Lieberman deserves a closer look than he’s gotten so far

LAST TUESDAY, the day of the New Hampshire primary, there was a sameness to the front pages of The New York Times and USA Today — something you don’t see every day.

Each featured four photographs, played with equal size so as to be perfectly fair to all. In each case, the four pictured were John Kerry, Howard Dean, Wesley Clark and John Edwards.

Those were the men leading in the polls, so it reflected sound news judgment — if, that is, you felt like you had to stop at four photos, and couldn’t go to five.

The fifth, applying the same logic of viability, would have been Joe Lieberman, the man we are endorsing for the Democratic nomination for president.

Sen. Lieberman, as it happened, ended up fifth in the actual vote. But he came in only three percentage points behind the two who were virtually tied in a dead heat for third. He was far closer to third than Gen. Clark and Sen. Edwards were to second.

That’s what the last tracking poll before the vote predicted. So why not feature the top two, or top five? In other words, why was Joe Lieberman, after 30 years of public service and a valiant effort as the vice presidential candidate in 2000, suddenly chopped liver?

I’m not just obsessing over two newspaper’s front pages. The fact is, those front pages reflected a consensus that seemed to infect all of the media in the weeks before Jan. 27. Everywhere I turned, I read and heard “Clark, Dean, Edwards and Kerry.”

Sure, Sen. Lieberman had skipped Iowa and missed out on all that excitement, but so had Gen. Clark, and it didn’t seem to hurt him any. Somehow, Gen. Clark had buzz, and Sen. Lieberman was old news.

Now I don’t know whether the press was ignoring the senator from Connecticut because the Democratic electorate was, or whether the Democratic electorate was talked into preferring the other four guys because the media made them look like winners.

Let’s assume the former. Let’s be generous to my profession and assume the media were just reflecting reality and not shaping it.

Still, that’s hard to explain. But let me give it a shot. I think part of it has to do with the last major story I saw about Sen. Lieberman on the front page of the Times. It was a profile that ran on Dec. 8 — the very day we were to learn that his old pal Al Gore was endorsing Dr. Dean. That’s about when folks starting writing Joe Lieberman off — and continue to do so, despite the fact that the other snap judgment made that day (that Howard Dean had it sewn up) was bogus.

The profile was headlined, “A Centrist, Lieberman Fights For Votes in an Extremist Era.” In other words, poor, quaint ol’ Joe is just out of step with the times. Why is that? Because he believes in getting along, even with Republicans, at a time when Howard Dean has everyone convinced that polarization is the way to go.

This is one of the weirdest bits of conventional “wisdom” I’ve seen in a while. Gov. Dean’s supporters and imitators would have Democrats believe that Sen. Lieberman and the centrist Democratic Leadership Council represent a failed strategy.

That ignores the glaringly obvious fact that the Gore/Lieberman team won the popular vote in 2000. It also ignores the fact that the same Third Way faction gave the Democrats the White House twice in the ’90s — the first time they had won an election not handed them by Watergate since 1964. That should count for something. Just because Bill Clinton was a flawed individual didn’t mean that his approach was wrong. The candidates who are doing the best — most notably Sens. Kerry and Edwards — seem to know that. The irony is that Sen. Lieberman, the very embodiment of the sensible center that appeals across party lines, hasn’t benefited in the same way.

Some Democrats have even dismissively referred to him as the “Republican” in the race. That is patently false. Joe Lieberman clearly embodies the highest and best ideals that have motivated the Democratic Party for generations. He has done so his whole life, from the time he joined Martin Luther King in the March on Washington until he stood up for America’s moral obligation to rid the Iraqi people of a vicious dictator in 1998, and again last year.

He has taken these stands whether they were popular or not, and he has not faltered. He is a true Democrat in the tradition of Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy — men who believed in America’s ability to use its wealth and power to make life better, not only for our own, but for all the suffering peoples of the world. That’s a faith that was shaken for many Democrats in the turmoil of Vietnam. But not for Joe Lieberman. He kept his faith in our ability to wield power for good.

He’s not following George Bush in supporting our mission in Iraq. As he likes to say on the stump, he was for regime change when W. couldn’t pronounce “Saddam Hussein” and “Osama bin Laden.”

Joe Lieberman, while his domestic agenda is only partly distinguishable from those of his “liberal” rivals, harkens back to the days when we left partisanship at the water’s edge. But he also believes passionately in working across artificial political lines to get things done here at home — which means they are more likely to get done.

More than that, he can be what George Bush promised to be in 2000, and has utterly failed to be — a uniter, not a divider. That’s what this country needs, and needs desperately.

If he’s a relic of another time, it’s a time we need to get back to — a time when we could disagree, but still respect each other, and find a way to work together for the common good.

Write to bwarthen@thestate.com.