The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
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    Lieberman

    By Barth on Sat, 10/31/2009 - 8:19pm |
    I came late to the bash Lieberman party. Orthodoxy, or knee jerkism has never much appealed to me and I do not expect or even want politicians to agree with me on every issue. I voted for Presidents Carter and Clinton twice in general elections each even though their version of a Democratic Party is not mine, nor that of Presidents Franklin D Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, but they were better candidates than their opponents, so I did what one does.

    Moreover, the state Attorneys General who fought back when the Reagan Justice Department abandoned so many of its traditional functions (at least since the Kennedy years), included Connecticut's Lieberman and that was worthy of some respect, it seemed to me.

    While I did not agree with Senator Lieberman's views on the war in Iraq, the issue was, as somewhat discussed here, a closer one than many on this site will concede. That Senator Lieberman supported President Bush on this issue could not be a disqualifier in and of itself. It was a tough time when that vote was taken, and three Senators who I admire cast a vote opposite from what I thought was the right one (Kerry, Clinton and Edwards, of course) so another wrong vote could not justify a primary vote to deny the party's nomination for another term for the same Senator who should have been elected Vice President in 2000. 

    I should have known better (as should Vice President Gore). More importantly, Connecticut voters should have known better. President Roosevelt taught us the lesson of just how far the party label can take us, and he did it about 14 years before I was born.

    It was 1938 when President Roosevelt made clear what Democrats were trying to ignore. The huge majorities they had in the Congress were illusory and while the despair of what President Hoover had wrought, and the Great Depression which the country was in, permitted the President elected in 1932 a great deal of leeway in fashioning the New Deal, the moment the emergency ended, the fact that the "party" such as it was consisted of a loose coalition of true New Dealers and the racist pols of the south who were Democrats since the period before the Civil War and remained so through Reconstruction and for many years thereafter.

    The most progressive Democratic President before Franklin Roosevelt was Woodrow Wilson. He was as "progressive" as the southern wing would tolerate, and for all his brilliance, was a racist as anyone else. Yet, until President Roosevelt's control of the party ended the "2/3 rule" which effectively gave the south a veto over the party's presidential nominee, that was as good as the party could be.

    Frustrated by the alliance of southern "Democrats" and conservative northern Republicans who were increasingly opposing New Deal proposals, President Roosevelt tried to back candidates to run against the worst of these so-called "Democrats." And, friends, when I say worst, I mean worse than anything you can imagine from a 2009 vantage point.

    This is from a 1938 Time magazine article, as just a taste of what we are talking about.

    To many Southern Democrats, it was strong medicine when in 1932 Franklin Roosevelt wooed the Northern Black Belt as no Democrat had done in mortal memory. When he gave Negroes prominent seats at his inauguration, put them in bigger jobs than they ever held in a Democratic administration, Southern Democrats tried hard to swallow it as political expediency. Such demagogues as Georgia's Eugene Talmadge gagged for public edification when, during the 1936 campaign, Mrs. Roosevelt was photographed between two young Negro officers of the R.O.T.C. at Washington's Howard University. But in this year's primary fight, Demagogue Talmadge's fire has been directed at Roosevelt's wooing Negro votes far below the Mason-Dixon line. Moreover, for the first time in years, South Carolina's Ellison D. ("Cotton Ed") Smith, who walked out of the 1936 Democratic Convention in Philadelphia when a Negro pastor was called on to pray, last month managed to put some life into his traditional campaign plank: White Supremacy.


    1938 was a bad election year for the New Deal and President Roosevelt, and it basically ended the progressive movement in its highest 1933ish sense until President Truman introduced the Fair Deal after the war, and desegregated the armed forces. But 1938 was a good year, too. It established once and for all what the Democratic Party would become, an event not fully realized until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 began the realignment of the parties into the structure we have today, where the Republican Party essentially represents the views of the southerners who brought down the New Deal. 

    But, as it turns out, not all of these regressive faux Democrats have left our party, and not all of them are southerners trying to appeal to people from whom race is always the deciding factor or people who have good records opposing racial classifications but otherwise hold the anti-government, let them eat cake philosophy that President Hoover allowed to all but destroy our nation. Some are actually secret Republicans (of the 1950s variety) pretending to be Democrats. The aforementioned Presidents Carter and Clinton fit, to one degree or another, that description.

    And then there is Connecticut. One of its 1950s Senators, Prescott Bush, had a respectable record on civil rights and was one of the leading Republicans to oppose Senator Joseph McCarthy and his methods, at least when it became possible to do so without being tarred as a Communist.

    Senator Bush's son and ne'er do well grandson both became President, of course, but his real heir in smiling yankee Republicanism appears to have been Senator Joseph Lieberman. Sen Lieberman was first elected to his current position by defeating Sen Lowell Weicker, another of those guys who just failed to see that the Republican Party had moved away from where it had been in the Eisenhower days. Senator Weicker was, as Senator Kennedy's book reminds us, a supporter of massive reform of the way we insure our citizens against the cost of medical care.

    Senator Lieberman has not been. Sure, he tried to claim otherwise during his 2006 campaign against Ned Lamont:

    Yes, well what a Democrat means to me is what it meant in 1960 when President Kennedy summoned my generation into public service. It meant the dream of opportunity and freedom here at home and throughout the world. President Kennedy said that "freedom doesn't come from the generosity of the state, it comes from the hand of God." 

    And America's mission is to pay any price, bear any burden, support any friend, and oppose any foe to assure the success and survival of liberty. In our time, the Democratic Party has been the great hope of people rising in our country, and it remains that way. 

