Joe Lieberman delivered what was from all accounts an impressive speech over the weekend, and WSJ does the service of printing a redacted version of it today.
Lieberman's argument, in sum, is that his party was once committed to the notion that freedom, our Republic's in particular, has enemies who must be resisted forcefully (in the literal sense). Among these Democrats were FDR, Truman and JFK. After 1968, the Ds became passive pacifists until Bill Clinton and New Democrats managed to turn matters around after twelve years in the wilderness (twenty if you count the Carter administration as wilderness for everyone). But partisan opposition to Bush has driven the whole thing back to its McGovernite past, most recently in the naive pronouncements of Barack Obama.
We add two observations. One is that the Ds have had this problem since their party quietly welcomed socialists in the 1920s and 1930s, culminating in FDR's naming Henry Wallace as his 1940 running mate and Wallace's running against Truman in 1948 after being passed over in 1944 for a second term as VP on the insistence of thoughtful Democratic Party leaders who prevailed on FDR.
The other is that no individual presently embodies this issue more starkly than Al Gore. On him, we urge the reading of James Taranto's chronicle of Lieberman's response to Taranto's question about Gore following Lieberman's speech.
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