Some members of Connec-ticut's Democratic State Central Committee proposed the other day a resolution formally censuring U.S. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman for betraying the party, as with his speech at the Republican national convention endorsing his colleague in the Senate, John S. McCain, for president.

The state central committee tabled the motion, perhaps realizing that Democratic displeasure with Lieberman is in danger of turning into hatred, which, besides being impotent, could make the party look bad for nothing.

To repudiate Lieberman, the party in Connecticut did all it could do with much effect when it defeated him for renomination in the primary election for senator in 2006. Nevertheless, since then Lieberman still has been voting with the Senate's Democrats in organizing the chamber, and because of that the Senate's Democratic majority has allowed him to keep committee leadership positions. That Lieberman has not been officially consigned to political darkness is the doing not of Connecticut's Democratic Party but rather the party in the Senate, the national party.

That's where the Lieberman haters should be addressing themselves, rather than to Lieberman himself. But, in doing so, the Lieberman haters may want to remember that the Democratic majority in the Senate is only 51-49 and that excluding Lieberman from the Democratic caucus probably would shift control of the chamber to the Republicans, with Vice President Dick Cheney, hated almost as much as Lieberman, casting the tie-breaking vote. So as much of a service as he may have performed for the Republican presidential nominee at the Republican convention, Lieberman continues to perform a greater service for the Democratic Party every day -- keeping the Senate under Democratic control.

If November's election turns out as the polls indicate, the Senate's Democrats won't need Lieberman to preserve their organizational majority after January. But until then the party is using him more than he is using the party, and his haters risk making him look reasonable and courageous by comparison.

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Westport's Paul Newman, who died the other day, was more than a great actor, philanthropist, and all-around good guy, modest and friendly. He was a courageous citizen as well. He got involved in politics not only recently, in support of Ned Lamont, the anti-war candidate who defeated Lieberman in the Democratic Senate primary in 2006, when most people were already against the war in Iraq, but also in the 1968 presidential campaign and Connecticut's 1970 Senate campaign, when opposing the war in Vietnam was likely to get you called a communist and maybe even get you beaten up.

In 1968 Newman supported Sen. Eugene McCarthy for president and became a McCarthy delegate from Connecticut to the infamous Democratic national convention in Chicago. And in 1970 Newman gave crucial support to anti-war candidate Joseph D. Duffey, the congregational minister who had led the McCarthy campaign in the state two years earlier and now sought the Democratic nomination for senator, which he won in Connecti-cut's first statewide primary.

Indeed, in the 1970 Senate campaign. Newman was a bigger draw for the anti-war cause than Duffey himself was. At campaign events, the handsome actor with the piercing blue eyes could turn middle-aged women into the sort of screaming, shrieking, hysterical girls who had attended concerts by the Beatles a few years earlier.

It happened repeatedly that summer, maybe most memorably one Saturday in New Britain, where a Duffey rally had been scheduled at the Burritt Hotel. Everyone traveling with the candidate and Newman had to be drafted into a security detail to form a cordon around the actor so he might get into the building in one piece.

That crowd didn't care what the advocates of the war were calling Newman and the candidate he was supporting. If New-man was what a communist looked like, that day New Britain was happy to be a people's republic. Certainly it was a lot more fun and sensible than a mistaken, un-necessary, and mismanaged war.

Great as Newman was for bringing the women out, another half of the population voted and was not as enthralled by him. Having arrived in New Britain a half hour early, the Duffey entourage stopped a few blocks away at a nearly empty restaurant to get some lunch in peace before confronting the mob scene. Leaving the restaurant, Newman reminded Duffey that they should try to shake some hands on the way out, so they went into the bar and introduced themselves, without any effect at all. For the bar was the preserve of men, and none of them knew who these glad-handers were, except for the bartender -- who said he had heard of Duffey.
