joe turncoat

So, Senate Democrats voted to allow Joe Lieberman to hang onto his chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee. Forgive me if I'm not bursting with enthusiasm. In fact, when I had picked all the low-hanging fruit this summer reading about Obama and Hillary slugging it out in the primary, I went off in search of some unflattering stories about Lieberman. I wasn't disappointed (click the link and read a doozy: I wish I could have been there to witness journalist Matt Taibbi unintentionally laughing out loud in the middle of a Lieberman speech and the resultant confrontation with Lieberman supporters).

Marc Ambinder in The Atlantic interprets the slap on Lieberman's wrist in light of the Democratic sweep in the election: the Democratic party has a mandate and Obama tends not to waste time and resources on paltry infighting in favor of focusing on the big goals. And keeping Lieberman in the caucus helps reach those goals. Ironically, the claims about a political party being "a big tent" usually come from Republicans - perhaps because they have a lot of convincing to do on this question. The Democratic party, obviously, is more of a big tent (at best a microcosm of America as a whole and at worst a fractured coalition of feuding interest groups), but the tent gets a bit smaller if Lieberman is essentially kicked out of it.

So, in the favor of the government actually getting things accomplished and having any chance to transcend (or at least curtail) partisan gridlock over the next four/eight years, I guess I'll have to tolerate Turncoat Joe as a quasi-Democrat for awhile...until I move to Connecticut just in time to register to vote so I can help bounce him out of the Senate in 2012.