Senator Joseph Lieberman died on March 27 at age 82. He was, as William Kristol wrote the next day, “A public servant of principle and decency, an American patriot and a proud Jew, a happy warrior and a kind man, Joe Lieberman was an example and an inspiration to us all.”
May his memory be a blessing.
Senator Lieberman was from that more courteous, responsible age when politicians ran for office because they were interested in governing well. He, along with his great friend John McCain, and other senators like Howard Baker and Sam Nunn and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, were willing to work “across the aisle.” They knew that responsible government required constant civility and frequent compromise. They were gentlemen who eschewed today’s performative politics, and the toxic, anti-democratic gestures of the culture wars.
If you really wanted to fix Congress (and heaven knows, Congress and many other things need fixing), then you could do worse than electing folks like these again.
You have to love a guy who, when running as the nominee for vice president in the 2000 ticket with Al Gore, decided, for the good of the country, to concede the election to George W Bush and Dick Cheney. This was despite winning the popular vote by over half a million votes, and losing the electoral college vote only because of a few hundred “hanging chads” in Florida.
Earlier in 2000, in August, Lieberman was tagged as one of the candidates for Gore’s running mate. This had to come as a surprise, because he had run afoul of many in his party since he was one of the few major Democrats who publicly denounced President Bill Clinton in 1998 for his lack of judgment in his extramarital dalliance with a young adult woman intern.
Lieberman, a Jewish politician, was in agreement with many evangelical figures like Ralph Reed, James Dobson, Franklin Graham, Robert Jeffress and others, who said, at that time, that “character” was crucial to American leadership, and Clinton’s amorous vices clearly showed a lack of it.
In a 2014 interview, Lieberman reminisced about how he found out that he was chosen as the VP nominee: “So this is Sunday night. We know that the decision is being made. … I get a call from my press secretary. He tells me he’s just heard from somebody at one of the networks and he’s sorry to have to be the one to tell me but they’ve heard from inside that they’ve selected John Edwards.
“And I get up in the morning and I flip on the remote at about five to seven — I’m still in bed with Hadassah. And the local TV anchor is saying, ‘Now, let me just repeat that really exciting news. The AP is reporting that Vice President Gore has chosen our own Senator Joe Lieberman to be his running mate.’
“What? I didn’t get a phone call. I wake Hadassah up. All hell breaks loose. I mean, if you want a little local color. One of my few jobs, as Hadassah would tell you, in the house is I make the coffee in the morning. So it’s August. I’m in my underwear. So I walk down into the kitchen to make the coffee and there are TV cameras at each of the windows. So I go hit the floor.”
I miss that kind of winsomeness in politicians. I’m so darn weary of boorish behavior, whether in the audience at the State of the Union address, in stump speeches that deny the Holocaust and raise doubts whether women should be in leadership or even vote, or in flatulent social media posts that deny the humanity of fellow humans. It’s getting so brimstone-polluted out there in the partisan hellscape of the 2024 election that I’m changing the lyrics of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs Robinson”: “Where have you gone, Joseph Lieberman? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you …”
We came close to Senator John McCain choosing his best pal Joe to be his running mate for the 2008 presidential campaign. What a ticket that would have been — a Republican and a Democrat running on a unity platform. What a pity that some cynical wonk (I’m looking at you, Steve Schmidt) pushed Sarah Palin instead. Even though the selection of Lieberman for VP would have set off a brawl at the GOP convention (probably more like a cage fight in a mud pit), the ticket — I think — might have edged out the Obama-Biden team, and history would have been changed.
Don’t mistake me. I have many disagreements with the positions taken by Lieberman. But what a pair he and McCain would have made. What a combination of heroics and statesmanship. On one hand, you have the superhuman nobility of a man who suffered as a POW in Hanoi Hilton for five and a half years — refusing to be released earlier until the rest of his fellow captives could go with him. For this reason, mainly, my fervently “union hall” Democrat father–in-law loved this Republican: he, too, was an ex-POW, having spent 16 months as a guest of Adolf Hitler in Stalag-XVII B.
Then on the other hand you have a Jewish gentleman with a wife (Hadassah) whose parents were Holocaust survivors, who was a Democrat but also a buddy of William F Buckley. A real mensch who had the manhood and decency, with his running mate, to do the right thing in 2000.
There were many in his party who complained that the Gore vs Bush election had been stolen. But they decided to protect the country and ensure a peaceful transition of government. Even at the cost of their own political prospects and party success.
Joe Lieberman was a conservative Democrat who defeated a liberal Republican (Lowell Weicker) for the U.S. Senate. Frankly, that sentence is impossible to even conceive, let alone write, of such a thing happening today. Too many politicians are more interested in shilling for extremists than making hard moral choices in responsibly governing a country.
Ex-GOP Congressman Joe Walsh said this upon hearing of Lieberman’s passing: “When I went to Congress in 2011 as a tea party flamethrower, I did not appreciate Lieberman’s politics of collegiality & compromise. Divisive voices like mine helped get us to our ugly politics today. How to fix things? Study Joe Lieberman. Be like Joe Lieberman.”
Be like Joe Lieberman, indeed. I’ll vote for that.
May his memory be a blessing. Tanchumin. Avelut.
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