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.
During the first month after the election, we were all seemingly in agreement that despite having lost, we’d managed to stay united as a party, and avoid the traditional Democratic circular firing squad. Times were gonna be rocky ahead, but we were going to face the enemy as one.
Then Beinart had to aim his guns at Moore and MoveOn, and Al From had to go on the attack against everyone who wasn’t as conservative as him without actually being a Republican.
These guys are a cancer on our party; they’ve got to go. I’m willing to debate ideas with whoever. But when the GOP puts Coburn and DeMint in the U.S. Senate, and worships at the feet of Limbaugh, Norquist, and Pat Robertson, anyone of *either* party has got a lot of damned gall to say our problem is that we tolerate extremists. Compared to the wingnuts I’ve just mentioned, Michael Moore is a freakin’ moderate. And, FWIW, he’s an honest-to-God patriot. If they try to kick him out of the party, I go too. Fercryinoutloud, we didn’t even kick GodZella out when he decided to campaign for Bush.
From: Gone. Beinart: Gone. (His ideas are actually good. But the penalty for starting a circular firing squad should be that you’re the first one shot. Then the rest of us all get to live.) Zell: gone. DLC: Gone. Being a conservative Dem is fine; being a traitor to the party isn’t.
You are very eloquent Aaron….but you are wrong. The Democratic Party MUST go back to its roots. If they don’t they will remain in the wilderness. I for one will not put my efforts into another election that dosen’t embrace a National Healtcare System again, (and again and again until we get it for ALL the American people), withdrawl from Iraq, investment in other energies, stem cell research (government sponsored), Choice and common sense.
If the DLC ignore Howard Dean for DNC Chair, millions will look for another leader in another party. Then the Democratic Party will be finished.
Beluumregio, you have profoundly misread Marshall. As the Dems adjust to the defeat and gather the reins to battle on, there will be much talk of restructuring the army.
But I don’t see any major commentator, certainly not Marshall, Black, etc. who will tolerate the sins of the Rupublican administration, much less endorse them. If you think Marshall supports Bush’s prosecution of Iraq, I’d suggest nothing else shows how badly you’ve misunderstood him.
I disagree with Jason Bradfield. There should be no purge and there will not be one. We cannot become Deaniacs until we have more PR infrastructure. Mr Rove has already made it clear that a sharp distinction between the parties is desirable. Since Republicans control the national imagination through their coordinated communications and public relations campaigns and have strong brand identity we would loose. We should (and must) do the hard thing by addressing the conservative issues in a liberal manner (as Marshall prescribes) and invest the public discourse with issues (and strategies) that put Republicans in a corner (which Marshall does not prescribe). The DLC is helpful but it should not be the Democratic brain trust.
I used to be a conservative Republican activist and I used to think the DLC was great because they forced the debate into a conservative frame of reference.
Now that I am a liberal I shocked that any Democrats, even centrists, take the DLC seriously. They are not centrists, they are conervatives. Every single one of their ideas puts the political debate on turf conservatives can win on.
The purge that is needed in the Democratic party is a purge of conservatives, just as the GOP successfully purged its Rockefeller Republican moderates.
The more a party can stay on message the better party discipline is. With DLC types running around the American public gets easily confused trying to figure out what Democrats stand for.
The sad truth is that, even if the public is not well enough educated, we don’t get to vote them out and elect new people. We work with the only Americans there are, or we lose elections.
The DLC would have us adjust our party platform to get to where the voters seem to be politically. The progressive alternative is to BE LEADERS and to make an effective case for our vision–such that the voters come around to our view. The Republicans have taken the leadership role, and brought the voting public where they want them to be, while the progressive Democrats have not led; they have instead insulted those voters who were following the GOP, calling them sheep, and focusing on attacking the GOP agenda rather than articulating a better alternative.
