By Tom Brennan
Joe Lieberman, long a centrist senator from New England, passed away March 27th. A documentary about his storied career is set to be released in November. The late U.S. senator took an apartment in the Granite State twenty years ago, part of a forlorn bid for president, as he sought to stand athwart the history of his party and yell “stop.” His apartment was in Manchester, not far from a bar called The Wild Rover. His passing leaves me thinking about a visit by him to that bar, which I happened to witnessed, and thinking about him, about the disappointments that can attend political life, and about the blurred line between constructive adherence to principle, and mere frustrated personal ambition.
Dr. Howard Dean’s anti Iraq war crusade fired an angry appeal to what he called “the Democratic wing of the Democratic party.” The Vermont Governor’s netroots driven crusade marked the end of progressive patience with two decades of what they regarded as Dem establishment appeasement of increasingly militant right wing politics, an approach often associated with Lieberman.
It was John Kerry, not Lieberman, who put down Dean’s progressive insurgency. By the weekend prior to the New Hampshire primary, Lieberman was not a factor. This undoubtedly rankled Lieberman as he and his wife made a quiet visit to the Wild Rover the Saturday night prior to that primary 20 years ago.
Kerry had trounced Dean in Iowa a week earlier, after Dean had for months, after which his Dean’s effort to rally his disappointed troops with a rowdy war whoop seemed unhinged on TV, played endlessly on cable news. Dean built his insurgent campaign mostly on the internet, and had a famously prickly relationship with legacy media. This may have been the last election cycle where “Old Media” would dominate.
There is always electricity in the air in Manchester on the Saturday night prior to the primary. In one corner of the Rover a crew of Fire Fighters for Kerry made time with a teacher named Lola. Preppy looking Edwards supporters were razzing Dean volunteers, with taunts of “how’s your head, Deaniacs?” I was at the bar with a young man about to ship out to Iraq. He’d thought the peace time reserves a good and safe way to pay for school. The war was starting to sour 9 months after George W had proclaimed “Mission Accomplished.” My drinking companion was apprehensive.
Into this scene walked the Liebermans. Granite Staters are not star struck about pols, but heads turned. Lieberman didn’t glad hand. He looked older in person than on TV. He certainly knew by then that his effort had failed. He would run fifth in NH, with just 9% of the vote. He had to be chagrined. He was clearly out of step with a party he had once helped lead. He was at odds with old friends. He felt betrayed by his old comrade in arms, Al Gore, who supported Dean, even after Lieberman delayed his own bid to wait for Gore to decide whether to run again. Lieberman had almost been elected vice president four years prior. He strongly supported the Bush position in the post 9/11 wars. His failed presidential bid would mark a turning point, and begin 20 years of estrangement from his party.
Lieberman spotted the soldier’s uniform and drew him aside. He spoke quietly with the frightened young man, my camera catching the pensive conversation. After about 20 minutes, whatever Lieberman had told the boy seemed to have calmed him and lifted his spirits. I have agreed with very little that Lieberman has said or done the past twenty years. But Lieberman’s sincerity and decency was evident in that incident, and his passing reminded me of it.
New Hampshire would move the party decisively to Kerry, a war hero who supported the war before he opposed it, and was thought better positioned than Dean to challenge George W on the war. Senator Kerry would run with Senator Edwards, the honey voiced southern trial lawyer, who charmed his way into the top tier of contenders. There was also a brief flirtation with Wes Clark, a general who also opposed the war. Again, George W. Bush would post a narrow victory. Within a year his political position would collapse.
Only four years earlier the Gore-Lieberman ticket actually defeated Bush in the national popular vote, with a disputed outcome in Florida delivering Bush the electoral college. Lieberman’s strength in south Florida was no small factor in that state being close enough to dispute. Lieberman was Jewish, and his presence on a national ticket was ground breaking. Lieberman famously taken to the floor of the senate to scold Bill Clinton for the Monica Lewinsky peccadillo, and Gore thought that was just what he needed on the ticket to take the curse off of him.
By 2004, the party was indeed moving away from the Republican Lite DLC model promoted by Gore, Lieberman, and Clinton, who was a friend of Lieberman’s at Yale Law School.
