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.
The parts of the memo that are really important need to be highlighted. It could use an executive summary. Otherwise the more original arguments (even if they are rethreads) get obscured by the more well known ones that have been debated endlessly.
These are the key insights (imo):
1. The political views of white workers were dramatically transformed by Donald Trump’s election in
2016. It is vital to understand the change that has occurred. … Since Trump’s campaign and election in 2016, however, circumstances have profoundly changed –and changed in a way that has shifted the political terrain dramatically against the Democrats. The difference can be stated simply: when white construction workers now sit around for lunch and the conversation turns to politics, Trump now completely defines and shapes the conversation. Every discussion quickly becomes framed in terms of what they agree with or disagree with about what Trump has done and said. They may have a range of opinions about specific policies and issues, but it is always Trump and his actions that defines the terms of the debate. (p.22-23 -talk about burying the lede-)
2. A key difference between the modern white working class conception and the traditional radical
view is that white working people do not visualize a single dominant “ruling class” or “power elite”
above them but rather see three different and distinct groups, none of which totally dominates
society but each of which in one way or another mistreats them and holds them in contempt. … The first group is the political class…The second group is the “Wall Street” financial elite…The final group is the “liberal” elite (p.24)
3. It is notable that none of the key distinctions indicated above between extremists and cultural traditionalists involve opinions on specific political issues. Instead, they deal with differences in basic social values like tolerance, compassion, empathy and open-mindedness and personal characteristics like psychological rigidity and obsessiveness. While these characteristics are resistant to change, they clearly divide the white working class into distinct sectors that are more and less persuadable. (p.6)
4. White workers in the groups very un-self-consciously expressed an old-fashioned “I have a dream”
philosophy about race – a philosophy that is now often viewed by progressives as naïve. … This feeling is expressed most clearly in disgust with “political correctness,” which they see as an attempt to impose upon them values with which they do not agree. Unlike conservatives, a number of participants in the groups admitted that over the years, they had gradually come to recognize that the biased cultural attitudes regarding African Americans that they’d held in the past were wrong and needed to change.
(p.11-12)
5. Progressives cannot assume that they can detach white workers’ displays of tolerance (of which they approve) from these workers’ cultural traditionalism (of which progressives do not approve and wish they would discard). Culturally Traditional white workers’ basic mental frameworks cannot be taken apart and reassembled at will. (A) progressive Democratic candidate who tries to run a campaign based on an elegantly detailed agenda of issues and policies but who cannot communicate a personal connection and emotional identification with the culture of the voters he or she seeks to represent will rarely succeed. (p.13-14)
6. (T)hey described politicians not simply as sometimes individually corrupt but as part of an inherently and irredeemably corrupt system that requires politicians to sell themselves to special-interest contributors to get elected, and who inevitably use their position to become wealthy. They further perceive all politicians as living in an insular and elite artificial world of wealth and influence-peddling.
They noted, in fact, that this perception was so strong that it represented “a new form of class consciousness.” (N)ever vote for the Democratic politicians who promise to enact them. The mystery disappears when it is understood that white working people tend to see Democrats as just as corrupted by the political system as Republicans are. (p.16-17)
7. Measures that Democrats themselves consider entirely altruistic policies to help not only the poor and needy but white working-class people as well are seen by white workers as cynical electoral bribery to buy mostly minority votes. (p.17)
8. When conservatives express broad generalizations about “welfare queens and Cadillacs,” it is
reasonable for progressives to dismiss such statements as urban legends that mask simple prejudice. But the anecdotes offered in the focus groups were entirely different; they were highly detailed and specific stories of people-white people-who the participants knew personally, and who were frequently their own white neighbors and relatives. It was, in fact, precisely the very clear, detailed, and vivid personal knowledge they demonstrated about such people taking advantage of the system that formed the basis for their intense anger. (p.18)
9. This same distinction between fairness and unfairness also appeared in the participants’ attitudes toward the wealthy. On the one hand, there was no antagonism for people who become wealthy through business success, and virtually no support for abstract “income redistribution” or punitively taxing the rich as a matter of basic social justice. But at the same time, there was a deep anger at the way the wealthy manipulated the system to pay lower taxes than ordinary workers or otherwise game the system to their advantage. There was also a feeling that the rich had become increasingly separated from and indifferent to those below. (p.18)
10. The participants supplemented these general views with specific ideas: that candidates should
live on their government salary and reject all other income, and that they should come from and
live in the very same community that elected them. … It is important to notice that this distinctive, personal-character-based set of criteria describe a candidate who is profoundly different from many of the “blue dog” Democrats that progressives quite reasonably scorn. Such candidates pander to conservative hot-button issues to win votes, while at the same time do not seriously defend workers’ economic interests but rather take money from special interests and make no effort to reduce the influence of big money in politics. (p.19)
I haven’t read the entire paper. But I totally agree with the premise. I have family in Ohio – white working class. They are not fire breathing extremists. They just feel that they work hard and play by the rules but just can’t get ahead. They feel that the system is stacked against them and no one cares. Culturally they are more aligned with the GOP but that’s not really what motivates them. They vote for the GOP in hopes that they will shake things up. Things like free college tuition or cancelling student debt has no relevance. At the same time, I’m not really sure what can be done to help in this global, knowledge based economy.
Levison’s argument is sound. I fear it will fall on deaf ears.
It has the advantage of not being as belligerent as many of Teixeira’s recent posts.