I was just pulling together material for a column I'm writing this morning. And on second reading of Joe Klein's Lieberman column this week in Time, this passage jumped out at me ...

There are those who believe the Senator's unwillingness to criticize Bush has its roots in politics. "He flew too close to the sun," said a Connecticut Democrat who believes that Lieberman played nice with the President in the hope of securing both the Democratic and the Republican nominations for Senate this year.

Can this be true? I'm not sure if the idea here is that Lieberman actually gamed his criticism of President Bush for the meager advantage of not having any challenger this year as opposed to whatever shlub the state GOP planned to send up against him on an electoral suicide run or whether he just wanted the bipartisanship hat trick of dual nomination.

In any case, the thought strikes me as highly implausible. Joe's kid gloves with the president and failure to take a stand on the disaster that has become of Iraq seems far more likely to be characterological or an effort to work Beltway opinion. But Klein seems to really think there might be something to this theory. Has anyone else heard anything about this?