AL GORE’S choice of Connecticut senator Joseph Lieberman as his running mate was so widely hailed for breaking an ethnic barrier that the seeming strategic illogic of it escaped notice. But as last week began, Gore faced problems beyond the power of logic to solve. On one hand, his left-wing base was showing a willingness to migrate to Ralph Nader’s Green party, which was running at 6 percent in some polls. On the other, Gore was proving unable to win the hearts of moderate swing voters; independents preferred Bush by 27 points.
To fix either problem seemed to mean making the other worse. Gore could placate Naderites by picking the young North Carolina senator Johnny Edwards, whose background as a trial lawyer makes his interests almost perfectly congruent with those of the environmentalist, product-safety-oriented Greens. Or he could look to the center and pick Lieberman. The risk was that Lieberman — whose support of free trade riles the New Democrat left, and whose home-state insurance constituency is permanently at loggerheads with Nader’s trial-bar allies — would enrage the Greens and strengthen the rebellious left.
Gore’s ideological dismissal of the Naderites was arguably as daring a move as the selection of an Orthodox Jew for a spot on a national ticket. And it will prove a brilliant move as well, if Democrats can succeed in stressing Lieberman’s identity (an ethnic pioneer) to leftist voters and his ideology (middle-of-the-road) to centrist ones.
That won’t be as easy as it sounds. Democratic National Committee chairman Joe Andrew explained that Lieberman was the right candidate because he has been “a great centrist leader of our party.” Lieberman has indeed strengthened Gore down the middle of the electorate. A CNN sounding of registered voters had Bush’s lead narrowing to 2 points 24 hours after the Lieberman announcement. Between August 5 and August 7, that 27-point Bush lead among independents dwindled to 9.
But whatever it is about Lieberman that has given Gore such a stunning bump, it’s not his centrism, because Lieberman is not a centrist. He is mistaken for one for three reasons: (1) his religious orthodoxy, (2) his willingness to use American military power, and (3) his forthright censure of President Clinton’s morality during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Lieberman’s voting record is remarkably similar to the one Al Gore complied in the Senate. He, like Gore, was one of 10 senators who boldly broke with their party to back President Bush’s commitment of troops in the Gulf War. Like Gore, he supports free trade. On certain foreign-policy issues — such as the Cuban embargo — he has been to Gore’s right.
Beyond that, he is a down-the-line, even doctrinaire, liberal. His commitment to protecting the environment is as solid as Gore’s. Almost alone among elected politicians, he backed Al Gore’s decision to sign the emission-reducing Kyoto accords in 1997.
Lieberman’s support for gay rights and abortion on demand is firm, and of longer standing than Gore’s. In 1992, Lieberman voted to lift the ban on fetal tissue research. In 1994, he voted to block protesters from access to abortion clinics. In recent years he has voted several times against a ban on partial-birth abortions. In 1996, he supported the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which sought to amend the Civil Rights Act to protect sexual orientation. After Anita Hill’s claims before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Lieberman backed off a prior endorsement of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas and voted against his confirmation.
On fiscal matters, Lieberman is strongly prejudiced towards high taxes and high spending. After flirting with capital-gains tax cuts in the 1980s, Lieberman voted for the Clinton tax hikes of 1993. He opposed the balanced budget amendment in 1995, the Republicans’ $ 800 billion tax cut in 1999, and both the marriage penalty relief and estate tax repeal earlier this year. The American Taxpayers’ Union gave him a zero rating for 1999.
Lieberman and Gore are an almost perfect match, in fact, both ideologically and temperamentally. Gore has always been much less open than President Clinton to the Democratic Leadership Council’s conservative fiscal and economic policies, and so has Lieberman. Adding the Connecticut senator to the ticket risks revealing it to voters as considerably to the left of the Clinton-Gore ticket that Democrats rode to triumph in 1992 and 1996.
The only area where Lieberman has followed a Clintonite centrism is entitlement reform. He backed the welfare reform bill of 1996, and agreed to educational savings accounts (a sort of compromise voucher plan) two years later. He has been sympathetic to Social Security privatization. But at his announcement last week, Lieberman issued a breathtaking, turn-on-a-dime recantation — even circulating an op-ed attacking the Social Security reforms it was assumed he still supported. Asked about vouchers, he replied, “When President Gore decides, Vice President Lieberman will support him entirely.”
The great dowry Lieberman brings to Gore is distance from President Clinton. In a 1998 Senate speech, he denounced the president’s conduct in the Lewinsky affair as “immoral.” And yet Lieberman took the Clintonite side on every Senate procedural vote throughout the trial and voted to acquit the president on all counts. Today he tries to soft-pedal his opposition, describing his friendship with the president as “a long friendship, and it’s not just the personal friendship, but it’s a partnership on ideas and programs that he took into the White House with Al Gore.”
There is no doubt that, in a post-Clinton era, Lieberman’s morality will be a plus for the campaign. But his reputation for morality may be an even bigger plus, backing Gore into corners where the public would like him to be anyway. The first sign came last Wednesday, when the Gore camp threatened to oust California representative Loretta Sanchez from her scheduled Los Angeles convention address if she didn’t withdraw her sponsorship of a party to be held at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion. Indeed, on Thursday, Gore had Sanchez removed from the convention program. Of course, the Democratic party had been perfectly content to see the event organized, whether to thank deep-pocket Democratic donor Christie Hefner or to pay indirect tribute to Hustler publisher Larry Flynt and other porn moguls. It was their investigations of Republican impeachment advocates, after all, that did so much to create a climate of intimidation during the Lewinsky scandal. But Lieberman gave Gore a perfect opportunity to posture on behalf of family values and to distance himself from the pornography industry which had become the investigative arm of the Democratic party.
Taking a stand against Sanchez shows that the Lieberman pick has already elevated the tone of the campaign. It will render much more credible Gore’s attacks on George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism. Those attacks will claim that “compassionate conservatism” is a chimera that will evaporate on closer examination. And they may be right. But for now — if “moderate” means fiscally prudent and “compassion” means using big government to cure social ills — Bush looks considerably more compassionate than Lieberman does moderate.
Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
