Joltin’ Joe

One Gamecube employee tells Lieberman that, as a registered Democrat, he was “kind of offended” when Al Gore endorsed Howard Dean. What, he wants to know, was Lieberman’s reaction to the news?

“I was surprised,” Lieberman says. “But it only doubles my determination to keep fighting for what I think is right.” The Gore endorsement, he adds, underlines the fact that he and Howard Dean are locked “in a fight for the heart and soul” of the Democratic party.

Meet the new Joe Lieberman. He was born sometime between December 9, the day Al Gore endorsed former Vermont governor Howard Dean for president, and December 13, the day the Americans captured Saddam Hussein. The new Lieberman likes to say those two events “crystallized” what’s at stake in the upcoming Democratic presidential primaries. “I’ve got a cause,” he tells reporters after the M Cubed staff has left the conference room. “I don’t want to replace one divisive leader [Bush] with another [Dean].” The choice facing Democrats, he says, “is between me and Howard Dean.”

Well, maybe. It’s true that since Gore endorsed Dean, the Lieberman campaign has received 14 times as many contributions as normal. But the contributions were mostly in small-dollar amounts–the average contribution, according to one Lieberman aide, was $80.23. Lieberman can’t match the sums raised by Dean’s Internet “swarm.”

Still, a Lieberman adviser says the campaign’s strategy is to act as if the Democratic primary were a two-man race, and hope the media catch on. For the past two weeks, that has seemed to be happening: According to the media, the Gore endorsement and Saddam’s capture have “galvanized” (the Financial Times), “energized” (the New York Times), and otherwise “bolstered” (PoliticsNH.com) Lieberman’s campaign.

Is the new Joe Lieberman really that new? Lieberman, after all, has long been one of Dean’s most outspoken critics. Here he was in July: “Some in my party threaten to send a message that they don’t know a just war when they see it, and, more broadly, are not prepared to use our military strength to protect our security and the cause of freedom.” And here he was in August, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.: “A candidate who was opposed to the war against Saddam, who has called for the repeal of all the Bush tax cuts . . . I believe will not offer the kind of leadership America needs to meet the challenges we face today.”

A few days before he visited Delaware, Lieberman stepped up his attacks, this time in a speech to workers at Electropac, a circuit-board manufacturer in Manchester, New Hampshire. Lieberman’s staff had billed the speech as an economic address, but they tore it up in the hours after Saddam’s capture, and broadened its scope to include foreign policy. Yet the overarching theme remained: Lieberman is the “anti-Dean” in the race. Lieberman mentioned Dean by name 22 times. He said Dean would take the United States “backwards.” He said Dean had made “a series of dubious judgments and irresponsible statements” throughout the campaign.

Lieberman’s differences with Dean on the Iraq war are familiar to voters, but his critique of Dean’s economic policies is less well known, and the audience in Manchester perked up at the subject of tax cuts. Dean has said he would repeal all of the Bush tax cuts if elected president. (Of the major Democratic candidates, only Dick Gephardt has the same position.)

By contrast, Lieberman, taking a page from the Clinton playbook, would roll back only those tax cuts that benefit the affluent. “Remember the increases in the Child Tax Credit?” Lieberman asked the Electropac employees, becoming more animated with every sentence: “Under Howard Dean, it’s gone. The new 10 percent tax bracket? Gone. The marriage penalty? Right back in place.” The difference between Dean and Lieberman, the senator proclaimed, is “$2,700 for the average New Hampshire family.”

$2,700 is no small change, Lieberman argued, for New Hampshire’s “working families.” Which is why Dean is the villain in the Democratic primaries–and Lieberman the presumptive hero: “Dr. Dean,” he said, “has become Dr. No.”

Speaking of the good doctor, Lieberman says he “climbed into his own spider hole of denial” when he said Saddam’s imprisonment did not make America safer. The audience chuckled politely at the leaden metaphor. “How many people here,” he asked, surveying the crowd, “agree that we are safer with Saddam Hussein in prison?”

About half the audience raised their hands.

