Mensch at work: the dilemma of Joe Lieberman.

• Author: Scheiber, Noam
• Position: An Amazing Adventure: Joe and Hadassah's Personal Notes on the 2000 Campaign - Book Review

AN AMAZING ADVENTURE Joe and Hadassah's Personal Notes on the 2000 Campaign by Joseph and Hadassah Lieberman Simon & Schuster, $25.00

IT WAS BACK IN MARCH OF LAST YEAR when Joe Lieberman, overcome both by his gratitude to Al Gore and his own satisfaction at being capable of such gratitude, began to make the sort of statements that give political consultants indigestion, promising not to pursue the Democratic nomination in 2004 if Gore chose to run again. In many ways, the pledge summed up the Joe Lieberman Washington has come to know over the years--that rare politician completely lacking in guile, a man who unflinchingly places his personal honor above his political ambition. The problem is that Lieberman is a politician. And politically, the pledge was a self-inflicted wound--something no one had demanded of him but which, once offered, would inevitably tie his hands.

You might think that a politician who found himself in this situation would choose one of two options: Either break the pledge and deal with the inevitable flak, or live with the mistake and sideline his presidential ambitions. But Lieberman did neither--or, rather, both. Publicly he continued to affirm the pledge, if anything even more vigorously as time went by. Privately, he spent the next several months doing all the things presidential candidates do, giving speech after speech in key presidential primary states and raising money hand over fist for his leadership PAC. This summer he floated criticisms of Gore's 2000 "people versus the powerful" mantra, highlighting the ideological distance between himself and his patron and implicitly identifying the rationale for his own candidacy. And, in recent weeks, he and his wife Hadassah have hosted a series of dinners with top Democratic operatives, whom they lobbied to hold out for a possible Lieberman campaign--or, at the very least, "not to commit [to another presidential candidate] unless they talked to him first," as one dinner guest recently told Roll Call.

Fortunately for Lieberman, Gore's decision not to run again made the pledge moot. Still, the episode epitomizes the dilemma Lieberman poses both for himself and the Democratic Party. On the one hand, he is a politician of real substance, that rare high-profile Democrat who has serious thoughts about foreign policy--who, for instance, understands why the use of force might be a legitimate response to the threat of a nuclear-armed Iraq, but hopelessly counter-productive...