Photo by Mr. Frego

What is to be done with Joe Lieberman?

By coming out last week against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s health care plan, and saying he would join a Republican filibuster to keep the bill from coming to a vote, the Independent senator from Connecticut finally dropped all pretense of Democratic loyalty. Which should come as a surprise to exactly no one who is familiar with Lieberman’s hypocritical, sanctimonious Lewinsky-era attacks on Bill Clinton (and “the impact of his actions on our democracy and its moral foundations”); his hawkish approach to national security and the war in Iraq; his indifference to the wishes of Democratic voters in his state in 2006 after they chose Ned Lamont in the primary; and his support last fall of John McCain in the presidential election.

So what should the Democrats do with him?

Well, if Democrats were like Republicans, Lieberman would be hanging in the public square already. If Democrats were like Republicans, he would be riding the back bench of the Senate Chambers Janitorial-Services Subcommittee. If Democrats were like Republicans, Joe Lieberman would be Dede Scozzafava, the moderate Upstate New York Republican House candidate who, late last week, was outed as being ideologically impure by the mob of right-wing scaremongers (including Limbaugh, Beck, Palin, and Malkin) and promptly thrown under the bus. After which the bus was set on fire.

Judging by today’s left-wing editorials, that’s exactly what many want to happen to Lieberman as well.

But here’s the problem: The thing that makes the Democratic Party so well-equipped to deal with rapidly changing national demographics and place itself in a position to profit off of them electorally – that being its big-tent, ideologically wishy-washy, take-all-comers, ad hoc approach to governance – is the very thing that makes it unable to handle heresy when it threatens to derail party priorities, like health care. Sure, Lieberman is a traitor. Sure, he’s a hypocrite who once tried to pass a bill that would have gotten rid of the filibuster and who is now threatening to use the filibuster to subvert the will of his constituents. And sure, he is the senator from Connecticut, which is the insurance capital of the world, and therefore any philosophical arguments he can make against a government-run insurance option are tainted to the point of absurdity. But Democrats just aren’t cut out for cutting out the hearts of those who defy them. For months, the Democrats have been held hostage by members of their own party who 20 years ago would have been called Republicans but who were hand-picked by the Democratic leadership to help them retake Congress in 2006. The Faustian bargain Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer made back then was simple: We will once again be in power … but there will be no “we.” The Democrats have no heresy because they have no ideology. Which is exactly the reason they’re in control of Congress.

So what should Democrats do with Mr. Lieberman? Probably nothing. As much as left-wingers would love to see him dropped down a well by Obama and Emanuel and other party leaders, deep down every Democrat knows that it’s not going to happen. That it’s not in their party’s nature. That it’s best to just take Lieberman aside and quietly give him what he wants in order to get health care passed. That the best way to keep their party in power is to continue making its platform as big and malleable as possible and to continue driving Republicans to make theirs even smaller and firmer.

Ideology is a cold bedfellow. Especially on election day.