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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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March 28: RIP Joe Lieberman, a Democrat Who Lost His Way
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.
No one is more tribal than Republicans — and their tribe is WASPs. Doug Jones showed that you don’t have to hide who you are in order to win. So did Ralph Northam. Both were pro-choice, pro fairness in the tax code, and pro medicaid. Both were pro civil rights. They aren’t down the line doctrinaire liberals, but they wer
One thing that Republicans have that we don’t is the illusion of authenticity and devotion to principle.
We don’t have to be strident, but we DO have to be authentic. The more we tailor our message to particular audiences, the less authentic we become. That was one of Hillary’s greatest weaknesses — the perception that she was a phony.
People liked Trump and Bernie because they came across as being authentic. Bernie was truly authentic.
Trump was faking it, but had enough of the nativist GOP base to win, and he was running against Hillary and all of her baggage. Joe is authentic, and that’s why Conor Lamb is having him campaign.
Authenticity and lots of shoe leather.
Gregory
You really aren’t getting it. It is about winning elections, not about your personal ideology and prejudices.
We have ceded the “Jobs” messaging to Mr. Trump. A large number of Obama voters flipped and voted for Mr. Trump. Why was that?
You want to to keep losing? Continue the self righteous dialog with yourself and continue disregarding potential allies of differing creeds, beliefs and priorities. It is a surefire recipe for keeping the Repubs in power.
One fundemental flaw in current Democratic strategy is the emphasis on groups of people. We have excluded the white male in democratic retoric and apparently some of their wives took that pretty personally too. We need to speak loudly in an “all lives matter” tone and stop being a society of exclusivity. At this point, everyone is special except the white male; women, LGBT, minorities, immigrants, veterans, etc. We have to stop parsing people into exclusive groups.
Naomi, although what you said is well written, and sounds good; especially to those who you felt was left out, but the fact of the matter is that the past, and current system of government was built around the special privilege of the white male. So to make the white male feel so called “special” now would be to add special to the existing special; given white males special special privilege while everyone else have to deal with just “special privilege”.The Democratic party intent to deflate the arrogance of the white male was met with push back from certain states not the American People as a whole.Let me be clear, deflation of arrogance is not the same as marginalization.The arrogance being some whites believe; that whites inherently are better and therefore deserve “special special treatment” when it comes to running this country among other things,and because everyone else has been elevated to the same level we must be on a higher level or given more special treatment.
The strategy should be to awaken the same abolition sentiments of the Union to abolish the electoral college that was born out of slavery .Explain to the american people that the popular vote is the will of the “American people” and that the attempt to marginalize the many is an affront to the values of the founding fathers pure thought that all men was created equal with no caveats .
Thank you.
Why do some Republicans become Democrats?: Do you have a rank-ordered list of the reasons that Republicans become Democrats?
It seems clear to me that Dixiecrats became Reagan Democrats because of their racism; that they otherwise more or less were with the 99% and got snookered by Reagan and Southern tribalism.
What is most likely to bring not-racist Republicans back into the Democratic fold? Talk about recruits and recruiting.
Best,
Monty Johnston