Los Angeles
JESSE JACKSON was just minutes into his address to the Democratic convention last Tuesday night when a long-haired, white Democratic operative started rushing up and down the aisles of the California delegation. He was carrying a pile of cardboard made-for-TV placards that said “African Americans for Gore-Lieberman.” He was late, and he couldn’t very well say, Any black people want these? So he handed them to the delegates on the aisle and asked them to pass them down the row. But the mostly white delegation didn’t get it. As a result, the signs wound up being waved by white schoolteachers from Pacific Palisades and white firemen from Fresno.
Confusion about who speaks for black voters in the Democratic party was, to the Gore campaign’s chagrin, the story that dominated the first two days of the convention. L.A.’s inner-city congresswoman Maxine Waters said on convention eve that she was not sure she could support Joe Lieberman as vice president, largely because he’d supported California’s anti-affirmative-action Proposition 209 in 1996. Reactions were sudden and strong.
There was panic in the Gore campaign, which set up a “task force” under D.C. delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton and labor secretary Alexis Herman to “sell” Lieberman to their fellow blacks. And there was scandal-fanning Schadenfreude from the press, queasy because Waters appeals to the same angry inner-city constituents as Louis Farrakhan, the country’s most conspicuous anti-Semite.
While Waters has no record of specific hostility to Jews, early press reports portrayed the confrontation in strictly racial terms. This may not have been fair, according to one long-time liberal Senate staffer, but it was Gore’s fault. “The way the Lieberman pick was handled by Gore set the stage for this,” he says. “Treating it as an ‘ethnic break-through’ was probably unnecessary, and even wrong, given the heights Jews have already reached in politics.” There were differences on the issues between Waters and Lieberman, but the public had no way of knowing that until the story had already run for 48 hours. By the time Gore sent Norton and Herman out as emissaries, he had basically tutored American voters to view the response as a race-obsessed Democratic party sending two blacks to calm down other blacks who were mad about a Jew.
“What you’re seeing about Maxine is ideological, not ethnic,” says Cal State Fullerton political scientist Raphael Sonenshein, a longtime top aide to Waters and author of Politics in Black and White (a study of how black-Jewish coalitions provided the power base for L.A. mayor Tom Bradley). “If Gore had picked Paul Wellstone — to take someone on her wing of the party — you wouldn’t have heard from her.” Sonenshein thinks the Waters-Lieberman imbroglio is the kind of coalition-firming difficulty Democrats encounter in every race, and even thinks Gore handled it in a more gutsy way than his predecessors would have. “Sending Alexis Herman and Eleanor Holmes Norton to help everyone live with a pick he’d already made is not pandering, it’s the opposite. Pandering is what used to happen when a candidate sent aides out to meet Mayor Daley before the pick, and waited for his thumbs-up.”
The rationale Sonenshein lays out is an honorable one. But since it rests on classic Democratic politics, it undercuts Gore’s claims that Lieberman is a “different kind of Democrat.” The long-term damage from the controversy may be not to black-Jewish relations but to the Democrats’ centrist image. Herman’s claim was that Lieberman had backed Proposition 209 because he hadn’t “understood” it. Last Tuesday, Lieberman went before the DNC’s Black Caucus and (metaphorically) signed the confession Herman had prepared for him. He said he hadn’t realized that 209 would do away with affirmative action. But back then, Lieberman was such a scathing critic of preferences that he even received a dressing-down from Jesse Jackson. No matter: “I have supported affirmative action,” he told the Black Caucus, “I do support affirmative action, and I will support affirmative action.” Lieberman’s abject appeals secured a promise from Waters to campaign with him, but showed him to be a moderate in style only — wholly available to the race-counting left in substance.
Lieberman has often won in battles with the party’s left, but this week’s events have shed light on just how “stylistic” those victories were. For instance, the Waters-Lieberman spat is a mirror image of the give-and-take last November between Lieberman and Gore-campaign manager Donna Brazile. Back then, Lieberman played today’s Waters, and Brazile played Lieberman. Brazile announced that the Democratic party had “four pillars” — women, blacks, labor, and minorities. Most in the conservative Democratic Leadership Council considered Brazile’s remark a swing-voter-repelling catastrophe, but it was Lieberman who as DLC chairman took the hardest line, appearing on television and radio over the next few days to denounce it. “Those are activist groups, but they don’t constitute the Democratic party,” he said, “and they certainly don’t constitute a majority of the country.” But he gave Brazile a total pass by pronouncing her words meaningless: He issued a statement that “the comments of Donna Brazile were not a reflection of what the Gore campaign is doing.” (Oh, no, she was only running it!) This is exactly what Alexis Herman was doing in Los Angeles when she announced that Joseph Lieberman’s positions, because of his weak “understanding,” were no reflection of what Joseph Lieberman believes.
Lieberman’s cease-fire with Brazile was strange behavior for the head of the DLC, which reacted to the Four Pillars gaffe by warning that Brazile’s “‘base constituency group’ strategy was central to the failed Democratic presidential campaigns of the 1980s.” At the Democratic convention, Lieberman made a pact to restore the strategy he once so eloquently condemned.
Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
