There is a fairly predictable pattern to how Joe Lieberman positions himself on public policy when the vote is close:

Determine where the breaking point is for failure on something that’s needed, and come out just on the wrong side, making his vote indispensable. That way, Joe is always the guy we have to placate, the doubtful vote we need to make progress.

So it’s no surprise that Joe Lieberman told CNN that maybe the President and Congress should postpone efforts to provide health insurance coverage to the millions who don’t have it or can’t afford it until the economy is sufficiently recovered. Joe knows that’s a long way off, so he can play that card as long as he wants to extract whatever concessions or compromises he can and draw attention to himself. That’s just what he does.

And it won’t matter that what he’s saying is complete nonsense. The always observant Matthew Yglesias correctly notes, for example, that Lieberman’s justification for delay ignores the fact the current health reform bills don’t really kick in until 2012-2013, when the recession is supposed to be over. [and see Ezra Klein.] And as Matt suggests, it’s more duplicitous than that.

While the official gnomes, Bernanke’s Fed, or Krugman et al have been telling us that under the accepted criteria for "end of recession" — the beginning of positive GDP growth — we’re probably already there, that’s not the critical factor for the millions who are out of work and the millions more who will lose their jobs or work fewer hours during the "jobless recovery."

Their reality is that some 14,000 of them will continue to lose health coverage every week day and a million or so per year may be forced into bankruptcy because they’re uninsured or found themselves to be underinsured when they get sick and discover their insurance companies had more people assigned to denying them coverage than paying their claims.

So you’d think that if Joe really believes we can’t afford to cover everyone right now, he’d be sponsoring emergency legislation to extend unemployment benefits, extend and generously subsidize COBRA, expand eligibility for Medicaid and, if he really cared about the deficit, demanding that the richest of the rich pay a surtax to pay for this emergency relief until we can establish a more permanent solution to affordable universal coverage.

Or maybe he’d announce he now regrets being one of the holdouts that forced a smaller stimulus and limited the federal backstop to the states whose budget nightmares are laying off health workers and serving as 50 anti-stimulus packages, and that now he’ll work with Susan Collins to fix that harmful "centrist" mistake.

Or he might become a champion of the public option and cite the CBO and other studies that show how much the public option could save consumers who need to purchase health insurance.

Or since Joe thinks it’s okay for others to wait for health coverage until good times return, then Joe can insist that he and his Senate colleagues refuse federal health insurance coverage until that happens . . . or maybe Joe can just get a clue.

But Joe Lieberman won’t be doing any of that, because he’s not in it for the policy or the public interest; this is all about Joe. And the way Joe draws attention to himself is to announce he’s the roadblock when something important needs to be done. Then he’ll appear on our tv screens righteously telling us he’s standing for some broader principle he never cared about before and that isn’t satisfied until he says it is.

It’s all predictable, but every time he pulls this, you can’t help but marvel at what a truly unprincipled man he is.

More on this:
Digby, Cost cutting or liberty
David at C&L, Lieberman: Worry about uninsured later
Armbruster/Think Progess, "No Reason to Deal with Uninsured until…"
Larkspur at MyLeftNutmeg, Lieberman may opposed public option