I was sorry to learn of the sudden death of 2000 Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Lieberman. But his long and stormy career did offer some important lessons about party loyalty, which I wrote about at New York:
Joe Lieberman was active in politics right up to the end. The former senator was the founding co-chair of the nonpartisan group No Labels, which is laying the groundwork for a presidential campaign on behalf of a yet-to-be-identified bipartisan “unity ticket.” Lieberman did not live to see whether No Labels will run a candidate. He died on Wednesday at 82 due to complications from a fall. But this last political venture was entirely in keeping with his long career as a self-styled politician of the pragmatic center, which often took him across party boundaries.
Lieberman’s first years in Connecticut Democratic politics as a state legislator and then state attorney general were reasonably conventional. He was known for a particular interest in civil rights and environmental protection, and his identity as an observant Orthodox Jew also drew attention. But in 1988, the Democrat used unconventional tactics in his challenge to Republican U.S. senator Lowell Weicker. Lieberman positioned himself to the incumbent’s right on selected issues, like Ronald Reagan’s military operations against Libya and Grenada. He also capitalized on longtime conservative resentment of his moderate opponent, winning prized endorsements from William F. and James Buckley, icons of the right. Lieberman won the race narrowly in an upset.
Almost immediately, Senator Lieberman became closely associated with the Democratic Leadership Council. The group of mostly moderate elected officials focused on restoring the national political viability of a party that had lost five of the six previous presidential elections; it soon produced a president in Bill Clinton. Lieberman became probably the most systematically pro-Clinton (or in the parlance of the time, “New Democrat”) member of Congress. This gave his 1998 Senate speech condemning the then-president’s behavior in the Monica Lewinsky scandal as “immoral” and “harmful” a special bite. He probably did Clinton a favor by setting the table for a reprimand that fell short of impeachment and removal, but without question, the narrative was born of Lieberman being disloyal to his party.
Perhaps it was his public scolding of Clinton that convinced Al Gore, who was struggling to separate himself from his boss’s misconduct, to lift Lieberman to the summit of his career. Gore tapped the senator to be his running mate in the 2000 election, making him the first Jewish vice-presidential candidate of a major party. He was by all accounts a disciplined and loyal running mate, at least until that moment during the Florida recount saga when he publicly disclaimed interest in challenging late-arriving overseas military ballots against the advice of the Gore campaign. You could argue plausibly that the ticket would have never been in a position to potentially win the state without Lieberman’s appeal in South Florida to Jewish voters thrilled by his nomination to become vice-president. But many Democrats bitter about the loss blamed Lieberman.
As one of the leaders of the “Clintonian” wing of his party, Lieberman was an early front-runner for the 2004 presidential nomination. A longtime supporter of efforts to topple Saddam Hussein, Lieberman had voted to authorize the 2003 invasion of Iraq, like his campaign rivals John Kerry and John Edwards and other notable senators including Hillary Clinton. Unlike most other Democrats, though, Lieberman did not back off this position when the Iraq War became a deadly quagmire. Ill-aligned with his party to an extent he did not seem to perceive, his presidential campaign quickly flamed out, but not before he gained enduring mockery for claiming “Joe-mentum” from a fifth-place finish in New Hampshire.
Returning to the Senate, Lieberman continued his increasingly lonely support for the Iraq War (alongside other heresies to liberalism, such as his support for private-school education vouchers in the District of Columbia). In 2006, Lieberman drew a wealthy primary challenger, Ned Lamont, who soon had a large antiwar following in Connecticut and nationally. As the campaign grew heated, President George W. Bush gave his Democratic war ally a deadly gift by embracing him and kissing his cheek after the State of the Union Address. This moment, memorialized as “The Kiss,” became central to the Lamont campaign’s claim that Lieberman had left his party behind, and the challenger narrowly won the primary. However, Lieberman ran against him in the general election as an independent, with significant back-channel encouragement from the Bush White House (which helped prevent any strong Republican candidacy). Lieberman won a fourth and final term in the Senate with mostly GOP and independent votes. He was publicly endorsed by Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani, among others from what had been the enemy camp.
The 2006 repudiation by his party appeared to break something in Lieberman. This once-happiest of happy political warriors, incapable of holding a grudge, seemed bitter, or at the very least gravely offended, even as he remained in the Senate Democratic Caucus (albeit as formally independent). When his old friend and Iraq War ally John McCain ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, Lieberman committed a partisan sin by endorsing him. His positioning between the two parties, however, still cost him dearly: McCain wanted to choose him as his running mate, before the Arizonan’s staff convinced him that Lieberman’s longtime pro-choice views and support for LGBTQ rights would lead to a convention revolt. The GOP nominee instead went with a different “high-risk, high-reward” choice: Sarah Palin.
After Barack Obama’s victory over Lieberman’s candidate, the new Democratic president needed every Democratic senator to enact the centerpiece of his agenda, the Affordable Care Act. He got Lieberman’s vote — but only after the senator, who represented many of the country’s major private-insurance companies, forced the elimination of the “public option” in the new system. It was a bitter pill for many progressives, who favored a more robust government role in health insurance than Obama had proposed.
By the time Lieberman chose to retire from the Senate in 2012, he was very near to being a man without a party, and he reflected that status by refusing to endorse either Obama or Mitt Romney that year. By then, he was already involved in the last great project of his political career, No Labels. He did, with some hesitation, endorse Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in 2016. But his long odyssey away from the yoke of the Democratic Party had largely landed him in a nonpartisan limbo. Right up until his death, he was often the public face of No Labels, particularly after the group’s decision to sponsor a presidential ticket alienated many early supporters of its more quotidian efforts to encourage bipartisan “problem-solving” in Congress.
