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’d tend to agree with shai but would also caution about more worrisome, though perhaps counter-intuitive implications of this population shift. I’ve heard reports, although I can’t remember where (perhaps NPR?) in which politicians and demographers have noted that the country is actually becoming more, not less politically homogeneous. Conservatives and liberals are tending more and more to live in neighborhoods (and perhaps states) with residents that are more like them. Therefore I’d throw out the possibility that many of the snowbirds moving south are Republican/conservative leaning, hence the willingness to move to the south in the first place. They might prefer the family values and nascar culture that already exist there or maybe they’re moving for lower taxes and thus they are moving there to be amongst their own kind.
I remember reading predictions in the 80s and 90s that Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina would be defeated because of all the population growth from the north to the state. It turned out at that many of the people moving into the state were conservative white northerners, not representative cross-sections of the states from which they came (based on exit polls).
This is not to deny that there are many other groups such as Hispanics moving into fast growing red states too, in fact, doubtlessly at faster rates than northerners. But the trends I described above might play out here too. For example, if you look at exit polls it’s easy to see that Hispanics vote much more Republican in states like Georgia and Utah than states like New York and New Jersey. They may also be attracted to those who are politically and culturally like them.
This may also be why Florida, despite so much heavy population growth from northern White baby boomers and non-Cuban Hispanics between 2000 and 2004, actually became more Republican on a state and national level.
I don’t have a solution to this and do believe long-term trends favor Democrats in the country overall, but since our electoral college system is based on geography rathe,r than the popular vote for electing presidents I consider the trends very worrisome.
I personally don’t care about the south; let them have it. We won’t see a blue south in a presidential election for a long time. However, the growth in population in other red states (such as the mountain west) will favor the Dems. As a former New Yorker/Washingtonian who relocated to Denver in ’03, I see the shift happening and am very pleased to be a part of recent Dem success in CO. And, if the Dems play their cards right in ’08, CO’s 9 votes will go blue. Then all we need is 9 more . . . .
With the demographic character of Sun Belt populaltion increases already sited, another factor in the mix is the fact that evangelicals seem to be slowing peeling off the GOP elephants hide, kind of like dandruff on a black shirt.
While it may be true that population shifts might just make red states more purple, the political implications may still be important for a while to come.
In presidential elections, it’s hard to see Texas going for a Democrat for a long time, even if the state is slowly becoming more Democratic. This could be because even a massive influx of new Democrats is not enough to outweigh the already considerable advantage Republicans hold in the state. It could also be because new (potential) Democrats count in the census but do not vote, in some cases because they’re not citizens.
Moreover, an effective gerrymander regime could easily mute the effects of a massive influx of Democrats, by sifting them into already heavily Democratic districts. Thus, Democrats could lose a House seat in the north but not gain it in the south.
Finally, the effects filter all the way down to the low-level races. My wager is that all the new Democrats in the south and west will be less likely to run for and win dog catcher races, for a variety of reasons: for example, they may not be qualified (too young or not citizens), or they may not have the community ties to understand how politics works in their area or to garner a base of support. Transient Democrats are at a relative disadvantage compared to stable Republicans.
I could easily be proven wrong about any of these scenarios, and I certainly hope to be wrong. But I think that we should not rest on our laurels just because population gains in red states are due to Democrats moving in.