    That's why I say he's running a single issue campaign. Every campaign, as President Clinton reminded us, is about the future. And what I'm saying to the people of Connecticut, I can do more for you and your families to get something done to make health care affordable, to get universal health insurance, to make America energy independent, to save your jobs and create new ones. That's what the Democratic Party is all about. 

    He is a single issue candidate who is applying a litmus test to me. It's not good enough to be 90 percent voting with my colleagues in the Senate Democratic Caucus. He wants 100 percent. And when a party does that, it's the beginning of the defeat of that party. 

    I want Democrats to be back in the majority in Washington and elect a Democratic president in 2008. This man and his supporters will frustrate and defeat our hopes of doing that.


    That was, of course, a lie. And it was an easily documentable lie. For instance, read this fascinating piece from the New York Times in early 1993:

    The First Lady said the Administration was willing to consider changes in President Clinton's health care plan so long as the final product guaranteed "universal coverage with comprehensive benefits." She said that the only proposals that earned serious consideration by those standards were the President's plan and those offered by liberal Democrats and moderate Republicans.

    They are "the only ones that recognize the importance of achieving universal coverage," Mrs. Clinton said in a meeting with 22 journalists at the White House.

    She brushed aside other plans put forward by conservative Democrats, notably Representative Jim Cooper of Tennessee and Senator John B. Breaux of Louisiana, saying they did not guarantee universal health coverage. 

    Mr. Breaux's bill has been endorsed by two influential Senate Democrats, Sam Nunn of Georgia and Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, and Senator Dave Durenberger, Republican of Minnesota. Mr. Cooper has 49 co-sponsors in the House -- 22 Republicans and 27 Democrats. Thus, Mrs. Clinton today declared herself squarely against a sizable bloc of lawmakers in a fight in which every vote counts.


    Or this, from the same paper, reporting Senator Lieberman's explanation of why
    he was disappointed in President Clinton for "veering" left.

    "I believe a lot of Democrats who had previously voted for President Reagan and President Bush voted for President Clinton because they really felt he was a different kind of Democrat," said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, who is a vice-chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council. The council is the centrist group once led by Mr. Clinton that defined the New Democrat.

    "In the first four months of the Government, there has been some disappointment both on a policy ground and a personnel ground," Mr. Lieberman said.


    Yet there was Senator Reid and President Obama assuring us last December that Fox News' favorite Democrat, the guy who campaigned against the election of a Democratic Party nominee for President, spoke that the Republican National Convention and supported several of its candidates for seats in a Congress he claim to hope would be in control of the Democratic Party, telling us that all of that was out of deep friendship with Senator McCain and meant nothing significant. The FOX News people could barely disguise their glee at yet another example of feckless, unprincipled Democrats, as they showed Senator Reid explain:

    Joe Lieberman is a Democrat. He is part of this caucus.


    Moreover, as Time magazine reported, it was :

    especially savvy because Obama and Senate majority leader Harry Reid know that in order to achieve virtually anything on the Democrats' long list of ambitious legislation, they will need every vote they can possibly get in the Senate. Obama's biggest challenge in both chambers of Congress will be keeping the varying factions of his own party together, especially the more liberal members and the more conservative so-called Blue Dog Democrats. To that end, Lieberman can be an asset, especially in helping to convince his fellow moderate members in the so-called Gang of 14, which includes some Republicans like McCain and Lindsey Graham. "We need every person that we can in Congress working constructively to move forward with the new agenda for our country," says Senator Ben Cardin, a Maryland Democrat. "Look, we're the majority party, we have the responsibility to act, and we've got to bring in the broadest possible coalition in order to get that done, and Senator Lieberman can be a very valuable member of our team."



    Sen Lieberman himself told us:

    "This is the beginning of a new chapter, and I know that my colleagues in the Senate Democratic caucus were moved not only by the kind words that Senator Reid said about my longtime record but by the appeal from President-elect Obama himself that the nation now unite to confront our very serious problems,"


    I am not sure whether it was the incoming White House that really showed a lack of resolve and principle or whether it was the Reid people, but all those who went along with this foolishness should either fix this or hang their heads in shame over what they did to their own agenda. This is how President Carter wrecked his presidency moments after taking office by not understanding who his friends would be, and that he needed friends and to keep his enemies on the defensive. By 1980 President Carter's uselessness made Senator Kennedy our only hope, but the nonsense that passes for political thought in this country brought us President Reagan instead. I have higher hopes for President Obama, the only person I have ever voted for in a primary who was then elected President but this should be a lesson learned that will not be forgotten.

    And, of course, the real villain of this piece is Senator Lieberman himself. He often sees himself as on a higher moral plane than the rest of us and his lecture to President Clinton in 1998 was certainly justified on that basis. But there is a strong moral component in this health care debate as discussed here, by me, and here, by a rabbi in New York City speaking to a Yom Kippur congregation.(Of course, since the rabbi is a Reform Jew, the antipathy that the Orthodox have toward Reform Jews makes it impossible, most likely, for Senator Lieberman to accept this rabbi was legitimate, but I will not get into that here.)

    And then there is the question of the role of a United States Senator on an issue where the demands of constituents may conflict with those of campaign contributors.

    It is not war, thank God. It is just politics. But there are rules that apply to almost everything we do in all of our endeavors. And this week's Regina Spektor-ism, though written in a completely different context, applies as fully as if she were a political commentator, which she decidedly is not:

    Two birds of a feather
    Say that they're always gonna stay together
    But one's never going to let go of that wire
    He says that he will
    But he's just a liar