That Vice President Gore picked Sen. Lieberman as running mate is not too surprising. First, the senator's general demeanor will not threaten the vice president's aspirations to alpha-male status. Mr. Lieberman has a taste for remarkably whiny speeches. Second, Mr. Gore obviously hopes that the senator's reputation for honesty will make people forget his own record, what with shady fundraising, sundry lies, and his defense of a crooked man he called his friend and the greatest president in this century.

Someone, no doubt a Democrat, some time called Joseph Lieberman "the conscience of the senate," a phrase that all news organisations have parroted ad nauseum since Gore made his choice official. As if it were supporting evidence, they usually follow up by emphasising that Sen. Lieberman is "an Orthodox Jew." That is fine from my viewpoint. My agnosticism notwithstanding, I am all for religion because more often than not it makes people better persons. I do not subscribe to the argument that religion has no place in political life, because it is silly to demand that religious faith should not influence choices made in the polling booths. The separation of church and state expressed by the First Amendment does not require anything of the sort. This being said, it takes a leap of faith---no pun intended---to think that Sen. Lieberman's religion makes him de facto "the conscience of the senate" and a man of exceptional integrity. Sen. Bennett of Utah is a deeply religious Mormon, and no one so far has made him an integrity flag bearer, although his political positions can be understood as the expression of unflinching religious principles.

Now, I find myself a bit puzzled over the idea of Orthodox Judaism. For my defence, I must say that my Jewish friends are of the Reform sort. Mrs. Laura Schlessinger, who says she is an Orthodox Jew, takes positions diametrically opposed to Sen. Lieberman's on political issues that have important moral and religious implications, and she claims that her faith is unambiguous on such matters. One case in point is partial-birth abortion. Recently, an orthodox rabbi forcefully stood by Mrs. Schlessinger on this question. So, should being an Orthodox Jew be such an important news item? Or a certificate of righteousness? Perhaps not. That is too bad, because orthodoxy somehow evokes a willingness to live by strict moral principles---unless it is called "fundamentalism" by spin doctors who know where the bad people are.

Two other major contributing factors to Sen. Lieberman's image of integrity are found in his votes for bills opposed by the majority of the Democrats, and in his celebrated speech on the Senate floor that called Clinton's conduct in the Lewinsky affair "immoral." That speech was referred to as scathing in its criticism of the president, politically courageous, and morally uncompromising. It seems that many people believed that. I did not.

In the two days following his new association with Mr. Gore, Sen. Lieberman changed three of his "principled" positions . These concern school vouchers, tort law reform, and partial privatisation of Social Security. On the latter topic, he predictably called Gov. Bush's proposal a "scheme," a word right out of the Democrats' songbook. So, Mr. Conscience, throwing away principle, is suddenly toeing the party line. We must expect him to renege on many of his other stands in the near future. As to his attacks about the immorality of Clinton's conduct, these were just words. When the time came to remove the immoral president, Mr. Conscience voted to keep immorality in the White House. My point here is that Sen. Lieberman is just another pompous poseur adept at grandstanding. Many politicians call that being a good politician. I call that being a fraud.

If the Democrats do not capture the presidency and Lieberman returns to the senate, it will be interesting to watch him do some fancy footwork to reconcile his pre- and post-campaign positions, and try to restore whatever credibility he may have managed to accrue. In any case, pretending to incarnate "the conscience of the senate" should not work anymore. Well, who knows? Prevarication and phoniness in the pursuit of power are no sins in certain political circles.

When candidate Gore broke the news of his choice for running mate to the public, Sen. Lieberman made an odd speech where he mentioned God more times per minute than one would usually hear in a place of worship. He also made a very big deal of his being the first Jew on the presidential ticket of a major party, and declared that day a milestone for all Jews. He said that a door had been opened for the future. I found all that rather odd, because I could not imagine that, in similar circumstances, say, Bob Bennett or Orrin Hatch would make as big a deal of being a Mormon. But Sen. Lieberman's speech makes sense in the context of the Democrats' scorched-earth campaign tactics. It will now be easy to turn the election into a poll on the electability of Jews to the country's highest level of government. It will also be easy to insinuate that opposition to the Gore-Lieberman ticket could be motivated in unspecified quarters by some latent strain of anti-Semitism. Gore would not be above that, given his habit to engage in divisive politics of class envy and race every time he thinks it can suit his purposes.

If Mr. Lieberman were not a politician, I would feel sorry for him. But he is a politician, and he knows doggone well that he is used, and for what reasons he is used, but he prefers to keep the blinders on and pretend that this one line to add to his résumé is more important than truth and honesty.