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.
I feel the same way as Drew. Steadfastness to the end. Emulate Kerry if you’re someone who sometimes has trouble being that way. I can’t imagine any poll result would have any effect on my level of effort. It might modify how I decide to try to help. People such as Ruy are going to help us all figure out what the poll results mean and therefore how, if at all, we need to modify what we’re doing accordingly. I’ll do as much as I can from now until November. No poll is going to change that one bit.
After finishing up a consultancy in ’92, I “interviewed” volunteer coordinators in a half dozen swing states. Ohio was able to offer me the most to do, so I ended up volunteering for C/G there. They were desperate for some kind of presence in a large county just north of Cinci, one of the most R in that state and one that because of its size they had to try to compete in. I went in for the last 5 weeks and coordinated the county effort. 90-100 hours/week, starting with no organization in place. We were leading in the polls most of the way in that state and then the weekend before the election B/Q pulls even. Did it effect anything we did that last week at the grassroots level? Hell no. With a whole lot of help from Perot, we cut the B/Q ’88 plurality in that county from 41,000 to 23,000, give or take. Impossible to say how much difference our ground campaign made relative to the TV ad campaign and all manner of other factors–who knows, maybe none. But we created a presence in a place that had had none five weeks before the election. We spent under $2000 in that county, what we were able to raise from sales of campaign paraphernalia, plus some loose change from Columbus.
There will be young people all around this country who will be doing similar things this time around.
Well, Drew, we might be able to ignore the polls for a week. But the media will not. There will be coverage. There will be analysis. And there will be headlines: “Complete failure”, “negative bounce”, “historic”- and so on. Which, I fear, will only aggravate the effect.
We need another poll to save us!! (Okay, okay, I’ll calm down now..)
_Where_ exactly did you post the new survey of Electoral College tracking/projection/prediction sites?
Sorry, it’s at:
http://unfutz.blogspot.com/2004/08/electoral-college-survey-81.html
I’m pretty much ignoring all polls until next week, exactly as I had planned to do before the convention. It’s still too early to measure the reaction. It’s amusing and yet sad to see people on either side hyperventilating over a single poll, or even a pair of polls. Return to your day jobs and watch the Kerry train continue to roll forward. There’ll be a bounce from the speech, and there’ll be a bounce from the debates too.
“Drudge has a new USAToday/Gallup poll that shows Kerry losing ground. according to their poll it’s now 50-46 in favor of BC04.
How can this possibly be?”
It is probably an outlier. Political polls use a 95% confidence interval which means that one out of twenty will be incorrect outside the MOE.
I write a bit more about this at the link below in my first installment on “understanding political polls.”
There miht not be a bounce that amounts to much. Andif there isn’t, I don’t think we should worry about it.
Right now there isn’t much flexibility possible. Most people have made a choice and most have chosen firmly. There aren’t many swing voters to cause a bounce.
I noticed that some Reublican talking head was predicting a big bounce–14 points or something like that. I was puzzled until I realized that the Repubs were trying to create a letdown. They wanted to generate the expectation of a big bounce so they could declare the convention and Kerry failures ifthe bounce was small or smallish.
The only thing that matters is that Kerry is ahead generally and seems to be building in the important battle ground states.
I think ,like so many of these so called experts say, that this country is so polorized that no one is changing their minds and the numbers will probably remain the same NO MATTER WHAT and that means terror attacks, Bin Laudin capture, good economy, or bad economy. Think about it, what would it take to change your minds.
I agree with you Robert. Kerry is managing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory it seems. I still think the futures market is the most accurate barometer for the race. The CNN poll may be a confirmation of the futures market from Friday when Bush received a small bounce. The bottom line though is if the CNN poll and the futures market are accurate then Kerry I would say is not in a very good position. We still have the GOP convention to go. Then again this might be just one of those cycles where all the conventional wisdom gets turned upside down. If Kerry could get a negative bounce out of his convention then it is certainly possible that Bush could get the same outcome from his convention.
“How can this be?”
The answer is “Drudge”
PRINCETON, NJ — A new CNN/USA Today/Gallup survey, conducted on Friday and Saturday following the Democratic Convention in Boston, finds that the presidential race remains close, with President George W. Bush receiving 50% support among likely voters, and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry 47%. Among the larger group of registered voters, Kerry leads 50% to 47%.
Drudge has a new USAToday/Gallup poll that shows Kerry losing ground. according to their poll it’s now 50-46 in favor of BC04.
How can this possibly be?
Not only Michael Moore but more significantly Kevin Phillips and CNN’s Carlos Watson believe turnout will be significantly higher this year, the latter opining that it could increase to 115 million up from 105..
Still the RV showed no change in the Gallup Poll.
Not a good poll…
About the CNN Poll…For one thing, if Michael Moore is right, a lot of new voters will vote for Kerry this year. That means that measures of so-called “likely” voters, usually based on if you’ve voted in the past, are inaccurate. In addition, the sample was in the 700 range for likely as opposed to the normal approximately 1000 registered voters sample and would have a margin of error of roughly plus or minus 4%. I just don’t see this poll as accurate, but if it is, this country deserves what Bush does to it, and it won’t be pretty.
We might also take into account the heinously irresponsible failure of the major broadcast networks to show responsibility to the public by showing the convention in it’s entirity instead of “Last Comic Standing”
How kind of you, Allan. But I bet you wouldn’t drop by so often if all you got here was just spin, would you? Let’s just wait and see what the next days will bring.
By the way: Take care. Tom Ridge just went from yellow to orange for stockbroker facilities.
