Lieberman shows class and spunk
WASHINGTON
JOE LIEBERMAN bounced back smartly last night in a classy assertion of a cause much bigger than his own.
As the most prominent victim of Al Gore's duplicity and Howard Dean's clumsy connivance in a premature push to broker the Democratic presidential nomination, Lieberman displayed a welcome revival of the spunk and good humor that makes him a valued national leader.
His calm assertion that the Gore-Dean power move -- not accompanied by even the perfunctory courtesy of a heads-up to a former running mate -- had doubled his determination to campaign was actually a needed defense of the campaign itself. He might even be right that "my chances probably increased today."
John Kerry also had the cool presence to couple his own reaffirmation of belief in his candidacy with the generous observation that it had been Lieberman who delayed his own candidacy (probably hurting its launch) until Gore decided a year ago that he would not be running himself. That brought the first spontaneous audience applause of the evening in New Hampshire.
That left John Edwards to deliver the most telling point of all, that whatever happens over the next 50 days in Iowa and the Northeast, "We are not going to have a coronation."
That was, of course, the purpose of the Gore-Dean move. As even Gore himself admitted, he is trying to "unite" the party he once led. Wrong verb. The idea of the endorsement, and above all its timing on the eve of a major debate, was not to unify but to suck the oxygen out of the other campaigns -- to destroy their ability even to be heard above the front-runner din.
If there was any doubt, Ted Koppel eliminated it. The ABC News co-host committed the basic sin of displaying the attitude that most people properly hate us in the press for: framing thinly disguised horse-race questions that amount to "Why don't you quit?"
Predictably, the eight people who still deserve to be heard flattened Koppel.
But the excellent performances of all eight supposed losers also left Dean isolated in a front-runner's smug pose. He managed a lame request that they attack him, not Gore, but little else. In a discussion of the mess in Iraq, Dean was the least effective participant, nailed by Dennis Kucinich's acerbic observation that Dean's current position of saying he opposed the war but supports the US occupation is at best inconsistent.
Gore and Dean are hoping to make January anticlimactic. After last night, there's a better case that it shouldn't be.
Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is oliphant@globe.com.
