Lieberman

A member of a political party in a ruling system is more or less expected to maintain a certain ideological purity. After all, these people advance to power on the backs of others. Or more accurately on their hands, minds and feet as the party workers strive with long hours to implant their candidates in power.

This of course creates a certain obligation in return, the obligation to support the party.

In this aspect, Sen. Lieberman seems to have a serious issue.

There is one thing you don't do in politics, you don't turn your back on the party, and by extension the people that helped elect you. As Chris Mathews sums up in his book Hardball: You dance with the ones that brung 'ya.

Mathews offers some interesting examples as well, how loyalty is won in Washington ("he was the kind of man that switched teams without giving away the signals" was one example of high praise) and how it is lost.

Lieberman perhaps committed the greatest political sin of all, he not only broke with the party, he tossed a grenade into his own party's trenches. His essay in the Wall Street Journal, which came from a speech delivered for a neoconservative event no less (Salon, P1) was an unabashed attack on his own party.

He even took the conservatives own terms, their own weaponry, casting the democratic party as un-American and unpatriotic, echoing the worst of the Bush-era neoconservative Zoroastrianism.

But you have to ask what it's all for? Is he trying to woo conservative voters? after the last election you have to wonder if there are any left... is he aiming for a split in the party between left-wing antiwar liberals and moderate social liberals?

Lieberman broke with his own party to endorse McCain. This is not unheard of, some charismatic conservatives have garnered support from moderate liberals. Notably the Regan Democrats of '80 and '84, chaired by another example from hardball, Connolly, who earned derision for masquerading as a democrat.

But in the case of Regan Democrats most were the average Joe (no pun intended), not elected federal legislators. No one cares who the grocery bagger at Copps is voting for, he can switch loyalties and party identification any day of the week; but for a man who has advanced his career on the work of others in the party, such a betrayal is not as easily forgotten.