The war Lieberman didn't want

March 30, 2006 | WEST HAVEN, Conn. -- When Joe Lieberman bowed out of the 2004 Democratic presidential race, he took the stage to the sound of an unrepentant Frank Sinatra singing "My Way." Now as the three-term Connecticut senator faces a suddenly vexing August primary challenge from antiwar businessman Ned Lamont, Lieberman is again channeling his inner Sinatra.

"I'm going to be the kind of senator that I believe it is my responsibility to be," the hawkish Lieberman said to me last week at the start of a soliloquy that ranged from portentous to fatalistic. "If that doesn't work politically, so be it. Life and service will go on."

Moments later, as a staffer drove us through the blue-collar suburbs of New Haven, Lieberman invoked Old Blue Eyes: "I don't want to be too self-psychoanalytical about it," he said. "But to quote the great philosopher Frank Sinatra, I'm going to do it my way." Then Lieberman quoted his political theme song with word-for-word precision: "For what is a man, what has he got? If not himself, then he has naught."

How has Lieberman gone in six years from being the first Jewish vice-presidential nominee to a senator brooding about the possible final curtain of his political career? When Lamont formally declared his candidacy a little more than two weeks ago, he sneered, "I doubt that anybody will call me 'George Bush's favorite Democrat.'" That sobriquet, which bitterly galls Lieberman, is rooted in the senator's early and still unabashed support for the Iraq war.

As a punching bag for left-wing activists, Lieberman somehow ranks up there with Tom DeLay and Dick Cheney. Yet according to the National Journal's 2005 Senate vote rankings, Lieberman's centrist record is on par with that of West Virginia's Robert Byrd, the octogenarian war critic lionized by the blogosphere.

Other Democrats are forgiven their ideological transgressions, but never Lieberman. In Pennsylvania, Senate challenger Bob Casey has overwhelming party support even though he is antiabortion and supported Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court. (Lieberman, in contrast, is pro-choice and voted against Alito.) It is almost forgotten that California Sen. Dianne Feinstein supported all of Bush's deficit-creating 2001 tax cuts. (Lieberman voted against them.) And Hillary Clinton, the winter-book favorite for the 2008 nomination, has not exactly been marching in antiwar demonstrations.

There is no simple explanation for why Joe-mentum (what Lieberman hoped for in the New Hampshire primary where he finished a dismal fifth) has turned into Joe-mad-at-him. Part of it may be that Lieberman's greatest strength (the self-righteous independence that propelled him onto the 2000 ticket when Al Gore wanted to signal his distaste for Bill Clinton's sexual transgressions) is also his greatest weakness. For some activists, memories of that 2000 campaign die hard, from Lieberman's sputtering debate performance against Cheney to off-message comments about the Florida recount.

George W. Bush and Co. also appear to be working overtime to undermine Lieberman's Democratic credentials. Republicans, apparently without Lieberman's complicity, have floated the senator's name as a possible replacement for Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon. Then Bush himself, after this year's State of the Union address, grabbed Lieberman in what appeared to be something between a manly embrace and a sloppy kiss. For his part, Lieberman insisted, as he ruled out an independent campaign for the Senate, "I am a Democrat. I believe in the Democratic Party. I believe in the vision of JFK and, I must say, the vision of Bill Clinton."

But what rankles liberals the most is Lieberman's refusal, even now, to give ground on the war. Appearing on "Face the State," a half-hour interview show that aired on Hartford television (WFSB) last Sunday, Lieberman said about Iraq, "I've been there four times now. I can tell you that about two-thirds of Iraq is pretty peaceful. Around the Sunni Triangle, around Baghdad, that's the worst part. And that's getting better."

Such an optimistic, glass-half-full view of Iraq is not shared by most Democrats in Lieberman's home state. This partially explains one of the oddest survey results of the 2006 campaign season: According to a mid-February Quinnipiac University poll, Lieberman has a higher approval rating among Connecticut Republicans (71 percent) than Democrats (57 percent). Still, most Democratic senators with overall 63 percent approval and no serious Republican opponent would be tempted to prematurely break out the election-night champagne.

Instead, Lieberman is facing his most daunting political challenge since he upended maverick Republican Sen. Lowell Weicker in 1988. Lamont -- a Greenwich cable-television entrepreneur who is the well-born great-grandson of J.P. Morgan's business partner -- impetuously entered the race when he could not find an elected official to take on Lieberman over the war. As Lamont, who may invest as much as $500,000 of his own money in the contest, put it to me modestly, "I wasn't my own first choice."

Next page: Lamont is no hardcore Deaniac