Just eight years after Joe Lieberman was on the Democratic Party’s presidential ticket, a growing number of conservatives have a better idea: put in him on the Republican Party’s presidential ticket.
The Weekly Standard’s William Kristol touted the idea in his column this week. After running a lengthy excerpt of a speech Lieberman recently gave, imploring Democrats to embrace Bush’s vision for combating “Islamist extremism,” Kristol concluded:
Read the whole speech on Lieberman’s website. As for Rudy and John and Fred and Mitt and Mike: Take a break from kissing babies to pick up the phone and congratulate Joe. Seek his endorsement after you win the nomination. What the heck–offer him the vice presidency. (Rudy, you might try State or Defense, since you’ll need a pro-life running mate.)
But McCain-Lieberman, Thompson-Lieberman, Romney-Lieberman, Huckabee-Lieberman — those sound like winning tickets to us. It’s true, given the behavior of the congressional Democrats, the GOP nominee might well win with a more conventional running mate. But why settle for a victory if you can have a realignment?
The idea is, oddly enough, drawing praise in several conservative circles. National Review’s Peter Wehner seems to like Kristol’s suggestion:
At the end of the editorial, Kristol suggests Lieberman for VP again — but this time, to serve as the running mate on a Republican ticket. It’s an intriguing idea — and it would certain scramble the political chessboard. Whichever party wins in ’08, let’s hope Joe Lieberman plays a pivotal role on national-security matters. In the entire political world, there are not many who are better, or politically braver.
And far-right blogger Mark Noonan went so far as to describe Lieberman as “the ideal candidate for Vice President on the Republican ticket in 2008,” in part because it would demonstrate to the world that “America is united in its quest for victory.”
At the risk of raining on the parade, this seems ridiculously far-fetched. As humiliating as Lieberman is on matters of foreign policy and national security, he’s also fairly liberal on most domestic policy matters, including abortion and gay rights. Is the Republican Party so devoid of leaders that can win a national election that it has to look beyond the GOP for running mates?
As for the substance of the Lieberman speech that Kristol enjoyed so much, it’s probably worth noting that the Connecticut senator “argued that George W. Bush and the Republican presidential candidates remained truer than the Democratic party to its tradition of a ‘moral, internationalist, liberal and hawkish’ foreign policy that was established by Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John Kennedy.”
This is exactly why Lieberman has lost any shred of credibility. As Matt Yglesias explained:
You’d have to be an idiot to draw from the FDR-Truman school of internationalism the simple lesson that a disposition to start wars is a good idea. After all, JFK was “hawkish,” too, but Lieberman seems to forget that his act of hawkery in Vietnam turned out to be a huge fiasco, and his foreign policy triumph came during the Cuban Missile Crisis when he wisely rejected the counsels of the preventive war crowd and instead struck a pragmatic deal.
Obviously all-war all-the-time has long been Lieberman’s signature contribution to Democratic Party thinking (like Bill Kristol on the other side) but the willingness of others to swallow the idea that the “internationalism” of the liberal tradition amounts simply to a disposition to kill foreigners is really insane.
Kevin Drum drove the point home:
“Insane” really is the right word here. Thanks to guys like Kristol, our foreign policy decisions have been increasingly framed through the lens of whether you’re willing to go to war. Not any particular war, but simply whether you’re willing to go to war in general. It’s Prussianism gone wild: every war is a good war.
What makes Lieberman’s idea even crazier is that Truman avoided more wars than he joined. That was the whole point of containment. He didn’t try to roll back Soviet gains in Eastern Europe; he provided aid to Greece and Turkey but no troops beyond a tiny advisory group; he airlifted supplies to Berlin but didn’t start a war over the Soviet blockade; and when he did go to war in Korea, he worked hard to get UN support. Given their actual records, does anyone seriously think that FDR, Truman, or JFK would have invaded Iraq if any of them had been president after 9/11? Anyone?
Of course not. Lieberman has chosen the wrong mantle, and then bastardized it.