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.
From THE ECONOMIST:
http://www.economist.com/world/na/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2910706
“Is the recovery losing momentum?”
“PITY the Republicans. No sooner had America’s jobs figures become rosy enough to brag about in campaign ads, than the pesky statistics stopped playing ball. According to numbers released on July 2nd, only 112,000 new non-farm jobs were created in June, far fewer than in each of the previous three months and less than half what analysts were expecting. After rising for four months, jobs in the politically sensitive manufacturing sector fell. The average work-week shortened and the unemployment rate is stuck at 5.6%. ”
[…]
“the number-crunchers also revised down the jobs figures for April and May a bit. And other evidence suggests America’s economy may be cooling somewhat. Durable goods orders (admittedly yet another highly volatile indicator) fell in May for the second consecutive month. Vehicles sales were decidedly lame in June. Measured at an annual rate, only 15.4m light vehicles were sold in June, a sharp fall from the 17.8m rate in May. And, perhaps most significant, several big chain stores, including Target and Wal-Mart, warned that June would be weak.”
“It is not all bad. For instance, consumer confidence looks robust (the Conference Board’s index rose to 101.9 in June, its highest level in two years). But for Mr Bush, even conflicting signals look dangerous. For the past few months, his campaign has been frustrated by how little his poll ratings have benefited from a string of uniformly rosy economic statistics. If the economic numbers are less rosy, then the poll numbers could yet go down.”
Marcus’ observation about the National Review is interesting, because Fox did try to spin it. The bottom-of-screen headline I saw was “Bush Was Right!” That’s pretty bad even for those guys. They must be getting nervous.
How bad news for “Shrub” is this? So bad even the partisans at NATIONAL REVIEW didn’t try to spin the 112,000-new-jobs release. They merely noted that at least the statistics were released at a time (=Independence Day weekend) when comparatively few people pay attention. And they are grateful for that.
http://www.nationalreview.com/kerry/kerryspot.asp
MARCU$
When it comes to something like the economy, the public’s perception comes mostly from their actual experience. We shouldn’t worry about Bush and the press hyping it, and by the same token there is no point in trying to play it down.
Kerry can win by properly explaining why the economy went into recession without blaming the American people. He can’t win by raising taxes just to end the recession. That’s BS and the smarty-pantses who think it works also drove the Democratic Party into a massive defeat in 2002. They should be banished from any position of decision-making, they should be exiled to a desert island until next February.
Sobering. Very sobering.
I agree with Ruy’s comments.
The bad economy is particularly visible when one compares job gains to population gains.
1) The index of Aggregate hours worked fell by 0.6 percent. This June number implies that there has been essentially no change in aggregate hours worked by employees since March 2004 and since 2002. Aggregate hours worked in manufacturing rose only 0.2 percent since March 2004. Aggregate hours in manufacturing are still more than 5% below their level in 2002 (Table B-5).
2) Recent Job growth is barely keeping pace with population growth. The HH survey’s employment population ratio was above 64 percent in 1998, 1999 and 2000. It fell to 62.3 in 2003 and that is also it’s level in June 2004. The unemployment rate has been constant since January 2004. (Table A-1) Just to get back to an E/P ratio of 64%, the economy would need to add 3,780,000 jobs.
3) From May to June 2004, The seasonally adjusted Weekly earnings of non-supervisory workers fell by $2.45 or about 0.5 percent (table B-3). This decline in nominal weekly wages came on top of a 0.2 to 0.4 percent rise in the cost of living. There is no disconnect between workers perceptions and the “reality” of an improving economy. Workers real weekly earnings fell by nearly one percent in June 2004. Their pay check’s buying power is declining.
4) Hours worked per week by non-supervisory workers has declined over the last year. Combined with the decline in the inflation adjusted hourly wage, the result is a declining pay check in real terms.The stability of aggregate hours worked since March implies that the increase in employment since March was accomplished by cutting back on the weekly hours of existing workers..
5) Occupations that are most subject to foreign competition and off shoring are still suffering despite the large reduction in the value of the dollar that should have improved the competitiveness of American workers. Household survey data implies that Employment of production workers fell 4.4% from June 2003 to June 2004 and office and administrative support occupations employment fell by 0.7 percent. Fast growing occupational categories were Construction (6%), Transportation and materials moving occupations (5.4%) and Installation and maintenance and repair occupations (3.5%). These are types of work that must be performed in the US (Table A-10)
6) The occupational up skilling of the employed work force has slowed. During the last year up skilling stopped. Over the last two decades professional, technical and managerial jobs (which account for 34 percent of all jobs) have accounted for about two-thirds of job growth. During the last 12 months, these high skill occupations accounted for only 22 percent of net job growth (Table A-10). Their share of total employment fell.
6) Industry payroll data from the establishment survey are consistent with this picture. Over the past 12 months, The fast growing industries were mining (2.9%), construction (2.8%), Janitorial services (3.4%), Temporary help agencies (10.3%), education and health services (2.1%) and Hotels and restaurants (2.4%). The Declining industries were manufacturing (-1.0%) and information and communications (-0.5%).
7) College grads have suffered along with everyone else. The employment to population ratio of college graduates was above 77 percent in 2000 and the first two quarters of 2001. The seasonally adjusted Emp/Pop for college grads had fallen to 75.3% in April 2004, 75.2% in May 2004 and 75.7% in June 2004. The E/P average for the second quarter of 2004 is 3.2 percent below its level in the first quarter of 2001. If we were to return to the first quarter of 2001 college grad E/P ratio, 1,250,000 extra college graduate would be employed. That is roughly equal to the number of bachelors degrees annually awarded by the nation’s colleges and universities (Table A-4)