Some time ago, I started writing a post about Joe Lieberman (I-Lieberman). It was after watching him on one of the Sunday morning talk shows, where he was advocating for John McCain. Tuesday night, he spoke at the Republican National Convention. Over and over, he referred to himself as a Democrat. And he called the McCain/Palin ticket “the real ticket for change this year.”
I guess he can call himself anything he wants to but to endorse the McCain of 2008 is to not be a Democrat.
Democrats gained control of the Senate in 2006 only because Lieberman caucuses with them – at least sometimes. That control gives Democrats the majority leader and chairmanships. I have to wonder, though, if the price of power is too high.
After all, it is not as if the Democratic agenda has advanced through the Senate. In fact, looking at the passage of the FISA bill, for example, I’d wager that whatever Democratic agenda that did exist has been abandoned. So what’s left? The ability to say that the Democrats are in charge? Big deal.
Democrats should kick old Joe to the curb. He’s crossed the line.
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
Well, considering that the Democrats kicked him to the curb two years ago, I suppose he owed them a parting shot.
I don’t agree with Lieberman or McCain on a whole hell of alot, but I think Lieberman is being honest when he tells people why he’s endorsing McCain. That, at least, is refreshing in a politician regardless of what initial is after their name.
As opposed to him being honest when he said that if he lost his primary, he would respect that? Ha. Holy Joe’s a liar, just like the rest of ’em.
Vivian, I’m with on putting Joe out on the curb for collection. At this point, though, I just don’t think it hurts to wait until January. If they can’t do it then, though . . . well, we’ll cross that bridge when we jump off it, I suppose.
(Joe’s probably also buying some life support within the party – he continues to hand over gobs of money to the DSCC. Much more than a lot of Democratic Senators.)
MB,
Considering how Lieberman was treated by Lamont and his friends at Daily Kos, I wasn’t surprised that he decided as an independent and, apparently, neither were the people of the State of Connecticut.
Well, if CT had the same rules as VA, ole Joe would be at home right now. VA has a spoiler law – you can’t run in a primary and then turn around and run as an independent in the general.
MB – didn’t know that ole Joe was donating to the DSCC. Not that it makes any difference to me, but no doubt that is another reason why the D’s are unwilling to cut him loose.
It’s called a primary election, Doug, not a “first of two chances shot.” And Lieberman deserved everything he got. I look forward to next term, where he’s completely useless to everyone and generally ignored. He’s earned an extraordinary level of contempt.
As to Connecticut voters, please. Don’t pretend as if you don’t understand the gaming of that election.
I’d agree with that. The spoiler law is a pretty good thing, but having acknowledged that, Joe may have lost the Democratic primary in 2006, but the margin he won by in the general election ought to suggest that the largest part of Connecticut’s electorate thought he was doing a pretty good job representing them in the United States Senate. I can’t stand him on a personal level, and I’m sure he doesn’t care because I can’t vote for him and it’s not his job to do what I want him to do. I’d like to think some of us learned a valuable lesson about litmus tests and demanding representation of party before electorate (mostly because I foresee a day when some Virginia Democrat with out of state backing tries to do something like this to Mark Warner or Jim Webb on the grounds that they’re not liberal enough), but I’m realistic enough to know that most people never really learn anything.
I just wish that Joe Lieberman would restrict himself to taking his vengeance out on Connecticut’s Democratic Party and leave the rest of us alone. I never did anything to him.
On Holy Joe’s donations – $230k to the DSCC through the last reporting period (I’ve seen $257k, but I’m not sure how that figure was arrived at). That’s more than most Dem Senators. Some excellent context available here.
Silence, I think you’re drawing the wrong conclusion from the CT Sen results. Let’s review the result in the general (ignoring the .5% Green candidate):
Lieberman (I) picked up 50%
Lamont (D) picked up 40%,
Schlesinger (R) won 10%
Most of the state’s Republicans voted for Lieberman not because they thought he “was doing a pretty good job of representing them”, but because the guy that they nominated wasn’t going to get the job done, and Lieberman had turned into a useful national tool (in every sense) for their party. So the Republicans joined in with those Dems that just couldn’t believe that Joe was as bad as turned out to be, and put him back in office. This result had very little to do with approval in doing the job that he was supposed to be doing.
MB,
I would concede that point if the Lamont/Lieberman/Schesinger election were the only example of ticket-splitting in the 2006 statewide elections in Connecticut. But it’s not. The Republican gubernatorial candidate (an incumbent) got around 64% of the vote. The Democratic attorney general candidate (also an incumbent) got around 74% of the vote (his name’s Richard Blumenthal–go look at his wikipedia page, you’ll hate him). Neither of these candidates benefited from an independent incumbent spoiler. Like Lieberman, they simply benefited from being the incumbent: around 40% of the electorate split their tickets outside of the Senatorial race, compared with 35% that voted a straight Democratic ticket and 25% that voted a straight Republican ticket (apart from the Senatorial). And of that 40%, more than half simply voted for the incumbent every time.
Lieberman did probably benefit from some strategic voting on the part of Republicans, but he benefited more from traditional ticket-splitters and pro-incumbent voters than he did from any vast right-wing conspiracy to use Lieberman as pawn in the Bush/Cheney/Rove machine.
Lieberman’s Republican opponent picked up a little bit more than a *quarter* of the support that Lieberman’s previous opponent garnered. You don’t need to call out a vast right wing conspiracy – just go back and look at the election (and the actions of the GOP, in relation to it). Gaming, pure and simple.
