NO MOJO.(The Talk of the Town)(Joseph Lieberman's quest for Senate nomination)

Why, you may ask, is Joseph Lieberman having such a tough time with the simple task of getting himself renominated for the Senate seat he has held for the past seventeen years? Theories abound. One of them, popular on the right, is that Senator Lieberman is the victim of what David Brooks, in the Times, calls "a liberal inquisition." Another, popular on the left, is that Lieberman is not a "real Democrat" but, rather, a species of Republican--a "Republican-lite," a "Bush-Cheney Republican," an "in-the-pocket Bush man," to quote some recent online epithets. A third, current across the ideological spectrum, is that Lieberman's trouble is based on a single issue: his unremitting support for the Iraq War.

These theories are not mutually exclusive, and they contain, respectively, a grain, a kernel, and a boulder of truth, but they all fall short. If what we have here is an inquisition (not the mot juste, perhaps, to describe a primary), then the only heretic who has anything to worry about is named Joe. Lieberman's views are broadly similar to those of such colleagues as Diane Feinstein and Ben Nelson, and nobody's trying to burn them at the stake. As for Lieberman's party credentials, they seem to be in reasonably good order. He is a three-term Democratic senator from a state, Connecticut, that's as blue as a state can be while still being the spawning ground of the Bush dynasty; six years ago, he was the Democratic Party's nominee for Vice-President, an unusual honor for a fake Democrat; he has the support of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., naral, and the League of Conservation Voters. The third theory comes closest to being a sufficient explanation, for without the war Lieberman would not be facing a primary challenge at all, let alone a strong one. Yet not even his opinions on Iraq can fully account for the special vehemence of the opposition to him.

To understand what it is about Lieberman that so many Democrats find so annoying, one must begin by cranking the wayback machine, first, to the height of (speaking of inquisitions) the pre-impeachment delirium of the late nineteen-nineties, a moment that one of the Senator's constituents has described this way:

In the Congress, in the press, and on the networks, the righteous grandstanding creeps, crazy to blame, deplore, and punish, were everywhere out moralizing to beat the band: all of them in a calculated frenzy with what Hawthorne (who, in the 1860s, lived not many miles from my door) identified in the incipient country of long ago as "the persecuting spirit"; all of them eager to enact the astringent rituals of purification that would excise the erection from the executive branch, thereby making things cozy and safe enough for Senator Lieberman's ten-year-old daughter to watch TV with her embarrassed daddy again.

Lieberman rated this cameo in Philip Roth's "The Human Stain" on account of a speech he delivered in the Senate on September 3, 1998. It was an exceedingly pompous performance, in which the Senator expressed his "deep disappointment and personal anger" at President Clinton for his sad, furtive affair with a White House intern and deplored "the impact of his actions on our democracy and its moral foundations." The speech earned Lieberman plaudits for statesmanship, integrity, independence, and the like; some people actually saw it as a service to the Democratic Party and even to the President, on the ground that it separated the former from the latter and redirected a little of the anti-Clinton feeling from demands for immediate impeachment (which Lieberman rejected as "unjust and unwise") to mere indignation. Others, however, saw Lieberman's ...