I hate making this call about my Orthodox Jewish brother Joe Lieberman, but he almost certainly will lose next week’s Connecticut Democratic Senate primary. He will be defeated, as predicted by the polls and pundits, primarily because of his support for the Iraq war and his refusal to join in the demonization of George W. Bush.
Lieberman will also go down because he is a man of faith, an Orthodox Jew, a believer in an overarching religious authority. His strong religious convictions (from which stem his commitment to the human rights of Iraqis) put him at a clear distance from an increasingly secularized Democratic Party activist base. And he may not be the only Democratic politician to suffer from being on the wrong political side in this cultural divide.
Democratic Illinois Senator Barack Obama recently warned of the peril awaiting a political party tagged with such a religiously indifferent identity. A study comparing church attendance of both Republican and Democratic delegates to the 2004 presidential nominating conventions showed that the GOP scored much higher in the worship criterion.
While Lieberman has compiled a reliably liberal voting record in his eighteen-year Senate career, there are enough Connecticut Democrats who will go to the polls on August 8in order to self-righteously congratulate themselves for voting to remove this decent man.
While Lieberman is far from preachy about his Orthodoxy, it’s not a secret that he prays and studies Torah on a daily basis, and that he refuses to engage in any politicking or traveling on the Sabbath. Such values establish him as a fundamentalist outsider to an increasingly relativistic “do your own thing” Democratic electorate. While his stand on Iraq serves as the foremost reason for liberal activists to oppose him on primary day, Lieberman’s religious commitment has never endeared him to Democratic Party secularists.
To be sure, national security was Lieberman’s main motive for originally concluding that Saddam had to go and national security is why he refuses to get behind his opponent’s arbitrary deadline for withdrawing American troops. But Lieberman’s support for the war is also attributable to his religious conviction that the biblical ideals of freedom and equality belong to all God’s creatures, not just Yale professors and yuppie Westporters.
As a man of religious faith, Lieberman believes in man’s responsibility to make the world God created a better place by helping to spread the gift of liberty, however imperfectly the results may first appear.
Ironically, a case can be made that the infamous kiss the president bestowed on Lieberman on the floor of the House of Representatives was more a reflection of the kinship they share as men of faith than a token of affectionate gratitude for Lieberman’s carrying the ball against the antiwar Left. Bush and Lieberman are both sustained by the belief that despite the attacks of the elite media, their ultimate accountability as to how they used this nation’s power will be to their Creator.
Politically, it would have been far less costly for Lieberman to join the guilt-ridden “illegitimacy of military power” wing of his party. But to overlook the brutality of hate-filled fanatics would be to betray his bedrock religious principles and expose this country and the Middle East to an even more likely terrorist threat.
The conclusion to be drawn from Lieberman’s pending defeat is that his party’s self-styled “progressive” human-rights base is ideologically bankrupt when it comes to fighting the most bigoted enemy of our time.