In his NH primary bid, Lieberman touted himself as a traditional “John Kennedy/Bill Clinton Democrat.” In 1981 he published an admiring biography of former Democratic National Committee Chair John M. Bailey, from his home state of Connecticut. Bailey was an old school pol who led the party in the LBJ era. The son of a liquor store owner in Stamford, Lieberman had gone to Mississippi to do civil rights work in 1963, when to do that was to put your life in danger. He escaped Vietnam with college deferments, courtesy of an early marriage and children. He was elected to the state senate as reformer at age 28. At 38 he lost a bid for congress to a Republican state senate colleague he had often collaborated with. He then divorced and remarried the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. In 1982, at 40, he was elected state attorney general.
His election to the U.S. senate offered an early clue to the road Lieberman would travel. By 1988, Lowell Weicker had been elected to the senate from Connecticut three times. If Lieberman would develop problems in his party for being insufficiently liberal, Senator Weicker had already well established problems in the GOP for being insufficiently conservative. Both men would later win statewide elections without a major party nomination. Weicker was grumpy and dismissive, caustic in his comments about the Bush and Buckley families, and probably best known for his harsh judgments about the Nixon administration as a member of the 1973 Senate Watergate Committee. Lieberman’s edge in that senate race came from an endorsement by William F. Buckley Jr., who edited the Yale Daily News a decade before Lieberman did. Weicker would be elected governor in 1990, running as an independent. Weicker died last year.
If Weicker was seen as grumpy but honest, Lieberman came to be widely seen as affable but sanctimonious. There was his posturing about the Lewinsky affair, which most of the country thought at the time was inappropriately and hypocritically made grist for a sham impeachment, which may mark the beginning of making that vital constitutional check on presidential excess less meaningful. Lieberman did not support impeachment, it is important to remember. Many felt Clinton might have resigned as a matter of self respect and integrity, but impeachment was not the remedy, and GOP hypocrisy in this matter was epic.
Lieberman’s relative moderation on social issues was soon crowded out by his fondness for right wing theocrat tropes such as “in America we have freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.” This constructs a straw man, the purpose of which ought to have been better understood by a man so intimately familiar with the persecution of people whose theology might be out of fashion, or out of power.
The country was in no mood to split hairs after 9/11. Most Americans actually believed Saddam had a role in the attacks. The WMD excuse for the war in Iraq was a lie. The assistance this blunder rendered the terrorists in incalculable. When a sober discussion of this was imperative, Joe Lieberman veered into McCarthyism. He repeatedly questioned the patriotism of Iraq war skeptics. That was a bridge too far for too many Democrats. Smash and grab right wing political tactics since the end of the Cold War included the sham impeachment, the truly stolen election of 2000, revived voter suppression, the lie and buy Newt Deal congress, and crass partisan exploitation of 9/11, which led to Iraq.
If there was any doubt where Holy Joe was headed, subsequent events resolved the question. The netroots that failed with Howard Dean in 2004, took Lieberman down in the Dem primary for his senate seat in 2006. The Dems retook both houses of congress that year, led by the new DNC Chair, Howard Dean, who promoted a grass roots 50 state strategy, not GOP Lite quackery. Interestingly, Lieberman was reelected as an independent in November, largely thanks to GOP support. The Dem who beat him in the primary is now Governor. Lieberman endorsed McCain over Obama in 2008, was very nearly McCain’s running mate, and opposed Obama’s reelection.
He was active to the end, when a fall at home led to complications, as it often will with an 82 year old. At the time of his departure Lieberman was a lead promoter of another exercise in more misguided and destructive sanctimony — the No Labels movement — an effort to put a third or fourth candidate into this year’s presidential election. This project attracted opportunists of diverse views precisely because it was rooted in no clear program or priorities, but was widely understood to be helpful to Donald Trump once again becoming president despite being twice repudiated by the majority of voters.
Lieberman’s story, in the end, is a tragic one. He had differences with more progressive Democrats but they tolerated his approach when it dominated the party in the 1990s, without essentially bolting to the reactionary opposition party. His frequent and deliberate empowering of an increasingly extreme and nihilistic GOP is better understood as an expression of his own personal resentment and frustrated ambition than as any matter of principle. He had traveled some distance from his days as a freedom rider in Mississippi.