Choosing Country Over Party: Time for Joe Lieberman to Become a Republican

Joe Lieberman, the "Independent Democrat" Senator from Connecticut is the sort of Democrat one doesn't see much of any more, though his sort was common up to about 1968. He is left of center (for the most part) on economic and social issues. But he is a lion on national security, including the War on Terror. He has been a consistent voice for prosecuting the War on Terror until victory. In that, Senator Lieberman is more like John F. Kennedy and Harry Truman than--say--Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi. That fact illustrates the decline of the Democratic Party as a serious voice for national security. It also presents Senator Lieberman with a stark choice, one that pits party loyalty against the safety of the country.

Senator Lieberman was not always a pariah in the party that he clings to. In the year 2000, Lieberman was considered enough of a Democrat to be Al Gore's running mate. Had a few votes gone the other way in Florida, he might be Vice President Joe Lieberman.

Fast forward to 2006. Senator Lieberman was running for his fourth term in the Senate. Because he was considered too pro war, too pro defense, too pro Israel, and (for some people) too Jewish to be a Democrat, Lieberman found himself defeated in the Democratic Primary by a businessman named Ned Lamont. A lesser man would have accepted defeat and called it a day. But Lieberman believed that he had a higher loyalty than just to party. He ran in the general election as an Independent and, on the strength of Moderate Democrat and Republican votes, won back his Senate seat. He has decided to caucus with the other Democrats, though, allowing them to maintain a bare majority in the Senate.

It may be time for Senator Lieberman to rethink that decision. It may be time for Senator Lieberman to choose country over party and cross the aisle, becoming a Republican.

The Democrats in the Senate, led by the increasingly mad cap Majority Leader Harry Reid, seem hell bent on trying to stuff down President Bush's throat a war funding bill that mandates capitulation in Iraq. Reid, who voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq, seems determined to grab defeat from the jaws of victory on the mistaken belief that it will be politically popular. And all to stick it to the man Reid and others believe is the real enemy of civilization--President of the United States George W. Bush.

Think about it. Reid and most of the other Democrats want to plunge Iraq into a horror of bloodshed and chaos of biblical proportions, with as many as a million dead and five million made refugees. They dream of the last helicopter leaving the Green Zone while Baghdad burns. And in the end, what is left of Iraq would become a new base for terrorists to wage jihad against the civilized world, fueled by oil revenue, buttressed by the latest humiliation of the Great Satan.

Where is the spirit of Harry Truman? Of Jack Kennedy? One would suspect that neither of those two gentlemen, iconic in the history of both the Democratic Party and of the United States, would be very happy at what their party has become. Ironically, neither JFK nor Truman, believing as they did that enemies of the United States should be fought to the death, would be very much welcome in the present day Democratic Party, which holds that enemies should be appeased.

Joe Lieberman is not welcome in the Democratic Party, because he more of a Kennedy and a Truman than a Reid or a Pelosi. Time to leave. It is not the Democratic Party of Lieberman's youth, that would. "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty."

Joe Lieberman will find that he is quite comfortable in the centrist-liberal wing of the Republican Party, which while small is still much larger than the conservative wing of the Democratic Party. He will, like many other former Democrats like--say--Ronald Reagan, find that he has come home.

He will, by making Mitch McConnell Senate Majority Leader, thus stymieing attempts by the Democrats to force surrender in Iraq, done his country a great service. He might actually do the Democratic Party, in which he is no longer welcome and in which he should no longer stay, a service by giving it a wake up call. Will the Democrats listen? Maybe not, but Joe Lieberman can at least wryly say, as so many have before him, that perhaps he did not leave the Democratic Party so much as it left him.