If Lieberman hopes to do well in New Hampshire, he’s going to have to raise a lot more hands. Democratic strategists say that unless Lieberman places at least third in the January 27 primary, his chances of becoming the Democratic nominee are virtually nil. Having pulled out of the January 19 Iowa Democratic caucuses, Lieberman has put all his resources into New Hampshire. The campaign has run television ads extolling his centrist, pragmatic record. It has paid $15,000 to air a town meeting hosted by Lieberman on WMUR-TV, Manchester’s ABC affiliate. And on January 1, Lieberman and his wife, Hadassah, will move into a rented apartment in Manchester, in order to maximize the time they spend in the Granite State.

In mid-December, a University of New Hampshire poll showed that Howard Dean still had a commanding lead, with the support of 46 percent of likely Democratic voters. Lieberman was in fourth place, with 7 percent. Those numbers are similar to those found in a Pew Research Center poll, released earlier in December, which had Lieberman tied with General Wesley Clark for third in New Hampshire, each carrying 8 percent of likely Democratic voters.

Lieberman’s only hope, says one Democratic strategist, is to rally New Hampshire’s “undeclareds”–the independent-minded Republicans and nonregistered Democrats who are eligible to vote in the primary, and who voted for John McCain four years ago. This is why Lieberman mentions Senator McCain on the campaign trail. And it’s why Lieberman has run an ad in New Hampshire highlighting his friendship with the Arizona Republican. “Something’s happening,” the announcer intones in the opening seconds of the ad. “McCain supporters are backing Joe Lieberman.”

Are they? In a conference call after the Manchester speech, I asked Lieberman how he plans to reach out to independent voters. “By being myself,” he told me. “You know, we like to say on the campaign trail, McCainiacs have become Liebermaniacs.”

Well, not quite. Lieberman has, as he tells you again and again, the support of a whopping 100 New Hampshire voters who supported McCain in the 2000 Republican primaries. But in the latest University of New Hampshire poll, Lieberman has the support of only 7 percent of independents. Dean has 44 percent.

“It’s very hard for me to imagine,” says Andy Smith, a political scientist at the University of New Hampshire, when asked whether a Lieberman surge is possible in the final weeks of the campaign. “You have to take into account the changes in the New Hampshire Democratic electorate over the past 10 to 12 years,” he explains. Since 1992, when centrist Democrat and Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas won the Democratic primary, the typical New Hampshire Democrat has grown less conservative. “Inside the Republican party, the ideology has stayed the same,” Smith argues. “But the Democrats who moved here after 1992 are far more liberal than the Democrats prior to 1992–they’re wealthy, they’re educated, and they’re incredibly anti-Bush.”

Lieberman, of course, is not all that different from Bush–at least on Iraq, the issue that energizes the Democratic base. It’s worth remembering that McCain’s appeal lay in his taking on the Republican establishment, personified by George W. Bush. In this year’s Democratic primary, it’s Howard Dean that’s taking on the establishment, not Joe Lieberman.

Lieberman likes to counter Dean’s claim that he represents the “Democratic wing of the Democratic party” by saying, “The Democratic bird doesn’t fly with one wing. It needs to have all its wings.” But if Howard Dean represents the Democratic wing, and the party needs “all its wings,” does that mean Lieberman represents . . . well, the Republican wing of the Democratic party? Actually, what Lieberman best represents is the Democratic Leadership Council wing–the Democratic establishment of the Clinton years. And it doesn’t seem to be helping him in New Hampshire.

On this Friday morning, however, Lieberman is focused on Delaware. He’s visited the state three times since announcing his presidential run, and his wife and daughter have visited frequently. He has the support of Sen. Tom Carper, an influential former governor, and the last poll of likely Democratic voters, back in October, showed Lieberman in the lead. Still, unless he wins in Delaware or any of the other six primary or caucus states on February 3, he will have to drop out.

What then? What if Lieberman loses his “fight for the heart and soul” of the Democratic party? “I’m only thinking of victory,” Lieberman says, smiling. “But I do think there’s a silent majority in the Democratic party that’s pro-growth and strong on security. And I know something else: Dems are unquestionably angry about what happened in the 2000 election, and so many other things that this administration has done since. But elections are won in the center.”

The Democratic base, of course, has drifted leftward. So would Lieberman ever consider leaving the Democrats and becoming an Independent? He rejects the idea, yet his answer is a curious one: “I’m a proud Democrat,” he cautions. “But my first loyalty is to my country.”

Matthew Continetti is an editorial assistant at The Weekly Standard.