MB, I think we ought to be able to agree that Republicans and independent voters at large viewed the Joe Lieberman who was on the ballot with a “D” next to his name twice in 2000 very differently from the Joe Lieberman who was on the ballot once with an “I” next to his name in 2006. God knows everyone else does. But let’s just conceed for a moment that every single Republican who voted for Joe Lieberman did so for interests related only to the national party, as you suggested in your penultimate post, and not because they had a personal interest in being represented by him–it still doesn’t matter. The single largest voting block in Connecticut are the left-leaning unaffiliated voters who don’t participate in primaries but do decide the outcome of every statewide race, and in no universe was Ned Lamont going to cut into that constituency with his single-issue campaign.
If Republicans did “game” the system that year, their only real sin is that they gamed it better than Ned Lamont.
Good point about 2000 (tho’ I’d say that Lieberman had become a useful Republican tool well before that. I started despising him with his sad sack moralizing during the Clinton impeachment). Still doesn’t affect my primary point, though, which is that Lieberman won because Republican voters gamed the system, and not because a majority of Connecticut voters genuinely believed that he represented them well.
You say:
Ok, let’s test that. If this is true, Lamont shouldn’t have been able to significantly expand on the votes he picked up in the primary, right? In the primary, he got 147k votes. In the general, he hit 451k. Sounds like he cut into that constituency, no? Of course, that assumes that all of Lieberman’s primary voters stuck with him through the general election. Even if you assume that they *all* switched to Lamont for the general (that’s picking up 136k votes), Lamont still attracted a hefty 168k slice of that unaffiliated electorate. Sounds like a universe in conflict with the one you describe, no? You still think that Lamont was just someone who couldn’t game the system as well as the Republicans?
Now let’s look at Lieberman, who started with 136k votes in the primary. Now again, let’s give him alll of his primary voters. In the general, he amassed 564k votes. So there’s a 428k gain between the primary and the general. Where did the come from? You posit that it’s from an unaffiliated left leaning pool who genuinely see Lieberman as best for their state. If that’s the case, it means that this race got 100k more people to vote “Democratic” (adding Lieberman and Lamont’s votes) in 2006 than voted in Connecticut’s 2004 (Presidential year!) Senate race. Not very likely, I’m thinking. So where else? Well, let’s look at those Republican numbers again. Schlesinger picked up 109k votes. Compare that to what the GOP candidate got in the 2004 Senate race – 452k. Even flipping the assumption about turnout, that’s still a 300k+ vote performance drop. I wonder where they went? You think they all just decided that he – with the terribly liberal voting record – really *did* represent them so much better this time?
No, Lieberman’s there because the GOP took advantage of Lieberman’s turning against his own party (and splitting it) by pushing for a massive (one off – see the next race for proof) shift of its voters from their own candidate to Lieberman. Has nothing to do with Lieberman doing a good job of representing his constituents.
One oculd argue that McCain has been a useful tool of the Democrats, too — as in McCain-Feingold and McCain-Kennedy. Whenever the Democrats wanted a Republican to make a bill look bi-partisan, they got McCain.
MB, comparing Lamont’s raw vote totals from the primary (in which less than 300,000 people voted) and the general election (in which more than 1.1 million people voted) is simply the law of big and small numbers. Of *course* his raw yield went up. The size of the electorate ballooned to four times the size of the smaller sample. Big deal. Lamont overperformed the Democratic gubernatorial candidate by a measly five points, which hardly qualifies as cutting into the unaffiliateds in a meaningful way.
You keep pointing out that Republicans voted for Lieberman, and I keep agreeing with you. I don’t understand why I have to keep going around in circles by pointing out that a whole lot of Republicans also voted for other conservative incumbent Democrats for reasons that had nothing to do with keeping said conservative Democrat in the national spotlight to benefit GWB (and a whole lot of Democrats also voted to elect a Republican Governor without being confused about whether she was a Republican or a Democrat), and none of those Republican they voted against in those races wasn’t even tarred earlier in the year with a scandal involving lawsuits tied to his gambling addiction and penchant for cheating at cards. Except, perhaps, that it all falls in line with your world view in which Republicans all have some sort of insane hive-like mentality where they each individually arrived at the conclusion where they’d cleverly split the Democratic base–but the split to re-elect the incumbent who would caucus with the Democrats, rather than using that split to elect a real Republican in the same manner that they managed to get that Republican Governor elected.
In any case, I happen to hate Joe Lieberman for personal reasons–my family is familiar with him outside of politics–and I really, really hate having to argue that he’s not a concoction of one of Karl Rove’s wet dreams and that as much as I disagree with some of his politics, apparently there are a bunch of people in the State of Connecticut who think he’s doing an okay job. So I’m going to stop now. And, um, shower. F–king Joe Lieberman….
Well, you can right-wing conspiracy and hive-mind and wet-dream it all you like (why you need to do that, I don’t know), and the bringing in of other ticket-splitting situations just ignores the rather unique situation in CT (how many other conservative Dem senators had W decline to endorse their opponent? How many were the beneficiaries of serious Republican fundraising efforts?).
In any event, you seem to have shifted from “the largest part of Connecticut’s electorate thought he was doing a pretty good job representing them in the United States Senate” to “there are a bunch of people in the State of Connecticut who think he’s doing an okay job”. There’s a pretty meaningful gap between those statement, in my view. So now I’ll leave it alone, too, and I guess we’ll see how Connecticut feels in four years.