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.
Democrats still don’t understand just how transformative Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party has been and the medium term consequences for American politics.
What Trump did:
1. Destroyed the de facto bipartisan consensus about deindustrialization not being a big deal, mostly via his attacks on American dependence on Chinese imports;
2. Defended people’s right to live in the places they grew up in, a rhetorical achievement with deep policy consequences via rejecting the Clinton/Obama framework of calling for people to “reskill” and move (and concentrate wealth further in just a few US cities’ neighborhoods);
3. Achieved a de facto end of the (forever) War on Terror, mostly by sticking to deadlines on withdrawal from failed country building in Afghanistan;
4. Started a (dangerous) return to historical patterns of isolationism (America First), not seen since World War II, and didn’t start a single war, not even a small one (even kept peace with Iran);
5. By keeping peace with Iran and expanding peace between Israel and Arab states may have led to the creation of a possible Middle East consensus on autocracy (and high energy prices), involving Saudi Arabia, Israel and Iran;
6. Destroyed the bipartisan consensus on entitlement reform, declaring Social Security and Medicare as untouchable, allowing seniors to complete their alignment with Republicans without fear of getting their own benefits cut;
7. By declaring Social Security and Medicare as off limits, made the Republican narrative about deserving and undeserving Americans more coherent, making cuts to other welfare programs and the imposition of work requirements more politically viable (the opposite happened with the failure to dismantle Obamare -but refusing to focus on Obamacare also neutralizes a GOP vulnerability-);
8. Created an economic boom during Covid by signing on to Democratic proposals for extensive cash payments;
9. Moved the GOP away from opposition to (popular) gay marriage, while refocusing on a moral panic around children and gender;
10. further closed to door to any bipartisan agreement on immigration reform, consolidating the GOP on an enforcement only agenda, and successfully identified policy changes needed to get the abuse of asylum under control (policy changes Biden has had to adopt).
Trump’s most important legacy is consolidating the Republican belief that Democrats are so dangerous and despicable that minority rule is not only legitimate, but necessary. Even the use of force has now been legitimized.
The fact that he achieved this legacy and still managed to both increase turnout in general and support from minorities should be the most worrying for Democrats.
Because of shifts in support from the upper middle class (high regular turnout) to Democrats and from the working class (low information voters) to Republicans, high turnout and highly polarized elections may now favor Republicans.
Meanwhile, 3 years into the Biden administration, the media (specially liberal media) is still obsessed with Trump and Democrats can’t move past their strategy of using rule of law tools and arguments to try to control Trump’s return.
There is still no widespread understanding, much less agreement (among elite, activist and highly partisan Democrats), that democracy won’t be protected in the long term without major shifts in economic policies and the creation of at least a few new consensuses on some of the major social issues of the day.
As of 2020, Gallup reported that 17% of respondents said they had “a great deal” of trust in the judicial branch of the federal government while 26% said “not very much” and 8% said “none at all.” Two years later, with Biden having succeeded Trump, just 7% report a great deal of trust in the judicial branch while 31% report “not very much” and 22% say “none at all.” In two years, the Americans who put a great deal or a fair amount of trust in the judicial branch went from a two-thirds majority to a minority.
Consider the political implications of this in the context of Trump’s indictment. If Gallup is accurate, most Americans today put little or no trust in the federal judicial branch. It is correct for Democrats to repeat the “let impartial justice take its course” mantra. The problem is that most of the country believes the federal judicial branch does not provide impartial justice. To them, that manta will sound like an excuse.