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.
to whoever played devils advocate on NJ,
This is the Bush feint into blue territory. Remember the California feint in 2000? That’s what these stories are.
As for McGreevy, he’s such a local politician that not even any New Jersyites link him with the national party. I mean he was just an obscure state legislator before 2001. Besides which, governors can;t really do much for their national party. Republican gov. Ernie Fletcher is very unpopular in KY, but Bush will still win there. Ditto on NJ.
I agree that this is all going to come down to turnout. I have another question, though.
Again this morning, Zogby shows Bush ahead 48/44. The explanation is that more Republicans are voting for Bush than Dems are voting Kerry (by a pretty large margin, I think; 14% of Dems are polling for Bush, 5% Repubs for Kerry). I’m just finding this sort of odd, and wonder if you have any idea of what gives with this.
Addy
Mark –
I have the same take on all this as you do.
I just read the Big FIVE-OH a few days ago, about the maximum for the incumbent between the last poll and the election day numbers, and I think it is completely valid that that last poll % is his election day %, too.
I have been saying for several weeks (months, really) that if Bush is not leading by MORE than five in a state he is toast. My reason has to do with the massive turnout that is coming – and will blow the pollsters out of the water. The 200 election was boring, boring, boring, and the turnout of 50.8% reflects that. I can’t see the turnout being less that 56% (I am expecting 60%), and I also cannot see how Bush can get more than a 20% share of the increase in vote totals. I have so far only heard of a 1 million increase in GOP voters.
Anybody else that has better figures on that?
SO many people stayed home in 2000 because they were bored or because they bought into the Rove lie that Bush was the same as Gore anyway, so what difference does it make?
The rest of the increase will go to Kerry, who did not bore us – even though the press seems to think he does. Hatred for Bush is rampant, and I don’t think the media and pollsters have a clue.
Mark,
Just to play devil’s advocate — someone I know suggested that NJ might be a lot tighter than expected this year due to a backlash against the Dems from the McGreevey scandal.
According to these two news stories just out, Kerry appears to be surging in Florida. After several weeks of being behind by 3-5 points, two polls out Friday show he is tied in one and 4 points AHEAD in the other. Here are the links:
http://www.bocaratonnews.com/index.php?src=news&category=Local%20News&prid=9844
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36823-2004Oct15.html
Difference of 4 with MOE +/-3? I don’t think you
really needed to actually explain the difference, did
you?
Although I tend to buy your argument about weighting
by party, I don’t see how you can just reweight the
way you do in all your posts here. If party ID is correlated
with other demographic categories, then won’t
merely reweighting make the other demographics wrong,
given that the samples have *already* been reweighted
to fix those demographics?
For example, if men are more likely to be GOP, then
reweighting a survey with too many GOP would also
make the survey too female. That doesn’t seem like
an improvement to me. Obviously, including
party ID as part of the reweighting matrix (where the
relationship between party ID and age/sex/income
is taken into account) is reasonable, but that’s not
what you’ve done here (unless you have all this
data, which I didn’t think was so easily obtainable).
i agree about not being concerned about tracking poll changes. although i think of zogby as being one of the best pollsters, i don’t think things change that fast unless something big happens. just a few days ago kerry was up by 3 or 4 in zogby’s poll.
Based on what I’ve seen in all the polling thus far, I believe we are looking at an electoral landslide for Kerry on Nov. 2.
First of all, incumbents do not win re-election with approval ratings in the 40s, with 56% of voters consistently saying the country is on the “wrong track” and when they are presiding over a wobbly, if not failing, domestic and foreign policy (see Jimmy Carter).
Second, numerous pollsters including Ruy have said that within the last 3 weeks of a campaign, the only number that counts is not the spread but the INCUMBENT’s percentage. In all of the polls taken over the last week, Bush is at between 44% and 48%, meaning that is almost certain to be the MAXIMUM he will get of the popular vote. Not a good sign for the president.
Third, and perhaps most important, I am convinced that Democrats and Kerry voters are being DRAMATICALLY undersampled in every one of these polls. The most clear evidence of this are the state polls in New Jersey that show Bush within 5 points or less. Now, Gore won New Jersey by 15 POINTS in 2000, and there are actually more registered Dems there now. And nothing in the dynamic of New Jersey has changed to explain a 10-point swing from 2000 (I don’t buy the ‘terrorism has touched them’ argument because that is not showing up in the NYC polls). The only plausible explanation is that a substantial number of Democrats and Kerry voters are not being reached by the pollsters in New Jersey — and that trend obviously would hold true in every other state. Therefore I would wager that any state in which Bush is not at least 5 points ahead on Election Day he will lose.
