Republicans: Nothing Matters But the War

William Kristol, a top Republican strategist and editor of the Weekly Standard is pushing Democratic senator Joe Lieberman for vice president, on the strength of Lieberman’s full‐​throated support for the war without end. Pete Wehner, the leading intellectual in the Bush White House (OK, but still–that carries some weight in the Bush party), backs the idea in National Review. 


True, Lieberman is one of the few Americans still solidly behind Bush’s war. But that couldn’t be sufficient for Republicans to put him a heartbeat from the presidency, right? He must share Republican values on other issues, right?


Not really. As Robert Novak pointed out back when Republicans were endorsing Lieberman for reelection,

Lieberman followed the liberal line in opposing oil drilling in ANWR, Bush tax cuts, overtime pay reform, the energy bill, and bans on partial‐​birth abortion and same‐​sex marriage. Similarly, he voted in support of Roe vs. Wade and for banning assault weapons and bunker buster bombs. His only two pro‐​Bush votes were to fund the Iraq war and support missile defense (duplicating Sen. Hillary Clinton’s course on both).


Lieberman’s most recent ratings by the American Conservative Union were 7 percent in 2003, zero in 2004 and 8 percent in 2005.

I actually agree with him on a couple of those votes, though I wouldn’t expect that conservatives would. The National Taxpayers Union said that he voted with taxpayers 9 percent of the time in 2005, worse than Chris Dodd or Barbara Boxer. Maybe because of all the Republican love in 2006, he soared to a 15 percent rating.


In a previous speech, Lieberman called for a tax increase so that we could continue the war without “squeezing important domestic programs, as we have been doing”–his view of a period during which federal spending rose by one trillion dollars:

During the Second World War, our government raised taxes and we spent as much as 30 percent of our Gross Domestic Product to defeat fascism and Nazism. During the war in Korea, we raised taxes and spent fourteen percent of GDP on our military…Today, in the midst of a war against a brutal enemy in a dangerous world, we have cut taxes and are spending less than five percent of GDP to support our military…It is not an acceptable answer to push the sacrifice of this war against terrorism onto our children and grandchildren through deficit spending, as we have been doing. And it is not an acceptable answer to pay the costs of this war by squeezing important domestic programs, as we have been doing.

Only if you believe that continuing to support the war in Iraq outweighs all other issues combined–for the next five years–could a conservative reasonably support Joe Lieberman. And apparently some Republicans and conservatives are willing to toss aside his commitment to high taxes, higher spending, more regulation, and entitlement expansion in order to get a vice president firmly committed to long‐​term entanglement in Iraq.