And beerwulf, thanks for the encouragement. I’ve braced myself now. Really sorry, was just a temporary bout..
Politics isn’t a game for people who panic easily, Frenchfries. And Allan, there’s a difference between spin and analysis. My own feeling is that CNN’s poll is a low outlier. The standard wisdom (which I agree with) is that RV’s are a better gauge than LV’s because in late summer nobody really knows how likely they are to vote. There’s a reason PollKatz and Polling Report survey a lot of polls – differences in methodology, sampling errors, and so on tend to cancel each other out when you do a meta-analysis.
Any given poll is only a snapshot, and an imperfect one at that (which is why pollsters bother to compute MOE). Calm down and let’s get on with the election.
New York is going from yellow to orange alert. I see “The Little Boy That Cried Wolf” is at it again…………
Frenchfries,
Don’t worry. I’m sure Ruy will find a new and better way to spin these new numbers from CNN and i can’t wait to hear it.
Just saw new numbers on CNN – and they’re not good at all: They have Kerry up 50:47 among RVs – but DOWN 47:49 among LVs!
I’m just sort of panicking…
And withh the integrity and clarity that we have all come to expect from big media, Face the Nation’s grey-haired emcee (whatever his name is) just cited an unnamed poll, but probably the Newsweek one, as having shown a 4 point bounce for Kerry/Edwards. Naturally, he didn’t mention that half the poll was taken before Kerry’s speech.
That would have added nuance to the discussion, and Face the Nation wouldn’t want that. Too much for our little pointy heads to handle.
Dear Joe Zainea,
_Where_ exactly did you post the new survey of Electoral College tracking/projection/prediction sites?
-Nate
“unfutz” — the name of my weblog, not “unknown”
I thought that the corporate parent of the Washington Post owned Newsweek?
BTW, somewhat off topic, for those interested in the state of the Electoral College, I’ve posted a new survey of Electoral College tracking/projection/prediction sites here.
Kerry still leads. Of 24 sites surveyed, 16 show him winning, another 5 as ahead. Only 2 show Bush as winning, and one other shows him ahead.
I’ve said it here before, Newsweek/MSNBC and WAPO are tied together somehow in various arrangements related to news and opinion content sharing. Relatively new leadership at WAPO, I believe, has shifted that organization’s political stance to the right, taking Newsweek and MSNBC along with them.
The difference in WAPO’s editorial attitude is related to the Bush administration’s unrelenting hostility to any media outlet that doesn’t toe the mark they lay down. A news weekly that is denied access to senior administration officials is a publication headed for trouble.
Bush’s people don’t hesitate to flex their muscles and I believe much of what we have come to see as the media’s stupor, starting from the run up to the Iraq invasion, is related to fear of access denial.
In addition to the shoddy work on the post convention bounce, we can also see a reluctance on the part of Newsweek and other frightened outlets to inform the public on continuing American casualties being sustained in Iraq and Afghanistan.
One can only hope that as Kerry’s campaign gathers strength that the media will rediscover their spines and perhaps do a little reporting on the status of the Plame affair or the question of whether the recently indicted “Kenny Boy” Lay attended Cheney’s secret energy conference. One can only hope.
On top of everything else, the Newsweek article says that Kerry’s speech was on Friday night, when it was on late THURSDAY night, idiots!
Get SOMETHING right, will you please??
Ruy is probably right about Newsweek’s bounce analyis but a 52-44 lead still sounds pretty good to me in such a polarized race.
Forget about the Newsweek Poll. The good news is that their second day polling had Kerry up by 10. There will surely be a bounce in other polls but some of it will undoubtedly fade as the month goes on. However, if Kerry can maintain a gain of 2-3 points AFTER the Republican Convention he will be in great shape indeed! Let’s keep our fingers crossed and work, work, work as hard as possible registering voters in the batlleground states and warn the media that they better keep their facts straight or we will be on them like a cheap suit.
So far, so good.
I said this over at Daily Kos, but will repeat it here:
This isn’t an appropriate measure of post-convention bounce; the numbers released Monday, measuring three days of post-speech afterglow, will be the most accurate reading.
However…Newsweek has been releasing this Saturday poll for as many election cycles as I can remember, so we can at least compare it to previous editions. And the comparisons are very favorable for Kerry.
The last incumbent/challenger face-off was 1996. Dole got to within a few points of Clinton in the Saturday release, but never any closer.
The same thing happened in 1984 — Mondale closed the gap with Reagan, but it was his high-water mark.
I think we can say with certainty, challengers that don’t lead after their own conventions can go home right there.
Successful challengers, on the other hand — specifically Clinton, Reagan and Carter — have immediately run to measurable leads. And this one Kerry’s got is clearly well past margin-of-error. (It’s not as big as Clinton’s or Carter’s, but the Perot in-and-out exaggerated the former, and the ongoing Ford/Reagan nomination battle affected the latter)
Anyway, honestly, who gives a damn about the margin of the bounce? Look at the margin of the lead. There, Kerry’s in excellent shape.
And, my two cents on the GOP post-convention: I don’t care if Bush leaps up 6-8 points. If the result doesn’t put him above 50%, he’s going to lose.
People sometimes make this more complicated than it needs to be.
Absolutely right. And on top of the problems you mention there is the fact that the way-too-early poll of July 8-9 was taken right after Kerry named Edwards as his VP, so he was already enjoying a bounce from that. And that Edwards bounce had mostly faded by the time of the convention. I am happy to have the information given in the poll, but to pretend that it measures the convention bounce is outrageous.