Demagogue

Connecticut Senators Joe Lieberman and Chris Dodd used to be the best of friends. But now? Jeffrey Goldberg offers this assessment in The New Yorker:

... few relationships are as unhappy as the one between Connecticut’s two senators.

A wall in Lieberman’s office is covered with photographs of the two men together. One is inscribed, by Dodd, “To Joe, our first appearance together as Senators! You obviously have forgotten the first rule of a junior senator. They should be seen and not heard!”

Lieberman has, in past years, described Dodd as his “best friend” in the Senate. When I asked him if this was still true, his eyes narrowed, and he said, “I have so many good friends in the Senate. John McCain is a very good friend.”

These days, most of Lieberman’s closest friends in the Senate are Republicans.

... Neither Lieberman nor Dodd was eager to discuss the unravelling of their relationship, in particular its most painful episodes: Dodd’s decision to endorse Lamont the morning after the Lieberman primary defeat, and his appearance in a Lamont television advertisement, in which he said, “People want different leadership in Washington.”

Lieberman’s friends were, of course, upset by Dodd’s infidelity. “I found that whole thing almost unbelievable,” Warren Rudman, the former New Hampshire senator, told me. “I can’t imagine why Chris Dodd did that.”

Dodd justifies his endorsement of Lamont as one of principle over friendship. “I’m the senior Democrat in the state,” he said. “What do I tell a twenty-year-old, what do I tell someone who wants to be a Democrat and join the process? ‘I’m sorry, the primary doesn’t count, it doesn’t make a difference’? It was painful. I didn’t like it. But I wasn’t going to turn around and tell people this doesn’t mean anything.”

Dodd was right.