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.
Tax Illegal Employers: A plan tp recover the cost of illegal immigration to taxpayers.
The Federal government should place a tax surcharge of $1.00 per hour or 10% of wages paid on employers of illegal immigration. The net funds collected should be divided into three equal portions which go to federal, state, and local governments, because each level of government spends money providing services to illegals and their families. As is the case with other unpaid taxes, those who report tax evasion to authorities should get a percentage of any taxes and penalties collected by the IRS. This plan aligns the interests of all three levels of government and individual taxpayers into seeing that the law is enforced and taxes due are collected. Since it’s an unpaid tax and not a crime, the government can collect without proving that the employer knew the employees immigration violation status beyond a reasonable doubt, making it much easier to enforce.
Illegal employers who claim they can’t find legal workers will be required to put their money where their mouths are by paying a surcharge on illegal labor.
Finally, if IRS officials are too beholden to corporate officials to collect the tax, we should allow individuals to bring suit under the federal tort claims act, allowing them to keep an even larger portion of taxes collected than they would receive for just reporting the violation to the IRS. This gives individuals who want tougher enforcement a path of action which is much more constructive than sitting at the border with guns. Also illegals would have an incentive to register as guest workers or take whatever path the law sets up to become legal and therefore financially more appealing to employers. Finally, if this isn’t enough to get American employers to give hiring preference to American workers, we could always increase the amount of the surcharge.
It amazes me that anyone thinks they can read the voters mindset on any specific issue based on the election results. I disagree vehemently with the Democrats position on illegal immigration, yet I always vote a straight Democratic ticket. Illegal immigration is a vexing problem all right, but it was dwarfed by dozens of other issues. I just don’t see how anyone can draw conclusions about a subject like this based on the election results. The writer is only deluding himself.
“Doing something about” the immigration issue usually means stopping and/or punishing immigrants. This is a trade issue, the other side of the NAFTA coin. American industrial farm products have decimated the Mexican agrarian economy, leaving people the choice of privation or emigrating to the US.
Whether or not this is the perception of the American public, it is the fact.
NAFTA is more widely excoriated in Mexico than in the US. To the extent the populist anti-corporate Democrats can, they ought to make this point. It isn’t working for anybody — except the corporate interests who can monopolize the gains.
One suspects, as you suggest, that the immigration issue was generated as a wedge for the election and will be relegated to the far back burner now that the vote is in.
Opposition to NAFTA must take one of two forms: repeal the agreements or intervene in the exchange. Intervening means creating new mechanisms to mitigate the environmental and labor problems and to make sure the net gain is a net gain for all players, not just for the corporations. This is a necessarily bureaucratic solution, but it is the only way to make it work in the context of corporate dominance.
It may well be that agriculture has to be dealt with under non-free trade terms. The subsidies to American agriculture cannot be matched in poorer countries. When a society loses agriculture, it loses not just another industry, but a way of life, a big panel in the fabric of its society.