On the eve of the brief caucus and primary season that will probably determine the two major-party presidential nominations by mid-February at the latest, most members of Congress are playing their cards close to their vests. The reason is there’s a lot to be lost in backing the wrong horse.
Of the few congressional endorsements in this campaign, none is as interesting as the decision of Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the self-styled Independent Democrat from Connecticut, to back Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona for president.
The move was just the latest twist in a remarkable journey from the core of the Democrat base to the political no man’s land in which Lieberman currently finds himself. But the significance of this event is not so much about the senator personally as much as it represents a sea change in American party politics. Lieberman’s flight from the fold makes it official that the last of the Scoop Jackson Democrats have really left the party.
Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson (1912-1983), the six-term U.S. senator from Washington State, was the living symbol of a set of beliefs that were once at the heart of the Democratic Party. He was a traditional liberal on social issues and a devoted friend of the labor movement.
Jackson is best remembered, however, for his foreign-policy stands. Though unremarkable during his first decades in Congress, he remained a determined Cold Warrior into the 1970’s and 1980’s, when many, if not most, of his party colleagues had abandoned this point of view.
Among Jews and friends of Israel, Jackson’s memory is also cherished for his passionate advocacy of freedom for Soviet Jewry. The Jackson-Vanik law, linking freedom of emigration from the former Soviet Union to trade, was a landmark achievement for a movement that eventually opened the gates of freedom and helped topple Communism’s evil empire.
But today, Jackson’s combination of domestic liberalism with foreign-policy hawkishness is as dead as the Dodo bird. Anyone seeking to dispute this need only look to Lieberman and his fall from Democratic grace.
Seven years ago, in one of the closest and most bitterly contested elections in the history of the republic, Lieberman barely missed out on his chance to take the oath of office as the first Jewish vice president of the United States. One can only wonder what Joe Lieberman would be doing today had a few hundred befuddled elderly Jews in Palm Beach not been confused by the infamous “butterfly” ballot, and voted for the Gore-Lieberman ticket instead of Pat Buchanan.
Would he be in Iowa and New Hampshire as the incumbent vice president running for president with a better chance than he had in his abortive 2004 bid for the White House?
We’ll never know the answer to that question, or what he and Gore would have done different from Bush-Cheney in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, had they been the ones rushed to “secure locations.”
Instead, Lieberman found himself drifting out of the Democratic mainstream over his support for the war in Iraq. In 2006, the Democratic icon was defeated for renomination by Connecticut Democrats; they chose a political neophyte whose only credential was a pledge to oppose the war.
Lieberman’s primary defeat was but a temporary setback. Though spurned by the party to which he’d devoted his entire adult life, the senator ran as an independent in the November election and cruised to victory.
Lieberman chose to caucus with his Democratic colleagues, many of whom had endorsed his opponent, and became the crucial 51st vote that returned them to the majority for the first time since 1994. But rather than being able to use his leverage to exert some influence over the party, he has found himself more isolated than ever.
As a result, Lieberman chose to endorse McCain – the one figure in either party who had consistently backed the war, even when it was most unpopular. For a man who has always been as partisan a Democrat as any, this was quite a step. But it signified Lieberman’s belief that the war on Islamist terror and the willingness of the United States to continue fighting it in Iraq and, if necessary, elsewhere, was more important than party loyalty.