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Politics is Good: In case anyone is wondering who my favorite Democrat is these days, it's Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut. It had been Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the senior senator from New York, who has been one of the nation's most important and contrarian social scientists over the last 40 years. But now it's Lieberman, and only in part because of Moynihan's announced retirement and his apparent eagerness to reapportion his seat to a queen-in-waiting from a place that's decidedly not Queens. I've actually liked Lieberman for quite a while. I've especially respected him for his work with Bill Bennett in taking on the entertainment industry when, for example, it has sought to amuse boys and girls by musically urging them to rape and murder and otherwise disobey their elders. ("I'd give it 95, Dick--it has a good beat, you know, and I can plunder to it.") But the most immediate reason for making the junior senator from Connecticut my new favorite Democrat is his recent book, In Praise of Public Life, as it says a slew of on-target, if out-of-step, things about politics. My starting point in such matters is simple: Democracy is not possible without politics, and politics is not possible without practitioners called "politicians." For me, far from being an epithet, the tag "professional politician" is a term of respect. This is not to say, it should be obvious, that politics is never odoriferous, or that regular turnover in elected jobs is without merit. Instead, it is to say that it's naively cynical--nothing more worldly or sophisticated than that--to condemn all manner of imperfections as "politics as usual" or to beat up on politicians in the motley ways that even other politicians like to indulge in, especially around election time. As witness, however, the title of his conversational little book, Lieberman is anything but glib. He reveres public service with a seriousness best characterized as religious. This, for instance, is how he concludes: "The day is short, as that rabbi said so long ago, and there is much work to be done...repairing our government and improving our beloved country and world." Lieberman also appreciates, in case I've suggested otherwise, why great numbers of citizens continue to disengage politically and how the system sometimes needs to be "shaken up through the election of a new kind of leader, like Jesse Ventura." He laments that political life is often nasty and intrusive and, therefore, offensive to many. Though, I hasten to add, he himself is not even close to being a Milquetoast or timid in combat. Two-term United States senators, particularly those, who also have extensive careers in state government, usually aren't. But Lieberman differs, in two very basic ways, from the take on the world that led to Ventura's election and that shapes his governorship. First, I trust it never would occur to Lieberman to describe colleague politicians as "gutless cowards," as Ventura did this past legislative session upon getting miffed about something. This difference reaches beyond matters of style. (As far as I know, Lieberman has never wrestled professionally.) It derives, rather, from the fact that Ventura and many of his partisans see politics--as opposed to something called "governance"--as fundamentally suspect, while Lieberman sees his line of work as honorable at root. As I do. And second, Lieberman does not attribute nearly as much policy or philosophical heft to the third-party movement that brought Ventura to office as (I trust) the governor and his friends do. While Lieberman recognizes that third parties have repeatedly cropped up in American history, they usually have done so as "part of a political realignment around a major societal change," he writes. But what is happening today, he adds, seems less like the emergence of "Lincoln's Republican Party and Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party" and more a reflection of Thoreau's "hostility to the entire process of popular elections"--an exercise the author of Walden described as a "sort of gaming, like chequers or backgammon." My own sense, which presumably parallels Lieberman's, is that it will be hard for any party, Ventura's included, to gain full footing as long as its message is grounded more in disgruntlement, and in half-bows to "moderation," rather than in anything meatier. This republic may have been jumpstarted in crankiness and righteous anger (the Boston Tea Party, for instance), but it has been animated by compelling and affirmative visions of greater freedom, opportunity, and security, to pick a handful of civic virtues. These visions--to complete the circle--have been legitimately and frequently achieved, in no small measure, by means of something called "politics," and people called "politicians," in all their supposed dastardliness. -- Mitchell B. Pearlstein is president of Center of the American Experiment, a conservative think tank in Minneapolis. |