“Joe Lieberman is back in the Senate,” noted The Wall Street Journal’s Paul Gigot in January 2001, when the Connecticut Democrat returned to his lawmaking duties weeks after the Gore/Lieberman ticket’s painful – and controversial – defeat in the 2000 presidential election.
The question, continued Gigot, was “which Joe is it?” Will it be, he wondered, the “New Democrat who often broke with liberal orthodoxy, or the vice presidential candidate who was pounded into submission by his party’s left?”
Until the question is answered, wrote Gigot, Lieberman “returns diminished. He’s more famous but also less admired because of the compromises he made to appease his liberal critics. Many who praised him in the past cringed as he bowed like a butler on racial preferences, Hollywood and Social Security.
“His pandering nadir came in his Los Angeles acceptance speech, when he added his own ad-lib kowtow to the Clinton-Gore boilerplate on affirmative action: ‘Mend it, but please don’t end it.’ Did he have to beg?”
Sharp words indeed, but Gigot was hardly alone in his tough appraisal. Former Forward and future New York Sun editor Seth Lipsky wrote, shortly after the election, “Of all the figures that emerged from the [presidential campaign and its aftermath], Mr. Lieberman is the most tarnished. In his quest for higher office ... he abandoned the very principles for which he was so much admired.”
Barbara Amiel, writing in the London Daily Telegraph, was considerably harsher, calling Lieberman a “pathetic figure” and “the consummate hypocrite.”
What most disturbed Amiel was that “Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, suddenly discovered on his way to wooing black voters that he had a great deal of respect for American black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan, author of some of America’s nastiest anti-Semitic quotes.”
(Equally disturbing was Lieberman’s embarrassing performance on “Meet the Press” shortly after Al Gore had selected him as his running mate. Asked by host Tim Russert whether he believed Pat Buchanan was anti-Semitic, Lieberman replied, “No, I don’t, personally. I enjoy his company. He’s a bright, interesting guy ... some of [his] statements I think lend themselves to misinterpretation, but, no, I wouldn’t call him an anti-Semite at all.”)
The pity of it all is that Lieberman over the years had painstakingly carved a niche for himself in the Senate as a thinking person’s Democrat (the very antithesis of the knee-jerk, Barbara Boxer/Ted Kennedy model). While his voting record was actually quite liberal, he displayed a willingness to go against his party’s ideological grain.
In the wake of his vice-presidential run, however, he found himself perceived as just another expediency-driven politician; one not above sacrificing principle for votes and who now had to confront the mocking challenge posed in the subhead of Gigot’s column: “Which will guide him now – his old independence or his newfound liberal religion?”
That “old independence” was a trait this writer had occasion to sample first-hand during several chats with Lieberman early on in his Senate career.
In a 1994 interview, for example, Lieberman sounded a skeptical note on the viability of the Oslo peace accords, then barely a year old, and the trustworthiness of Yasir Arafat (concerns Lieberman no longer seemed to harbor during the 2000 presidential campaign when he faithfully defended the Clinton/Gore Middle East policy that placed so much stock in Arafat’s trustworthiness):
“The [Oslo] agreement was always full of risks... I thought the risks were worth taking ... but I’ve had serious reservations since [the signing]…. Rather than act like a leader, Arafat has been carrying on like an agitator. The whole situation, including future negotiations, has to be approached with a great deal of caution.”
That was the real Joe Lieberman, the one who would begin to reemerge, slowly at first in the years after the 2000 election, then with increasing panache after his embarrassingly short-lived presidential bid in 2004, and, finally, full throttle when Connecticut Democrats dumped him for a political unknown in the 2006 Senate primary, forcing him to mount an independent, and ultimately successful, run for reelection.
Earlier this month, Lieberman, who hasn’t ruled out supporting a Republican for president next year, criticized his party’s presidential candidates for kowtowing to “politically paranoid, hyper-partisan sentiment in the Democratic base.”
“Even as the evidence has mounted that General David Petraeus is succeeding in Iraq, Democrats have remained emotionally invested in the narrative of defeat,” he said during a speech at Johns Hopkins University. “For many Democrats, the guiding conviction in foreign policy … is distrust and disdain for Republicans in general and for Mr. Bush in particular.”
The real Joe Lieberman. He’s back, he’s angry, and he’s loaded for donkey.
Chanukah is upon us. Among the happy preparations (note to self: pick up candle oil a.s.a.p.), everyone seems to have gifts on the brain—the little ones anxiously anticipating their presents, the grown-ups agonizing about what to buy. I hate to be a party pooper, but why are we doing this? It’s not only that it’s stressful, and that most of the kids we’re buying for do not need another toy or game. To the best of my knowledge, exchanging gifts at this time of year is not a Jewish custom. The real tradition is to give kids money—gelt—in commemoration of the coins children received as a reward (or was it incentive) for learning Torah during the ancient Greeks’ brutal Hellenization campaign.