Some will view Lieberman as a victim of partisan polarization, and others as an anachronistic member of a pro-corporate, pro-war bipartisan elite who made polarization necessary. Personally, I will remember him as a politician who followed — sometimes courageously, sometimes foolishly — a path that made him blind to the singular extremism that one party has exhibited throughout the 21st century, a development he tried to ignore to his eventual marginalization. But for all his flaws, I have no doubt Joe Lieberman remained until his last breath committed to the task he often cited via the Hebrew term tikkun olam: repairing a broken world.
Kerry ought to prepare policy speeches of equal length as Bush’s, and let the campaign demand equal coverage. It does not have to be immediate response as per Saturday Radio messages — but it ought to be roughly equal venues.
I have been quite supportive of Kerry’s apparent tact of remaining fairly silent on many apparent matters, but in the past week I have wanted Kerry to be much more critical of the apparent origin of the “torture” policy in the memos that passed between Bush and Gonzalas, that apparently assumed you could change the law of the land by simply declaring it “Quaint” and an old paradigm. Let’s get something straight. When a President participates in negotiating a treaty (as Harry Truman did in the 1949 Geneva Accords) and then recommends them to the Senate as a Treaty — and the Senate passes the treaty, it is the law of the land — period punct. If you want to change it, you have to go to congress, etc., etc. It might help if someone started talking about Article VI of the constitution — which is where you find the Treaty is Law language. Kerry really needs to offer an analysis not only of the Abu Ghraib pictures — but of the essentially passive manner in which Bush allowed illegal assumptions to filter down the chain of command.
Yeah, Carpe-
What’s the use in voting? I’m sure there’s a good episode of American Idol on tonight.
Carpe, I agree with you (except maybe for #5 and 6). And as reignman mentioned, the upcoming speeches on Iraq and the media fawning over those speeches, and the usual negative media coverage or non-coverage of Kerry and the Democrats, will make Bush rebound in popularity. It’s still his election to lose.
Look, Bush is gonna win, and here’s why:
1. Diebold
2. Florida is in the fix
3. The media is his buddy
4. We are no longer a democracy. That quaint notion ended
in November 2000.
5. Osama Been Forgotten will be found at the GOP covention in prime time and presented to Rudy The Hero Guliani as a trophy.
6. Conan the Barbarian will be out stumping for Bush, so all the star struck morons will think they’re voting for Der Terminator.
7. We’re a fascist country now, so hells bells, lets have more war.
Just my opinion cuz I have no faith left in the Murican peeplet anymore.
News: Bush falls off bicycle.
That’s what happens when you take off the training wheels.
I’m not so sure I agree with the premise that Democrats have been swinging between poles of despair and optimism. I believe that there is a certain amount of that which is simply a reaction to the way in which stories are reported. Understand that your average reporter, when he or she reports that the polls have the candidate in a dead heat, does not mention that this is a poor position for an incumbent president. Then the news changes and the polls figures change and it is reported as “President Bush’s position in the polls is weakening considerably on the heels of a report that…” Media loves scandal and shock and drama. Most of the Democrats I know are pretty level-headed. They take exactly the tone you suggest: cautious optimism.
Agreed. Bush will get a bump from his newest speech deal on Iraq. He’ll get another once Iraq gets its soverignty. He’ll probably do something on the 4th of July. He’ll get a bump at the convention, and another on 9-11, 04. But come the debates, Bush won’t be able to stop millions of dissatisfied Americans tuning in, and listening to what Kerry has to say, or at least what SNL does.
For those who need a quantitative analysis for their comfort blankie…
Check out this in Salon By James Galbraith…econometricists kick ass when it comes to numbers..
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/05/22/polls/print.html
Coming to our senses?
What the president’s declining approval ratings suggest about Americans’ judgment — and the prospects for redefeating Bush.
– – – – – – – – – – – –
By James K. Galbraith
May 22, 2004 | So you think the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal has broken the back of President Bush’s popularity? Well, I did too. But then I did a reality check.
Last February I ran an experiment with the first 37 months of Bush’s approval ratings…
Tick, tock — no matter what Bush said or did, Americans seemed to come to their senses about him at a steady rate. Except, of course, in the presence of a galvanizing foreign event or crisis.
Americans could be coming to a deeper judgment on Bush — perhaps about his competence, or trustworthiness, or character. And we could be coming to that judgment as a whole people. It could be that we are not irrevocably divided down the middle between blues and reds. Maybe some of us just take a bit longer than others to think things through.
The optimism is warranted and it really has little to do with horserace numbers or with history.
Especially not with history for the Bush presidency since 9-11 is fundamentally AHISTORICAl.
This leads to the fundamental reason for optimism. The Great National Coma is over. Iraq is a disaster and will continue as such. The economy is nowhere near as strong as the stock peddling pundits would have us believe and most importantly THE NATIONAL COMA IS OVER. Bush has made enemies not only of democrats, but lazy media who think they’ve been had, Chinese, Japanes, Russians, Europeans, Arabs, the entire Muslim world…a list as long as your arm.
The National Coma is over. Kerry must strike and strike hard. Whne I say SOON but that is the art of politics not the science…
THE NATIONAL COMA IS OVER:
“Not to get personal about it, but the president’s capacity to lead has never been there In order to lead, you have to have judgment. In order to have judgment, you have to have knowledge and experience. He has none.
The emperor has no clothes. He is SO gone” Nancy Pelosi
I think these articles make good points. Let Bush hang himself. We need to register voters and work , work , work.
The Kerry campaign can win big if we organize and keep the pressure on Bush. But we cannot appear to be too greedy. Save that for after the election.