And making the same mess he always makes
Six questions for Joe Lieberman.
Lieberman, the former Democratic senator from Connecticut who later became an independent, is a co-chair of No Labels, a centrist group that is working to secure ballot access for a potential third-party “unity ticket” in next year’s presidential race. The group describes the effort as an “insurance policy” to prevent President Biden, former president Donald Trump or any other candidate who doesn’t embrace its agenda from being elected if the group sees a path to victory.
Lieberman will appear in New Hampshire on Monday with Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), who’s mulled running for president next year as an independent. We talked with him about whether he wants Manchin to run and how he deals with Democrats who fear that No Labels’ efforts will hand the election to Trump. This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
The Early: What’s the message No Labels will be trying to deliver in New Hampshire?
Lieberman: The reason what No Labels is doing in New Hampshire on Monday is important is that we’re really launching our own policy agenda for ‘24, which we call “Common Sense,” evoking memories of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.” Inevitably, as we have initiated this 2024 insurance policy project, the talk has gone to, “Who are you going to run?” That’s not irrelevant, but it’s not the question before us now.
The Early: Do you see this policy agenda as the foundation of a platform should No Labels decide to run a presidential candidate?
Lieberman: It could be. We think this is a platform that we hope candidates for the House and Senate will consider and embrace in their campaigns next year. But it could also be the basis of a campaign by a bipartisan unity ticket that No Labels would offer its ballot access to,
The Early: When it comes to the insurance policy project, are you talking with potential candidates at this point? What do those discussions look like?
Lieberman: We’re not talking to potential candidates at all, really. Occasionally somebody will talk to us and say, “Hey, you ought to consider this person or that person.” We’ll begin over the summer, probably by the fall, to try to create an actual process — you might say a nominating process, or at least a candidate review process or a candidate search process. We’ll reach out and see who might be interested in being on a bipartisan unity ticket.
The Early: Would you like to see Manchin run as part of a unity ticket?
Lieberman: I’m a great admirer and friend of Joe Manchin. I think really he has walked the walk as a centrist in the Senate. [But] as a chair of No Labels I think I’ve really got to be scrupulously neutral at this point.
The Early: Richard Gephardt, the former House Democratic leader, is launching a new group next week to oppose No Labels’ effort. “No Labels equals Trump,” Greg Schneiders, whose firm Prime Group conducted polling for the group, told our colleague Michael Scherer. “It is going to affect the race and it is going to affect it negatively for Biden, and it is probably going to elect Donald Trump.” What’s your response?
Lieberman: I don’t know [how] the group Gephardt is forming will oppose what No Labels is trying to do. But this other group has been very aggressive. Insofar as they’re involved in some of the efforts in states like Arizona and Maine and now North Carolina to have state officials add requirements to our effort to get on the ballot in those states even after we’ve submitted more than the required number of signatures — they’re violating our constitutional rights.
I’d give a respectful word of caution to all the groups that are opposing what No Labels wants to do in 2024. They obviously have the right to oppose us. But if they begin to take action that’s aimed at blocking us from achieving our constitutional right to gain access to the ballot for a third ticket, they’re really running the risk of not only unconstitutional but illegal behavior.
[”I have absolutely no idea what Joe Lieberman is talking about,” Matt Bennett, the executive vice president for public affairs at Third Way, a center-left think tank leading the efforts opposing No Labels, wrote in an email to The Early. “No Labels is well within their rights to try to gain ballot access, and we — the broad coalition of groups and individuals that oppose that idea — have every right to try to stop them. If they do not meet every legal requirement for ballot access, members of our coalition will challenge them.”]
[Go fuck yourself, Joe — digby]
The Early: You’ve said again and again that No Labels won’t play the role of spoiler next year. How can you really know for sure that you run a spoiler candidate until the election is over?
Lieberman: We at No Labels are going to do everything we can to try to measure how a bipartisan unity ticket would do as a third choice in next year’s election. And I personally am going to argue that we be cautious about what the data tell us — to bend over backward to not run the risk that our involvement will not be as constructive as we want it to be.
When you’ve lost Third Way …
This is the stupidest thing these so-called “centrists” have ever done and there has never been a worse time to do it. Naturally Joe Lieberman is right in the middle of it.
I’ll let Stuart Stevens take it from here. I had no idea that the stated motive (besides money) behind this insurance policy nonsense is in case something happens to Biden they must offer an alternative to Kamala Harris. My God, they are even worse than I imagined:
A group of Americans is so worried about the prospects of a woman of color moving from Vice President to POTUS that it necessitates a national emergency such that only a third-party candidate can save the country.
Who are we talking about? The Proud Boys? Or No Labels?
Beneath the urgent call for a third-party candidate is a racist assumption that is deeply troubling. Much of the rationale for a third-party candidate hangs on the argument that Joe Biden is unelectable – despite winning in polls, but you can’t get hung up on the details – and Kamala Harris as his VP is a key element in that unelectabilty argument. It goes like this: Joe Biden is old – true – and voters will reject him largely because he could die in office and VP Harris would become president.
