GOP May Spurn Devil It Knows for One It Doesn’tJoe Lieberman seeks to unseat Sen. Lowell Weicker of Connecticut.
By Paul A. Gigot
March 27, 2024 6:43 pm ET
(Editor’s note: This column was published in The Wall Street Journal Oct. 14, 1988.)
Farmington, Conn.
To regain control of the Senate this November, Republicans will have to win several upsets and strike one Faustian bargain. The bargain is that one of the winners may have to be Lowell P. Weicker.
This is just the circumstance to delight Mr. Weicker, a Republican by label who nonetheless revels in tormenting a party whose philosophical mainstream he abandoned long ago. Now seeking a fourth Senate term at age 57, he is again running as the last Mohican of GOP liberalism. Democrats failed to unseat Mr. Weicker in 1982 by fielding a candidate who ran to his left, a sliver of space even in Yale-and-chablis Connecticut. Their odds are better this year, because Joseph Lieberman is challenging as a centrist.
The dilemma for Republicans is whether they’re better off if Mr. Weicker loses. On the one hand, as an incumbent favored to win, he could contribute one more vote to the precarious Senate goal of 50. Scholar Thomas Sowell has argued that since the goal of politics is power, the GOP should seek to control Congress even at the price of tolerating such annoyances as Mr. Weicker.
On the other hand, he’s still an annoyance—or worse. The leading advocate of this view is William F. Buckley Jr., the columnist and Connecticut resident. He’s endorsed Mr. Lieberman, and has even gone so far as to create a political action committee on his behalf, BUCKPAC. For $2, enthusiasts can receive bumper stickers that ask, “Does Lowell Weicker Make You Sick?” or “Republicans for Weicker? Yuck.”
State Republicans don’t lack for reasons to dislike Mr. Weicker. For one thing, he routinely trashes them. In 1986, he recruited former GOP national committeeman Roger Eddy to run against Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd, but then before Election Day publicly attacked Mr. Eddy for taking issue with Mr. Dodd’s liberal record. “He’s done absolutely nothing for the party,” says Patrick Sullivan, a self-described GOP “moderate” who supports Mr. Lieberman.
In Washington, Mr. Weicker opposes his party majority nearly two-thirds of the time, well above the rate of any other GOP senator. Opposes nearly every Reagan initiative, from tax reform to SDI. Opposes so many GOP priorities that, on the Labor and Human Resources Committee, his aides are often barred from GOP strategy sessions because they’re assumed to be working with Sen. Ted Kennedy.
Mr. Weicker’s aides insist Mr. Buckley’s opposition will actually help their man in this Democratic state, but that’s doubtful. Thomas Scott, a Republican state senator, notes that GOP voters tend to be loyal, so Mr. Buckley sent an important message that “it’s OK to vote for Lieberman. The polls are showing the race is starting to tighten, and Weicker has to be concerned about Republican defections.”
Hoping to benefit from all this is Mr. Lieberman, a warm, brainy 46-year-old who has made his reputation as a consumer advocate as state attorney general. He’s a liberal by most standards. But he has enough intellectual circumspection to qualify as moderate compared with the doctrinaire Mr. Weicker.
He supports the U.S. strike against Libya and the invasion of Grenada. (Mr. Weicker called the first a “gutter act” and the second worse than any recent act of the Soviet Union.) He questions the wisdom of the War Powers Act as a limit on the commander-in-chief. (Mr. Weicker waves it at every chance.) He finds Cuba’s Fidel Castro a totalitarian. (Mr. Weicker has praised his idealism.)
On domestic issues, Mr. Lieberman believes that having a “moment of silence” in public schools doesn’t violate the Constitution. The Weicker campaign responded by issuing a scare-letter linking Mr. Lieberman to “the Jesse Helms-Jerry Falwell-Pat Robertson platform” and “the extreme Right Wing” (his capitals). Mr. Weicker is not known for extending the “compassion” he advertises for society’s poor to his personal political dealings.
Mr. Lieberman has also tried to make an issue of Mr. Weicker’s appetite for higher taxes. But that message is blurred by Mr. Lieberman’s own support for more government spending for child and health care and other familiar Democratic proposals. With typical modesty, Mr. Weicker hails his own support for higher taxes as a sign of political courage.
The pose fits what the polls say is Mr. Weicker’s main campaign advantage, his cultivated reputation as an independent. “My party is the state of Connecticut,” he declared in a debate here this week. But Mr. Lieberman is attacking that reputation by pointing out that Mr. Weicker’s “independence” from the GOP amounts to fealty to Washington’s special interests. He helped to exempt fertilizer from toxic waste cleanup and now accepts campaign money from the Fertilizer Institute. After he barely lost the AFL-CIO endorsement in 1982, Mr. Weicker spent the next six years slavishly supporting the labor agenda. He won the labor nod this time.
Mr. Lieberman still faces an uphill fight, but he says he takes comfort in Mr. Weicker’s less than 50% approval rating. He also can still count on the many Republicans who share the hope of the Senate staffer who said this week that, “If God is a Republican, both Metzenbaum (Sen. Howard of Ohio) and Weicker will lose.”
Joe Lieberman Died
Reply With Quote