Our job as progressives is to give the voters an attractive vision of why what we want to do is best for them. If we do that effectively, then they will vote for us. If we’re not willing to do it, then the DLC is right and the only remaining way to win is to offer the people what they believe they want now, at the expense of our beliefs to the contrary.
I’m one of those rare believers in both the Beinart thesis (Democrats lost this election on national security grounds, and need to make Arab democracy the centerpiece of their foreign policy) and that the DLC is almost wholly irrelevant on domestic issues.
With a few notable exceptions, the DLC red state strategy has been a certifiable failure. Five out of six decent corporatist DLCish red state senate candidates went down in flames last month, and in at least two of those cases to complete lunatics. The only red states this strategy works in have large Democratic bases, and large quantities of white, professional, moderate, suburban swing voters (as in Colorado and New Hampshire.) This doesn’t describe most red states today.
Democrats need to recover their losses with the white working class if they want to have any hope of becoming a majority party again in the next thirty years, and economic populism is their best shot at that end. Combined with a program of democracy promotion abroad and you have not only a winning formula for the next generation, but you have again the party of FDR and Truman.
When I think of the DLC, I think of the smarmy, smug Evan Bayh who is a prominent member.
I think about how as a Democrat in the state of Indiana, one needs to go about being elected it’s US Senator. My best guess would be to position yourself just to the right of Joe Lieberman, and just close enough to Zell Miller without being laughed out of the party.
There is a reason why during our annual summer confrontation with hate groups here in the Chicago area, we had to bus them in from Indiana.
I disagree with the last poster Joe, as he is under the wrong assumption that the Democratic Party has been actively turning away or purging those of ‘faith and conscience’, which is exactly what the Republicans have been doing to gays and pro-choice members.
We are dealing with an American electorate where still today, 44% percent think that a ‘stable democracy’ is possible in Iraq.
There is nothing wrong with our message or our messengers. The problem is the truth does not translate well into the language of fear, intolerance and hate.
“The DLC is full of smart people who have many good and useful ideas about the road forward for Democrats.”
Perhaps they could work for Democratic institutions then? There’s more than a few on the rise, and they actually believe Dems should be… Dems.
Seriously though, I think MoveOn’s response was, while blunt, accurate. The DLC came up because they were successful at raising money via large corporate donations. Dean, MoveOn, TrueMajority, and Kerry in their wake showed that we can reach financial parity with the right with “trickle up” fundraising, and none of those efforts involved foresaking Democratic values to curry favor with big business. How thrilling was it, amongst the grief on Nov. 3rd, to see and hear all the responses of “Okay, I’m ready to keep fighting, where do I send the check and when do the ’06 campaigns get under way?”
I wouldn’t worry about all the truly smart and skilled people at the DLC. There is an upsurge of Democratic institutions afoot, there will be plenty of room for the good ones to get in and contribute, and hopefully working for those institutions won’t entail wincing when the bosses decide to berate the grassroots in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.
Worse things could happen than to have From and Reed fade into obscurity.
John Kerry lost to George Bush because the latter was successful in scaring the hell out of the American people and the former was not convincing enough that he could protect them as well as the guy who proved he couldn’t on 9/11.
Go figure.
The Dems don’t need to move to the center. Kerry did and he outscored Bush among independents and still lost. We turned out more voters for the Democratic party than any previous winner from either party ever got and still lost.
The Democratic party simply needs to open itself to people of conscience and faith while still voicing a progressive theme on economics, health care etc. and forget gun control, abortion rights and other social issues that Repubs use to bolster their base through identity politics.
Bush won because Rove grew the Republican base. The Dems will win when they field a candidate who grows their base and caters to it.
hmmm…
I’m not sure that the DLC and Clinton didn’t lead the Democrats down the garden path to near-oblivion. Clinton is a political genius, but with the republican party lurching off to the ideological gamma quadrant, the Democrats need to keep their distance from them, now more than ever.
The Republican party is simply crazy now, but the Democrats don’t win because they are still playing Clinton’s games.