Most seemingly endless U.S. Senate careers end with a
whimper rather than a bang.
When Dennis House, the moderator of “Face the State” on WFSB
Channel 3, asked Senator Joe Lieberman how he would like to be remembered by
history upon his retirement, Mr. Lieberman said the question put him in mind of
Winston Churchill who, when asked a similar question, said he thought he would
be well remembered because he himself intended to write the history of his time
and place. Immediately, Mr. Lieberman, perhaps familiar with Mr. Churchill’s
voluminous writings, said he didn’t know about writing history himself, but…
Mr. Lieberman, the author of seven books -- The Power Broker (1966), a biography of the late Democratic Party
chairman, John Bailey; The Scorpion and the Tarantula (1970), a study of
early efforts to control nuclear proliferation; The Legacy (1981), a
history of Connecticut politics from 1930 to 1980; Child Support in America
(1986), a guidebook on methods to increase the collection of child support from
delinquent fathers; In Praise of Public Life (2000); An Amazing
Adventure (2003), reflections on his 2000 vice presidential run; and The
Gift of Rest: Rediscovering the Beauty of the Sabbath (2011) -- can
turn a phrase, and he is a close student of history. In that sense, while by no means as prolific
as Mr. Churchill, Mr. Lieberman could be, out of office and free to roam the historical
range, a man as dangerous as he is thoughtful.
So given to cogitation is the senator, that someone here in
Connecticut once flung at him the sobriquet “The Hamlet of the Senate,” which
stuck.
Some of Mr. Lieberman’s more recent hobby horses are term
limits -- he likes them --the extreme partisanship that has made co-operation
in the U.S. Senate less possible -- he hates it -- and the Electoral College --
he’d prefer the president be elected by popular vote. In the course of his 23
years in the Senate, Mr. Lieberman has changed his mind or emphasis on all
three issues; but, as the transcendentalists tell us, to become perfect is to
have changed often. Extreme partisanship destroys collegiality, in Mr. Lieberman’s
view, and the Electoral College distorts the sovereignty of voters. Out of
office, Mr. Lieberman’s preferences are not likely to carry much weight. Term
limits are a positive good because they prevent congressional sclerosis; of
course, you must have some people in the Senate who know what they’re doing,
Mr. Lieberman hastened to add.
One senses the senator has not thought deeply on the
question of partisanship. Suppose – just to suppose – that one of the two major
parties dedicated itself to a daily revision of the U.S. Constitution, so that
the Constitution could once and forever be rescued from autodidacts who insist
that the document strengthens the liberty of the people by imposing restraints
on fashionable ambitions. Given such a circumstance, would not Mr. Lieberman yearn
for a principled partisan opposition?
During his retirement, removed from the congressional theatre
of action and inaction, Mr. Lieberman may in time produce something worthwhile
on such enduring subjects. Distance clears the mind wonderfully, and a thing
seen from the outside often wears a different appearance than the same thing
seen from the inside, as Churchill well knew. Partisanship is related to political
parties. A certain measure of partisanship must be allowed if one is to have
parties at all. The abolition of political parties, some argue, would usher in
political anarchy rather than the utopia envisioned by radical thinkers in the
United States who continue to believe, apparently sincerely, that parties are a
bar to right reason and efficient government.
Political parties are, in fact, a bar to tyranny as
understood by the vanishing breed of Republicans in the age of the Caesars,
many of whom longed for a restoration of the old Roman Republic. While the most
representative form of government, democracy is also the weakest, subject
always to popular demagogues and populists soon lifted aloft to tend the Republic
and make the trains run on time. Like constitutions, vibrant political parties
are a bar to overweening ambition. For those who do not believe in a politics
of limits, the weakening of political parties opens the door to what one might
call magical political thinking, rooted in the immodest notion that for
congresspersons and presidents, as for God, all things are possible.
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