Joe Lieberman and the Venality of Elite Bipartisanship

It’s worth revisiting Lieberman’s famous speech denouncing Bill Clinton. In that speech, Lieberman only obliquely and glancingly acknowledges the feminist grounds for objecting to Clinton’s behavior: that this was workplace harassment by an older and senior employer of a much younger woman. Lieberman nowhere mentions the Clinton White House’s genuinely vile campaign of slander against Lewinsky. Instead, the burden of Lieberman’s complaint is that Clinton’s behavior was unseemly and created too much talk about oral sex. According to Lieberman, “something very sad and sordid has happened in American life when I cannot watch the news on television with my 10-year-old daughter anymore.”

Will no one think of the children! This was the same spirit of paternalistic tut-tutting that led Lieberman to join Tipper Gore’s ridiculous moral crusade against rap music. As a public moralist, Lieberman resembled the pious frauds who populate the novels of Charles Dickens, oily and unctuous figures like Uriah Heep and Seth Pecksniff. Like Heep and Pecksniff, Lieberman was a monster of obtuse self-satisfaction.

By any measure, lying to promote an unnecessary war is far more immoral than explicit rap lyrics or even Bill Clinton’s degraded sex life. Nor did Lieberman ever stop lying. On January 20, 2011, Leiberman appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and asserted that “the evidence is very clear that [Saddam] was developing weapons of mass destruction…. Charles Duelfer conducted the most comprehensive report on behalf of our government…he found, and proved I think, that Saddam…was developing chemical and biological weapons.”

Lieberman was challenged on this point by the pundit Arianna Huffington. This led to a telling exchange:

HUFFINGTON: Well, based on this completely unfounded assumption, I sincerely hope for the sake of the country that you do not become Secretary of Defense.

LIEBERMAN: Now Arianna, these are not unfounded. Go read the Duelfer Report.

HUFFINGTON: There is nothing in the report that proves anything that you have said.

LIEBERMAN: I don’t think you’ve read it, sweetheart.

That final comment was pure Joe Lieberman: condescending, elitist, sexist, and completely dishonest. As the journalist Jon Schwartz pointed out at the time, the Duelfer Report does not support Lieberman’s WMD fantasia.

On the level of economic policy, Lieberman’s much-praised bipartisanship meant he supported the politics of austerity that has helped make the United States a wildly unequal nation. He worked tirelessly to water down Obamacare and put the kibosh on the public option, which would have extended access to public healthcare to many under 65. This meant that millions of Americans currently have far worse healthcare than they would have if Lieberman’s Senate seat were held by a less plutocracy-friendly Democrat. As a wealthy senator, Lieberman enjoyed the best healthcare money can buy, a special privilege shared by members of Congress and the 1 percent.

Writing in Jacobin in 2018, Branko Marcetic astutely noted that Lieberman’s bipartisanship was a gift to the right:

Lieberman was a reliable Bush ally on the “war on terror” and other issues, and had long been a suspect Democrat, let alone progressive lawmaker in general. His entire career was built on his conservatism, having beaten (with the support of William F. Buckley) liberal Republican Lowell Weicker in 1988 in a campaign where he supported bombing Libya, invading Grenada, and maintaining the US freeze-out of Cuba, all of which Weicker opposed. Lieberman also supported the death penalty for drug traffickers, a stealth form of school prayer, and strict spending cuts for the purpose of balancing the budget.

Aside from Buckley, many other rabid reactionaries loved Joe Lieberman—for good reason. As Marcetic reports, when Lieberman first entered the Senate in 1989, he was greeted by the ancient reptilian racist Strom Thurmond, who said, “I understand we think a lot alike in the way we do things.” Lieberman responded, “Yes, I think we do.” Another serpentine scoundrel, the notorious dirty trickster Roger Stone, was also a Lieberman fan. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, taking a break from leading a campaign of mass slaughter in Gaza, wrote an effusive tribute to Lieberman.

Of course, as a bipartisan hero of the Senate, Joe Lieberman is being mourned not just by the farouche right but by lawmakers across the spectrum. Lieberman truly had friends across party lines. He was Al Gore’s running mate in 2000, and eight years later John McCain was briefly tempted to also make him his vice-presidential running mate. Donald Trump also wanted to work with Lieberman and toyed with the idea of nominating him to run the FBI.

But the fact that so many elite Democrats and Republicans both loved Lieberman says nothing good about the senator—or the American political system. For what they loved was the narrow, discredited consensus of militarism and plutocracy.

That consensus has been much battered in the 21st century as the Republicans have moved to the right and Democrats to the left. But in the aging mind of Joe Biden, only nine months younger than Lieberman, this sordid consensus retains a diminishing half-life. Biden still tries to push for a bipartisanship based on American global hegemony—and even seems prepared to risk his presidency on behalf of this ideal. But if Biden wants to be reelected, he’ll have to learn to curb his atavistic tendency to revert to Liebermanism.

Joe Lieberman is dead and soon will be buried. We can only hope that his political ideology joins him speedily in the grave.