Politics: the challenger's plight - Joseph Lieberman's campaign against Lowell P. Weicker - column

National Review, Oct 14, 1988 by William F. Buckley, Jr

NEW YORK, SEPT 12

IT IS WIDELY OBSERVED that if you are a Representative running for re-election to Congress the chances of your being defeated are remote. It is less widely known that increasingly the odds also favor the senatorial incumbent, for all the obvious reasons and for some not so obvious. In New York, for instance, it is unlikely that political quizmasters could give you the name of the person who is running against Daniel Patrick Moynihan. It is not quite that bad in the state of Connecticut, though very nearly so. And for the paradoxical reason that Lowell Weicker, the Republican incumbent, is always in the news because he is, well, so awful. By some people's calibrations, that was the reason Senator Joe McCarthy was always in the news, except that Senator McCarthy wondered whether people were as patriotic as he was, whereas Weicker wonders whether people are as morally magnificent as he is.

I went down to a Rotary Club meeting in Stamford to hear Lowell Weicker's Democratic opponent, Joseph Lieberman, hold forth. Lieberman is the attorney general of the state of Connecticut and he has a reputation for being an eat-'em-alive liberal. He certainly didn't act that way in speaking to the Rotarians, and though it is natural to change emphases just a little depending on what group you are speaking to, one walked away from the Sheraton Hotel doubting that Joe Lieberman deals in forked tongues.

He is a Democrat who: Applauded the use of military force in Grenada. Applauded the anti-terrorist strike in Libya. Applauded the deployment of naval forces to keep open the sea channel in the Persian Gulf All these positions, Republican Senator Weicker opposed.

Lieberman favors a moment of silence in the public schools; and-as he put it, "in order"-he believes in God, in love of country, and in the work ethic. By contrast, Lowell Weicker prays every day only that there shall never be prayers said at school.

Lieberman believes that Fide) Castro is one of the most finished totalitarians of the century: "He is more of a Marxist-Leninist than Gorbachev." Weicker believes that Castro i "a man of enormous intellect and idealism."

Lieberman believes that one should first seek out a way of cutting expenses and only then go for extra taxes. He'd have voted, however inelegant he thought it as a piece of legislation, in favor of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings bill, which Weicker opposed.

On abortion (Lowell Weicker will be satisfied only when the Federal Government provides a bonus to any woman who aborts her child), Lieberman looks and sounds genuinely distressed by the subject. It is, he says, a profound moral question. He opposes abortion. But he would not outlaw it. And then he points out that Roe v. Wade, which turned the country's laws around on the subject of abortion, recognized the right of the state at some point during pregnancy to extend protection to human life. He was saying, in effect, that although it developed under Roe v. Wade that anyone can get an abortion at any time, in fact, the Supreme Court only meant to license it for early in the pregnancy.

LIEBERMAN spoke with that degree of ideological modesty which highlights the imperial obnoxiousness of the Republican for whose seat he is competing. If politics is heavily a matter of character, as we all are urged to believe in the matter of Dan Quayle, then many independents, and even some Republicans, are going to look at the two alternative candidates and say: Better a Democratic Lieberman, than a Republican Weicker. Some would go so far as to say, Better nobody, than Weicker. James Jackson Kilpatrick, the renowned columnist, mentioned the other day that in all the years he has worked on the Hill, he has yet to hear one human being utter one respectful, let alone admiring, let alone affectionate word about Weicker.

Does that surprise Mr. Weicker? Evidently not. For a while it was thought he would run for governor rather than for the Senate, but he decided to stay in the Senate, he reported to the Litchfield Times, in order to "aggravate the New Right." Or as Mr. Weicker, always in search of keener formulations that better express his character, once said at a cocktail party: "I've always been the turd in the punchbowl." An artistic triumph of self-description.