weakening or deposing dictatorships directly or indirectly abetting authoritarian culture, and in their place introducing liberal reforms. The senator was memorably booed by the audience of a 2004 presidential primary debate when he did not apologize for holding a position on the Iraqi campaign largely indistinguishable from George W. Bush's.
Ned Lamont, accepted regionally as a party preference and depicted nationally as a party correction, congratulated himself last night on a very clear distinction between him and both Lieberman and Bush. As solidly as the latter pair, Lamont spoke of foreign policy — well, just Iraq, twice — with axiomatic conviction. Granting Lamont some latitude, one can string the Senate hopeful's statements together and conclude that he believes: a) helping Iraqis create a liberally democratic nation out of their country is not worth American lives and resources; b) American soldiers are hapless supernumeraries in, Lamont's words, a "civil war"; and c) what amounts to a full retreat deserves, again, Lamont's words, "the hero's welcome."
United States senators answer to a constituency and also represent the interests of the country. Still, it is a little remarkable to have Lamont, in his victory speech, repeat the sentiments coming from his narrowly focused backers — Connecticut had the most to do with his elevation as an intercessor, America to the White House. Military retraction and bureaucratic expansion, Lamont said, was "the America Connecticut voted for."
Of course, Senator Lieberman swears up and down that he taxes and spends, and decries muscular capitalism, just as much as Lamont could ever manage if he got to Washington. Check Joe's record: he's not lying. So Connecticut's substitution is over the fine point of war and reconstruction. The state's Democrats have what they want right now, and in November might have what they will want then. Is the vaguely isolationist message of Lamont what the country wants?
Polls and anecdotes show that otherwise dispirited majorities can be found to agree that Iraqis can do better than Saddam Hussein, that Hussein colluded with al Qaeda and that there is a reward in posterity for present company having at least tried to democratize Iraq. Salient here is that roughly half of all Americans believe that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Leftist media and intellectuals subtly title this one a mark of American credulity. But the broad left has been very subjective on the matter since 2003, forgetting what was written about what was experienced from 1979 onward; and ignoring a lot more. What to make of Saddam Hussein's obsession with armament that, according to the yet-definitive 2004 WMD compendium from Charles Duelfer, could only have ended inexplicably; complicated by Duelfer's conclusion that Hussein would have resumed development once free from sanctions; and, from a fraction of classified Defense Department reports, the collection of five hundred chemical rounds, confuting all the headlines declaring "no stockpiles."
Ideologues suffer from projection. Missed by Lamont and his supporters is that Americans view operations in Iraq with pessimism but the dismay, though the consistency of certain survey responses, is motivated not by a fundamental difference with intervention or antipathy for George Bush but an impatience with protracted warfare. Democrats, at least those in Georgia who voted yesterday, are not so inclined to anti-pro-Bush-whatever that they will support anything conducive to it, like Cynthia McKinney and her perfervid anti-Semitism, at least one of which voters rejected for a place in Congress. A third-party candidacy by Lieberman might open an interstice through which the GOP can get to the Senate for six years, amusing lagniappe for something so unlikely in New England. Party integrity is instead in question, as it has been for years. Splits in general elections do not make for a strong party, and Bush-protest tickets have so far proven weak. If the Democratic Party faces hostile takeover, the left should know that the state of Connecticut is only one of fifty.