Anyone have any thoughts on these observations?
I’ve long thought that the Dems had benefitted from not having a someone run on their fringe, unlike Republicans, who have been losing votes to the Libertarians and other right-wing fringe parties for years. The Dems will just have to get used to dealing with a crankish fringe siphoning off the occasional percentage point on their left.
At this point, anybody who is actually going to cast a vote for Nader is someone who, absent Nader, probably wouldn’t vote for Kerry anyway – they’d vote for some other third party (what’s Peace & Freedom doing this year?), write in “Donald Duck”, or just not vote at all (and sneer about how “all those parties are owned by the same corporate fascists, maaaaan.”) Those votes aren’t really “lost” to the Democrats. The Dems should just plow forward and concentrate on registering and getting the votes of people in critical battleground areas.
That doesn’t mean the Dems should make it easy for Nader – they should work to stymie his candidacy at every level, if only to hone their election law skills. Hell, they could try a bit of old Clinton-style triangulation and run against Nader and his crazier ideas, to burnish their moderate appeal.
This issue is up my alley, because I am a progressive and not a DLC Democrat at all. Many people I know supported Nader in 2000 — but somehow managed in NY to support Hillary against Lazio. (Kind of odd to be FOR a Clinton Democrat in NY against an honorable Republican, but not nationally against a self-evident turkey. I supported both Democrats, because, when the chips are down, the national Republican Party has NOTHING to offer positively either in Congress or the White House, while the Democrats are at least the lesser of two evils — on many issues no different but other significantly so.)
On Nader — He’s polling around 1%, and Andrew Kohut says his numbers are going down and down steadily. In swing states it should even be lower. But in one region — the upper midwest (Iowa, Minn, and Wisc) he appears to have a substantial base, more likely to tip a state there all other things being equal than anywhere else. A concerted effort by the Michael Moore progressives for Kerry in that region, figuring out where the pockets of Nader voters are and with 527’s buying up media time in those less than superpricey markets with progressive voices like Chomsky should be able to make a real dent right in that area. A strategic approach to the problem would be helpful.
Nader’s alliance with sleazy corporate Republicans in the election (openly) should be flaunted in front of these voters, then have trusted progressives who support Kerry make the case for Kerry Edwards to the Left RATHER THAN wasting the time and concern of the candidates themselves.
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For some voters, really getting down to brass tacks about unemployment and the strategic deficit as a lever against future Social Security, as well as the draft should win over both mainstream AND progressive voters. These are areas that gain broader support in BOTH directions at the mass level rather than sacrificing the swing voters to win progressives.
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I’m much more concerned about the fallout from the ‘nuisance’ article — which is what it was. I even read a poster at this site whose views I highly respect praising the picture of Kerry in the article.
Its distortions were crafted to be subtle, but they were distortions and not merely differences of interpretation. And they were systematic and deliberate, which is probably why Kerry was (by the reporter’s own account) so suspicious of him. He was clearly fishing for materiel to use against Kerry and has done the job. Kerry MUST respond more effectively, both to the distorted article and then the second layer of distortion from the Dick Morrises of the world.
It is a case of highbrow demagogy — more dangerous as you can’t always recognize it, but having spent 15 years of my life in and around Harvard and Berkeley (degrees from each) I do know how to smell it a mile off. Slicker than the SwiftBoat smear but no less slimy.
If Nader gets 1-2% of the vote, how many of those people would vote for Kerry even if Nader didn’t exist? If Nader voters are otherwise non-voters (or Socialist Worker Party voters), it doesn’t matter.
Frankly, I’m not worried about the Zogby numbers. There’s no reason why Bush’s numbers ought to have gone up, plus he’s still under 50%. If he can’t break 50 in at least a few polls, he’s in trouble, since late deciders always go for the challenging party.
As for Nader, I can’t see him getting much more than 1.5%, maybe not even that much. He was polling 4% in 2000 and only got 2.7%, and it’s reasonable to expect that some of his supporters will defect when they see that there’s a real possibility of Bush remaining president. Almost half of Nader’s 2000 supporters defected at the last minute, so why not again?
What do you think the odds are that those polled purposefully lie about what their party preference is? If it is known ahead of time that the pollster weights the survey based on party preference, I can tip the survey in favor of Bush if I state that I am a Democrat but am voting for Bush. The converse is also true. Is there any scuttlebutt out there that operatives are encouraging their followers to misstate their party affiliation when polled?
Okay, I did freak out at Zogby today, but I’m chilled now…