Lieberman Campaign Takes Page From Clinton's Success
By Jonathan Finer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 16, 2004; Page A06
DOVER, N.H. -- Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.) has less than two weeks to convince voters like Michael Schultz that he feels their pain.
A computer engineer and Web designer during Bill Clinton's presidency, Schultz lost his job when the tech bubble burst almost four years ago, and his marriage soon after. Now he peddles sausages from a cart in the southeast New Hampshire town of Dover, and makes about a quarter of what he earned in 2000.
"People here haven't forgotten the prosperity that Clinton helped bring," Schultz said wistfully after listening to Lieberman try to tie his struggling candidacy to the coattails of the Comeback Kid.
As a moderate Democrat, seeking out independent voters in a still wide-open race for New Hampshire's Jan. 27 primary, Lieberman has a political profile resembling that of the man who preceded him as head of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, and who won his party's nomination, and eventually the presidency, in 1992.
"There is only one lifelong Democrat in this race who will build on Clinton's legacy and take our party and country forward," Lieberman said during a half-hour address Tuesday that was as much a policy highlight reel of the Clinton years as it was an explanation of how Lieberman would continue those efforts.
Lieberman is far from the only Democrat seeking to glean a boost from Clinton, who has not endorsed a candidate.
Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.) boasts of shepherding the early-1990s economic package through Congress. Retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark used a photograph of the former president in a television ad and counts several former Clinton operatives among his own. And Sen. John Edwards (N.C.) exudes the effortless empathy and familiar drawl of the man from Hope, Ark.
Even former Vermont governor Howard Dean -- who dismissed the DLC last month as the "Republican wing of the Democratic Party" -- often argues that the Bush tax cut should be dumped, because voters "will gladly pay the same taxes they paid under Bill Clinton, if they can have the Clinton economy back."
"In theory it's a very good strategy. If you look back over the last generation, there's only one Democratic philosophy that's returned a two-term president," said Joe Lockhart, who served as Clinton's press secretary, and who said that this election will determine whether Clinton's brand of centrism is still the party's dominant ideology.
No candidate makes that case as explicitly as Lieberman, who has described the period before Clinton's emergence as the Democrats' "wilderness years."
But there is more than a hint of irony in Lieberman's reaching for the Clinton mantle. Selected as Al Gore's running mate in 2000, in part because he denounced the president's affair with a White House intern as "immoral," Lieberman seems to some voters an awkward match with the only president since the 1800s to be impeached.
"I thought I could support him, but not after hearing all of this Clinton nonsense," said Lynn Howard, an independent voter from Durham who caught Lieberman's Dover speech. "He ought to step away from that before it hurts him."
And Lieberman has already spent months likening himself to this state's 2000 Republican primary winner, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.). The two share hawkish security views and a distaste for special-interest politics. More than a hundred people showed up Wednesday at a "McCainiacs for Lieberman" party in a Bedford home.
The Connecticut Democrat's push to attract the independent and undeclared voters who fueled McCain's victory and who make up more than a third of this state's electorate has drawn in a heartening, if unhelpful, number of Republicans -- who, unlike independents, cannot vote in the Democratic primary.
"He's the only Democrat I can stand. He has integrity and says what he really thinks," said Republican Ed Dunbar, a software engineer Lieberman met Thursday in a Manchester diner.
Although McCain has endorsed Bush and will reportedly stump for the president here later this month, it is Clinton who has inspired much of Lieberman's policy platform: his plan to offer 98 percent of income taxpayers further relief, and his proposed addition of paid leave to Clinton's Family and Medical Leave Act.
"It's important to say who you're like, but if it obscures the message of who you are, that can cause problems," said Lockhart, who said that as a "once-in-a-generation" political talent, Clinton is hard for any candidate to match.
But as most campaigns settle into a rhythm of stump speeches short on policy specifics, Lieberman has offered a host of new initiatives each week, including harsher penalties for domestic violence and identity theft and a plan to curb medical errors.
Although most recent polls put him fourth in New Hampshire, and the crowds at his events are sparse compared with those who flock to see the front-runners, his in-house pollsters say he is inching past Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) into third, behind Dean and Clark. Relentlessly optimistic, even after 16-hour days that begin and end in the dark, Lieberman says voters are taking a "second look" at those on top and reminds the reporters hounding him with the latest numbers that "polls and pundits don't pick presidents." |
