CAMPAIGN 2004
Run, Joe, Run
Lieberman is the Democrats' best hope--but he has to pick a fight.
URL:http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110003483
BY PETER BEINART
Monday, May 12, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
The oft-repeated liberal charge that Joe Lieberman is Bush Lite is correct in at least one respect: The stronger the president looks in the general election, the better the Connecticut senator's chances in the Democratic primary.
If Howard Dean, the kindly Vermont doctor, is the candidate of Democratic fantasy, Sen. Lieberman is the candidate of Democratic desperation, the centrist of last resort once all other scenarios for regime change have been exhausted. Which is why from Mr. Lieberman's perspective, the South Carolina Democratic debate, held just two days after President Bush triumphantly declared the end of major hostilities in Iraq, couldn't have been better timed. If they could have, the Lieberman team would have held the debate on the USS Abraham Lincoln itself.
For Democratic activists, America's rapid military victory in Iraq ended the dream that on foreign policy the country would come to them. Those dreams were a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for Mr. Dean's dramatic winter surge. And they are slowly giving way to the realization that the partisan credibility gap on national security will be closed only by changes in the Democratic Party itself. It is that dawning realization, more than any stylistic modifications or debating tactics, which explains the widespread perception that Mr. Lieberman won last Saturday's debate and Mr. Dean lost. When Sen. Lieberman said "no Democrat will be elected president in 2004 who is not strong on defense, and this war was a test of that," he wasn't saying anything new. It's just that this time, the audience didn't boo.
But while victory in Iraq may be transforming Mr. Lieberman's hawkish foreign-policy profile from a liability into an asset, on domestic policy he has barely any profile at all, except as a someone who talks a lot about God. Given his controversial position on the war, Mr. Lieberman may be tempted to re-establish his ideological bona fides by emphasizing a conventionally liberal domestic agenda. But the truth is he can't--he'll never convince Democratic activists that he's as reliably liberal as John Kerry. Like John McCain before him, Joe Lieberman can't win if he plays by the rules. He needs to gamble on domestic policy like he has on the war, and pick fights that once again change the dynamics of the race.
The nature of those fights is suggested by the two groups Mr. Lieberman is most aggressively courting: blacks and moderate whites. He is downplaying Iowa and New Hampshire, where both groups are underrepresented, and counting on the six states that will likely vote on Feb. 3: South Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, New Mexico, Arizona and Missouri, four of which have large black populations and three of which allow independents and Republicans to vote in the Democratic race.
At first glance, Mr. Lieberman's strategy seems schizophrenic: blacks and moderate, southern whites are generally considered the Democratic Party's ideological polar opposites. But a look at past Democratic primaries suggests that they often vote in harmony, joining together to support Walter Mondale, Bill Clinton and Al Gore and opposing high-minded reformers like Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas and Bill Bradley, who captured the hearts of upper-income white liberals.
Mr. Lieberman needs to paint the frontrunner Kerry into the Bradley/Tsongas role. With African-Americans, he is banking on his religiosity and his status as a victim of the Florida recount. In the South Carolina debate, for instance, he quoted the Bible and called the Supreme Court's Bush v. Gore decision, "profoundly unfair." But he needs issues to match his cultural and experiential message, and the most intriguing would be school choice. It's true that vouchers have less relevance for a rural, Southern black audience than a Northern, urban one, but polls still show them polling clear majorities among African-Americans nationwide. Few candidates have yet translated those public opinion numbers into votes, but that may be because most of the candidates peddling vouchers are from the GOP, which has such a toxic image among blacks that virtually any proposal it offers elicits suspicion.
An aggressive restatement of Sen. Lieberman's support for vouchers (centering, for instance, on schools that fail year after year) would cost him the support of teachers' unions. But he wouldn't win their support anyway. The real hope is that a Lieberman proposal on school choice might become the political equivalent of Richard Gephardt's recent proposal on health care: It would make him a lightning rod on an issue where Democratic leaders are more timid than Democratic voters. He could cast himself as a McCain-style fighter against the interest groups that control the party, and distinguish himself from his opponents on an issue, education, near the top of African-American concerns. A battle with teachers unions would also echo Mr. Lieberman's battles with Hollywood, another area where black Democrats may not feel well served by a powerful liberal lobby.
The second opportunity for Mr. Lieberman to distinguish himself is fiscal policy. He has already promised to postpone part of the Bush tax cut and use some of the money to fund homeland security, a smart argument given that homeland defense is President Bush's biggest national security liability. But he should promise to use another chunk of it for an immediate tax cut aimed exclusively at the working and middle class (expanding the modest, business-oriented tax cut he as already proposed). The hope would be to replicate the 1992 primary debate, where Bill Clinton promised a middle-class tax cut, and Paul Tsongas promised to balance the budget. Behind today's Democrats' near-universal condemnation of the Bush tax cuts are latent disagreements about the relative importance of deficit reduction, new spending, and progressive tax reduction. Mr. Lieberman could expose them by proposing a short-term tax cut that other candidates, worried about deficits, would likely condemn. As on vouchers, a genuinely middle-class tax cut (as opposed to Mr. Bush's) might unite blacks and moderate whites against the deficit hawkishness of upper-income liberals, as it did in 1992.
These are high-risk strategies. But given the wariness with which Mr. Lieberman is regarded among many Democratic activists, a low-risk campaign will leave him buried in the middle of the pack. His best chance is if his campaign becomes a magnet for Democrats disaffected from the party establishment, a kind of ideological mirror image of the insurgency Mr. Dean has created on the left. Joe Lieberman has long been criticized as unwilling to make enemies. But for a candidate like him, making powerful enemies in his party is the only way to win.
Mr. Beinart is editor of The New Republic. |
