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.
Clinton supporters endorse pragmatism. The Internet far left believes in idealism. Past events and present arguments are just symbols of the division in the basic world views of the factions.
A challenge to a person’s world view is an attack on everything that person is and believes in. Anger results.
There is great hostility between the factions now. The primaries aren’t going to settle it. If Democrats are to survive as a party the factions must be able to form temporary truces.
In my organizing work, I think Democrats feel betrayed by Bill Clinton. He promised a “third way” and then had Mickey Cantor drag us into NAFTA and GATT and more globalization. When polled between 55-60% of Americans opposed NAFTA and increasing globalization of our economy.
John Edward’s public criticism of corporate dominated Washington rings true for many. And a lot of us don’t want to have to relive the rancor and negativity of the Clinton 1990s. This election is about facing the future, not regurgitating the past.
And what is HRC doing? She has appointed Joy Philippi, past President of the National Pork Producers, as co-Chair of Rural Americans for Hillary. The NPC represents global, industrial agri- businesses in a time when many, many Americans hunger for a local, healthy food system built on humane and ecologically smart principles. Joy Philippi is strong evidence that HRC does not have a clue about what is happening on the ground in America’s communities with regard to food.
Food, its contribution to health and community, is a concrete reality, a topic that everyone has some feelings about.
Our nation is in the middle of a local food revolution (fueled by lack of confidence in food from abroad). HRC, indeed, virtually all the candidates are silent about this strong grassroots movement. This is a very big mistake.
Whatever the future of the Democratic Party and our nation, I don’t think another corporate centrist that talks “free markets” while increasing subsidies to dysfunctional corporate enterprises like hog production and ethanol is the answer.
Bill McDonough says, “if you want to go to Canada, but are heading toward Mexico at 100mph an hour. It doesn’t really help to slow down to 30. You are still going the wrong direction.”
HRC doesn’t evidence any understanding of where history and the living Earth’s environment is taking us. We need to turn around and go in the right direction.
What Bai calls Clintonism is nothing more than smart liberalism, constrained by the art of the possible. Traditional liberalism came to embrace a lot of dumb, bad policies, the faults of which experience and a better understanding of psychology, sociology, and economics have clarified. Clinton rejected the most obvious of those bad policies. He could not implement major replacement programs, however, because of the political climate he faced, a climate partly engendered by the old-line lefties whose advocacy for those stupid policies helped poison it.
The Clinton Referendum merely points out that at bottom the primaries are about whether Democrats want to side step Constitutional term limits and re-elect Bill Clinton (with Hillary as the front man).
The question is, is it even good and proper for Democrats (and the country) to be asked to revisit the Clinton Presidency in this way?
I think legacy presidencies are a bad idea to begin with (a la Bush) for many reasons. But here Bill Clinton has completely withdrawn his role a past president in order to play cut throat partisan politics. Which says a lot about who he really is and was. And in the end, there will be a referendum, not just on his presidency, but on them personally. No more Clintons. Enough!