As the primaries draw closer, observers have been wondering: Can
Howard Dean be stopped? Is it possible for the Democrats to pull
themselves back toward the center and away from the abyss?
Even if the former is possible, reasons abound to doubt the
latter. Almost lost within the shuffle over New Year’s amidst the
orange alert and the fingers pointed at the Bush Agriculture
Department over the mad-cow hysteria was a year-end mini-tempest
that nicely illustrates the nature of today’s Democratic Party. For
what seems like the millionth time in this election cycle, Joe
Lieberman was forced to defend his left flank.
This time it was for comments that were made to sound as if the
Connecticut senator was about to pull a Dennis Kucinich in reverse
on abortion. Lieberman was holding court with the Manchester
Union Leader and waxing philosophical about abortion as an
issue he thinks about a lot. He was quoted as saying that while he
remains “staunchly pro-choice,” he realizes (in Union
Leader senior political reporter John DiStaso’s words) “the
period of time a woman actually has a ‘right to choose’ gradually
grows shorter as medical science pushes fetal viability
ever-earlier in pregnancy.”
“To me,” Lieberman said, “Roe v. Wade said that in the
stages of pregnancy up to viability (of the fetus), the state
basically cannot intervene in a decision a woman makes whether to
go forward with a pregnancy or not. But after viability, the state
can regulate that choice because the interest of the fetus goes
up.” He noted that the Supreme Court has replaced Roe’s
original trimester framework with a consideration for fetal
viability and argued that there was no inconsistency between a
pro-choice position and the realization that as the age at which
fetuses can survive outside the womb has been lowered “the period
of time in a pregnancy when the right to choose prevails has been
somewhat shortened.”
The publication of these comments under the arguably misleading
headline “Roe v. Wade should be updated, says Lieberman”
prompted a flurry of press releases and statements from Lieberman’s
campaign reaffirming his pro-choice credentials. “I did not say nor
do I believe that Roe should be looked at again, revisited or
reconsidered,” said the candidate in a statement. Lieberman
spokesman Jano Cabrera said in an Associated Press story, “There is
one reason and one reason only why there is no direct quote from
Senator Lieberman calling for the Roe v. Wade decision to
be looked at again: Because he never said that.”
Kate Michelman came to Lieberman’s defense, but Dean predictably
seized the moment to liken his opponent to the evil Republicans: “I
think Joe makes the mistake that Republicans do, insinuating
himself in the doctor-patient relationship.” For good measure, he
dismissively claimed Lieberman “doesn’t understand the
science.”
Really? The Supreme Court did in fact move from the arbitrary
trimester framework to the somewhat less arbitrary viability
standard more than a decade ago, in Planned Parenthood v.
Casey in 1992. The common understanding of viability has gone
from approximately 28 weeks when Roe was decided to 23 to 24 weeks
today, with continued medical advances offering the potential to
push this back even further. It’s hardly a radical pronouncement to
suggest that this reality has legal relevance.
The Democratic Party has become such a motley conglomerate of
left-wing special interest groups that even implying that
post-viability fetuses can be protected from abortion invites
controversy and requires damage control pledging fealty to the
NARAL line. The irony is that it is highly unlikely that Lieberman
would ever act upon the observation he shared with the Union
Leader in office. His most recent high-profile action on the
abortion issue in the Senate was to vote against the new law
banning partial-birth abortions, which tend to occur in later
stages of pregnancy.
This has been Lieberman’s modus operandi for quite some time: To
make vaguely conservative-sounding statements in speeches and
interviews and then vote with the left in the Senate. This is the
pattern he followed on racial preferences, Bill Clinton’s conduct
in the Lewinsky matter, Hollywood and various family issues. His
conservative votes — such as the hawkish stance on Iraq that has
caused much friction with the Democratic base during his
presidential campaign — are relatively rare; it is mainly his
rhetoric that has gained him a reputation as a comparatively
conservative Democrat.
Yet for today’s Democrats, even this is too provocative. A
candidate in the Jack Kennedy tradition on national defense who so
much as pays lip service to traditional values, while compiling a
reliably liberal voting record on social issues, is regarded as a
right-wing impostor, a member of the “Republican wing of the
Democratic Party.”
This is why if a successful stop-Dean candidate for the
Democratic presidential nomination is to emerge, it isn’t likely to
be Lieberman. In a column about Al Gore’s decision to endorse Dean
over his former running mate, Jonah Goldberg argued, “…Joe
Lieberman has been at the forefront of the war on terrorism in the
Senate. He was pretty much the original drafter of the Department
of Homeland Security, and in 2001 and 2002 he was the chairman of
the Senate Governmental Affairs committee. In short, not only is
Lieberman more qualified than he was in 2000, but the things that
made him qualified to be Al Gore’s stand-in back then are all the
more important after 9/11.”
But today’s Democrats have different priorities; none of those
conservative-sounding qualifications are any more attractive to the
crowds that cheer for Dean than off-hand comments about limits to
“abortion rights.” The left has thoroughly captured the party.
This is of course the very point Zell Miller made in his recent
book A National Party No More. But forget Zell Miller.
This is a party that no longer has much room even for Joe
Lieberman.
