Making up with Lieberman

So, “Democrats decided not to boil Joe Lieberman in oil after all,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. The Connecticut senator will get to keep his powerful post as chairman of the Homeland Security Committee despite his support for Republican John McCain in the presidential election. Democrats still have hope for a filibuster-proof 60-seat majority as long as Lieberman votes with them, so “Lieberman alive is of more use to the new president than Lieberman banished.”

Joe Lieberman is definitely “a survivor,” said Joe Gandelman in The Moderate Voice. The former Democrat -- now an independent although some progressive Democrats might call him a "closet Republican" -- will lose the chairmanship of a subcommittee on global warming, but that amounts to “little more than a slap on the wrist.”

Which amounts to a slap in the face, said Markos Moulitsas Zuniga in DailyKos, “for the American electorate that voted in overwhelming numbers for change from the discredited Bush/McCain/Lieberman policies.” In “a city known for tone-deafness, there clearly isn’t a more tone-deaf group than the Senate Dems.”

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Lieberman’s fate “was always going to represent an interesting litmus test for how Obama and the Democrats would govern,” said Jim Geraghty in National Review Online. In the end, Democrats, so close to a filibuster-proof majority, couldn’t afford to give Lieberman the boot. “Score one for building a larger, and not necessarily consistently liberal coalition; score it as a loss for vengeance.”