The Lieberman question.(Joseph I. Lieberman)

NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 3

ANEWSMAN pressed me a couple of days ago on the matter of the Senate election in Connecticut. Whom would I vote for? That's an improper question, as we all know: that's why voting is done in private. But I had been noisy on the subject of Joe Lieberman and could hardly plead the superordination of privacy. So I said, "Lieberman." And he said, Why? And I said, "I like Lieberman"; and politely declined amplification.

Years ago I argued in favor of Al Lowenstein, a prominent New York liberal, for Congress, and received the same bemused interrogation from the press. On that occasion I said simply that I was defying my principled opposition to many of Lowenstein's positions in order to vote for a human being I thought superior. On the matter of Lieberman, there is more there than a personal attraction to the individual. Republican candidate Alan Schlesinger commented on my choice, "I think it's ironic that anyone as conservative as Bill Buckley would help someone as liberal as Joe Lieberman." But Schlesinger misses the point.

The important contention doesn't involve the GOP candidate. It is Lieberman vs. Ned Lamont, the other Democrat. And the political drama in Connecticut isn't just among the candidates. It has to do with the future of the Democratic party. And that future affects everyone.

What happened in this campaign was the materialization on August 8 of an ideological posse. Its mission was to punish a Democrat for the sin of backing President Bush in the Iraq war.

Now it gets a little complicated because there are many Americans who oppose the war as it has evolved. If you promise not to tell anybody, my own conviction is that if George Bush ever took to the bottle again, he might confide that he wishes he had never got into war in Iraq. I too wish he hadn't, but that's not because he was wrong in going in. He was moved by a conviction that Saddam Hussein was productively engaged in manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, that he was in league with a terrorist movement that threatened the Middle East, and ...