A few weeks earlier, the same Joseph Lieberman had taken a drubbing from the Connecticut Supreme Court. Gov. William O'Neill, a socially conservative Democrat, had tried to cut off state Medicaid funding for abortion, with Lieberman taking the governor's side. They lost. I asked Lieberman why he pursued the case. He paused, then in that sedulous way of his began to explain the responsibilities of an attorney general, the fiscal policies involved. It was all so even-keeled and dispassionate; not until his departure did I realize he had gently and earnestly blown a smoke cloud around the central question of why a Democratic administration wanted to deny poor women a medical service available to the more affluent.

With today's selection of Joe Lieberman as his running mate, Al Gore seeks to evoke some of the emotion that surrounded the election of John F. Kennedy as a Roman Catholic president in 1960. But there is far more to the nomination of Lieberman, an observant Jew, than some momentary calculation to overcome the Clinton moral stain. If Lieberman's nomination represents a marker for American Jews, it says even more about the future of the Democratic Party.

What makes Lieberman's nomination far more resonant than your typical vice-presidential nod is the man's protean political career. On the one hand, there is the Joe Lieberman who arrived for a long-scheduled speech before the AFL-CIO's Connecticut convention this morning: reminiscing about the state's union leaders past, issuing fierce denunciation of anyone who would weaken workplace safety standards, calling for a higher minimum wage. This Joe Lieberman remains an environmental crusader and consumer rights advocate.

Then there is the other Joe Lieberman: The social conservative who won his Senate seat in 1988 with support from William Buckley and other conservative Republicans, running to the right of the civil libertarian and then-Republican Sen. Lowell Weicker.

The same Joe Lieberman has teamed up with Republican William Bennett to clean up rap lyrics, sponsored school voucher legislation and favors privatizing Social Security -- just like George W. Bush. This Lieberman was a fervent ally of President Bush during the Gulf War and counts the far-right Cubans of Miami among his close political friends.

Al Gore wants both Joe Liebermans on his ticket. On the surface the reasons are simple: to counter the narrow conservatism of Dick Cheney and the callow inexperience of George W. Bush; to craft a ticket that is morally unassailable from the right, featuring a vice-presidential candidate who was among the first Democrats to openly criticize Clinton for the Lewinsky scandal even though the two men were old friends.

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