While the endorsement is a positive development for McCain as he attempts to resurrect his candidacy, the truth is that Lieberman brings few votes with him. After all, if he could not get many Democrats or independents to vote for him for president when he was the only foreign-policy hawk in the field in 2004, how many would follow him now?
When asked about how Democrats have come to think about him, the genial Lieberman said that they have come to view him as the party’s “eccentric uncle.” But the comments from the leftist blogosphere were far worse than that.
At places like Huffingtonpost.com and other sites where the MoveOn.org crowd congregate, the comments range from the scatological to the purely anti-Semitic. At such places, hard-core anti-Bush and antiwar sentiments are the coin of the realm, and hostility to Israel and its perceived influence on American foreign policy is rampant. The notion of a Democratic Party that aggressively defends America’s interests abroad as vigorously as it fights for liberal causes at home is treated as an absurdity in this quarter.
Even a bastion of Jewish liberalism like the editorial page of the Forward had to admit that the reaction to Lieberman was more “than the familiar fringe bigotry that we’re accustomed to tut-tutting and then ignoring. This is something new and alarming.”
We should not jump to the conclusion that the Democratic Party is now the property of the Jimmy Carters of the world – though it’s true that they are not quite as insignificant as the Israel-haters (such as Buchanan) are in the GOP. All of the major Democratic candidates back Israel and use harsh rhetoric concerning Iran, though whether their words (or those of their Republican counterparts) will be translated into policy is an open question.
But Lieberman was the last of a particular kind of principled Democrat still in captivity. American politics has changed, and the country is worse off for it. Let there be no doubt about it: The Scoop Jackson wing of the party is now officially dead.