Although this newspaper isn’t endorsing in the current primaries, we don’t mind pausing to express our admiration for the real underdog in New Hampshire, Senator Lieberman. He may be way down in the polls — he had but 4% in New Hampshire in one sounding reported last night — but he is, after the withdrawal of Rep. Richard Gephardt, the only Democrat to have conducted a stable campaign in the season of his party’s discontent.

The Nutmeg State senator, the only real centrist among the Democratic candidates, chose to bypass the Iowa caucuses and pin his hopes on a strong showing in New Hampshire. Mr. Lieberman has this year begun to earn his way back from the disgrace that attended his compromises with Vice President Gore’s left-wing campaign of 2000. The senator has been running a campaign straight out of the Democratic Leadership Council playbook that won the Oval Office for President Clinton. There may be a debate about the kinds of tax cuts to offer, but Mr. Lieberman is a senator who recognizes that taxes for ordinary Americans are too high.

On foreign policy, Mr. Lieberman has long shined, refusing to wear partisan blinders and insisting that the Muslim world must move toward democracy, for its sake and ours. Calling Yasser Arafat “no longer a credible partner for peace,” Mr. Lieberman has faced up to his ouster as a necessary prerequisite of negotiations with the Palestinian Arabs. Alone among the leading Democrats, Mr. Lieberman, a lead co-sponsor of the 2001 Gulf War resolution, was and continues to be an unapologetic supporter of the war with Iraq.

As much as any man in America, he was there in the early — and lonely — years of the struggle for the idea of democracy in Iraq, back when Robert Bartley and the Wall Street Journal were nursing the idea and Thos. Friedman and other neo-hawks were mocking the idea. Mr. Lieberman was there when the strategies were being hammered out in the Congress for legislation that would emerge, in 1998,as the Iraq Liberation Act and establish regime change as the official American foreign policy by the authority of law.

There are those who reckon Mr. Lieberman’s Judaism is a problem, among them members of the Jewish community who fear that were Mr. Lieberman to be elected he would be in an awkward spot when it comes to Israel. Not by our lights. His unapologetic loyalty to his religion — and to the idea that his religion and others’ are relevant to decision-making in America today — his loyalty to the idea of morality and values in public life, we find refreshing coming from the liberal camp where all too often the priority has been on isolating our governance from contact with religious thinking.

How Mr. Lieberman’s candidacy will fare when Democrats go to the polls in the Granite State to choose their nominee — this we will know in due course. If the polls prove correct and he is relegated to the rear, it will say more about the Democratic Party than it will about the value of what Mr. Lieberman stands for. We nurse the same hope as The New Republic, that the Democrats will someday reclaim their historical legacy as the party of American idealism and intervention in international affairs — should the Republicans ever abandon the high ground they now hold.