Marshall Wittmann, the Democratic Leadership Council thinker who writes the Bull Moose blog, is a terrific guy. But in his zeal to defend Joe Lieberman heâs backed himself into a corner.
Thereâs a larger debate about Lieberman and his role in the party, but Iâll set that aside for now. Marshall defended the Senatorâs honor by citing his vote against the bankruptcy bill, which Marshall praised a as âa strong stand against this flawed legislation.â Indeed Marshall throws this strong stance in the face of all the liberals who see Lieberman as a shill for business.
Fair enough. But since then several other bloggers have pointed out that the best chance to stop the bankruptcy bill was not on the final vote. The decisive vote was an earlier cloture vote. And Lieberman voted yes on that. Probably, after passage was inevitable, he switched from yes to no in order to spare himself more criticism from the left.
So Marshall responded by launching a counterattack on âdogmatic idealoguesâ and âhyperspace leftiesâ who gang up on Lieberman. That’s fine as far as it goes. I actually agree with Marshall and the DLC on the suicidal purity of the Democratic partyâs left wing, embodied by the Howard Dean movement and its fanatical internet contingent, even if I disagree with his support for Lieberman in particular. (I think Lieberman’s zeal to be seen as bipartisan, apologetics for torture, history of supporting capital gains tax cuts and fighting sensible regulations on Wall Street allow party liberals to tarnish the whole moderate wing as sell-outs.)
Be that as it may, thereâs a specific issue here. Marshall claimed Lieberman opposed the bankruptcy bill, but it turned out he really didnât. Shouldnât he, you know, admit that? He could still argue why he supports Lieberman despite this one bad vote. But clearly he was caught praising Lieberman for a particular stance and then, when it was pointed out that Lieberman actually did the opposite, lashed out at his critics without acknowledging the contradiction.
Marshall is in many ways a Scoop Jackson Democrat. Jackson was a foreign policy hawk and a domestic New Deal liberal. Lieberman isn’t quite that. He’s a hawk and a pro-business moderate. It’s fine for Marshall to decide he cares most about foreign policy and support Lieberman despite some domestic disagreements. Pretending Lieberman is something other than what he actually is simply undermines the case.
