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thought for the day…

the question of whether lieberman should suffer consequences for his apostasy is being framed in terms of whether the obama-led democratic party will live up to its leader’s campaign rhetoric and move forward with magnanimity and grace, letting bygones be bygones and healing old wounds because we need everybody on board, and because bipartisanship! punishing lieberman would be petty and pointless, we’re told, and would contradict the spirit of unity that has characterized the campaign and the nascent obama administration.

i disagree, and not just because i personally would love to see lieberman’s head on a spike, for my own shallow and vindictive reasons. at the end of the day, this is not about punishing a turncoat democrat; it’s about whether we’re willing to accept amoral, transparently self-serving hack politics in the interest of a very narrow definition of pragmatics.

the fact is that obama won by promising to change the way politics has been done for the last generation: through smears, distractions, fearmongering, character assassination, gratuitous questioning of the other guy’s patriotism, brazen politicization of national security, and flogging of meaningless wedge issues. outside of actual, nominal republicans, i can’t think of anybody who embodies that kind of vicious and cynical politics more than joe lieberman.

the fact that lieberman was personally disloyal to obama and antagonistic to the party’s interests is beside the point — testimony to his miserable character, perhaps, but not important on the scale of the problems we face. if being a weaselly and treacherous human being were lieberman’s only crime, then his advocates would be right in characterizing the effort to de-chair him as spiteful and counterproductive. but this isn’t about barack obama’s hurt feelings, which i give obama credit for being man enough to rise above. this is about the kind of leader he said he would be. promising to change the political dynamic is not identical with a call for hand-holding and unison singing of “kumbaya.” if obama meant what he said, lieberman has to be held responsible. anything less is a tacit endorsement of the way he has conducted himself, not just as a putative member of the democratic caucus, but as a U.S. senator.

we should take a cue from the post-apartheid regime in south africa: you can’t have reconciliation without truth, and truth implies consequences. not retaliation, not retribution — consequences, and the acknowledgment that everything is not automatically hunky-dory just because the most immediately culpable actors have been deposed. i don’t see anything in the prospect of lieberman losing his homeland security chairmanship that’s inconsistent with that sentiment. if the argument for keeping him around is that he’s “with us on everything but the war,” then give him responsibility for anything but the war. if he chooses on that basis to take his ball and go home, then his decision has to be understood as such: his decision, not a vote to boot him from the caucus.

as for where obama stands, my going hypothesis — and my hope — is that he’s exercising that long-view strategic sensibility that got him where he is today, and waiting to see what happens with the election results in AK, MN & GA before making a move. depending on the outcomes of those contests, the need to keep joe happy becomes more or less pressing, though it’s hard for me to see a scenario where he’s the pivotal vote (as if he could be counted on to break a GOP filibuster when it really mattered). in any event, either openly or through senate back-channels, lieberman has to take a hit. not to shore up obama’s strength, which is all but unassailable at the moment anyway, but to make good on the promise of reform at a systemic and philosophical level.