Like U.S. Senator Chris Dodd before him, U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman soon will be leaving the congress with 23 years of service under his belt. Following his leave-taking, Mr. Dodd fell on a plush Hollywood featherbed. Lieberman’s future is a question mark. His bitterest critics – they are legion – suppose he will worm his way into a lobbyist position in Washington because, as Willy Sutton said when asked why he robbed banks, that’s where the money is. Like Senator Dick Blumenthal, who stepped into Mr. Dodd’s congressional shoes, Mr. Lieberman is Jewish, and when his most hot-headed critics wish to strike a death blow, they revert to stereotypical insults: Jews are motivated by money alone; Lieberman’s principal loyalty lies with beleaguered Israel rather than the United States, that sort of thing. Apart from racism, the two oldest and most perduring prejudices in the United States are anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism, both of which still have lots of wind in their sails.
When Mr. Lieberman appeared recently before the MiddlesexCounty Chamber of Commerce in Cromwell, “goodbye” was in his voice. No one, perhaps not even Mr. Lieberman himself, has been keeping count over the years of his public appearances. Like his critics within the progressive wing of his former Democratic Party, they are legion, though likely falling short of those of Mr. Blumenthal, about whom it has been said there is no more dangerous spot in the state than that between Mr. Blumenthal and a television camera. Mr. Blumenthal attended the Cromwell event as a sort of legacy pallbearer: Mr. Lieberman’s legacy in Connecticut politics and his own, Mr. Blumenthal said, had been intertwined.