As I type this, I hear the No Labels crowd screaming, “We’re not racists.” And I agree. I don’t know anyone associated with No Labels whom I would remotely consider racist. Which is probably a large contributing factor to their inability to perceive the toxic impact of their embracing the premise that Kamala Harris is a threat to President Biden’s re-election.
Like much of the No Label’s tortured logic of the necessity of a third party, there is zero evidence to support its claims. There is no reason to believe that Harris or any VP candidate is going to impact an incumbent president’s re-election. It’s never happened, and some Vice Presidents were considered huge political liabilities to winning presidential tickets. There’s obviously Dan Quayle, but let’s talk about Harry Truman.
When FDR was running for his fourth term, unlike Joe Biden, he had clear and obvious health issues which the White House and the Roosevelt family went to great lengths to downplay. As David Welky, who is writing a book on the Roosevelt family, described in the Washington Post, “According to his son Jimmy, on July 20, the same day he accepted the Democratic nomination via radio hookup from San Diego, America’s longest-serving president turned white, complained of agonizing pains and lay on the floor for 10 minutes before composing himself. He dismissed the incident as ‘collywobbles.’” The Republicans had nominated Thomas Dewey, who at 42 was younger than any Republican currently running for the 2024 nomination.
Welky details how Roosevelt suffered an angina attack six weeks later while addressing “10,000 sailors and shipyard workers at the Puget Sound Navy Yard. Early in his speech, he felt a burning sensation radiating throughout his chest. His forehead beaded with sweat. Waves of nausea flowed through him. He suffered for 15 excruciating minutes, still speaking, before his chest relaxed.”
Joe Biden tripped on a sandbag some idiot left on the stage at the US Airforce graduation ceremony.
Like Joe Biden, FDR was under pressure to replace his VP Henry Wallace who was seen as too liberal. Walter Lippman, the nation’s most influential political columnist to a degree unimaginable in today’s crowded mediascape, wrote that the next VP was “not unlikely to be president.” Wallace was dumped, and FDR picked a candidate with a whopping 2% national support in Gallup polling: Harry Truman. Did Truman help FDR win the 1944 election? It was Roosevelt’s closest election, and it’s impossible to point to a single state FDR would not have carried with Henry Wallace.
When FDR died after 82 days in office, the 2% Truman became president and went on to win an election few believed was possible. We’ve been living with the “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline since what was, at the time, the greatest upset in presidential elections. He left office four years later wildly unpopular and paved the way for eight years of Eisenhower. But he won.
Compared to Harry Truman, who was elected to a county judgeship before the Senate, Kamala Harris is an electoral juggernaut. She defeated an incumbent San Francisco DA in a very tough campaign. She was seen as such a strong incumbent no one ran against her four years later. In 2010, she ran for Attorney General against Steve Cooley, the LA District Attorney who was the strongest Republican candidate not named Schwarzenegger since Pete Wilson was elected to the Senate. The race was so close it took three weeks to declare a winner, but Harris then became the first woman, the first African American, and the first person of South Asian descent elected California Attorney General.
In 2016, she was elected US Senator from California. Then Vice President of the United States. Add it all up, and more Americans have voted for Harris than any woman in US history.
Remember when the last incumbent Vice President ran for president? That was George H.W. Bush, who was such a dominating candidate he came in third in the 1988 Iowa caucus to Senator Bob Dole and televangelist Pat Robertson. Yes, third to Pat Robertson. That must have been a fun plane ride from Iowa to New Hampshire on Air Force 2.
So why does No Labels think Harris is so unelectable that she will doom Joe Biden? There are three big moments in a VP candidate’s campaign: the introduction once picked, the convention speech, and the VP debate. Harris passed each of those three tests without the customary stumbles of VP candidates. As VP, she has served without scandal, and for all the efforts to blow up a news cycle’s worth of awkwardness into some cosmic flop, she’s had a relatively smooth if uneventful VP tenure. Which is about all any VP can hope for.
So, let’s ask again, why is it that No Labels thinks Harris is so unelectable she will doom Joe Biden? Can we just be honest? It’s because she is a woman and a woman of color. That’s not to say that every member of No Labels wouldn’t welcome a woman of color as president. (This probably isn’t the case, but let’s give them that.) But do they not realize how extraordinarily damaging it is to take the position that a woman of color can’t be elected president?
The mantra of “No Labels” is that 2024 is “unique,” and all past political equations do not apply. This is how they counter the political reality that no independent presidential candidate has won a single electoral college vote since George Wallace. The great populist independent candidate of 1992, Ross Perot, does indeed have something in common with the great masses of America. Like you and I, Ross Perot never won a single electoral college vote.
Electing an independent candidate is a wishful fantasy akin to my asserting that the next NFL draft will be unique and I’ll go in the first round. But if they believe 2024 is the ultimate rule-breaker election, they can’t allow for the possibility that a woman of color might be a plus for Joe Biden’s re-election? What kind of message is No Labels sending to every young woman in America who isn’t as white as the leadership of No Labels that the first non-white female VP is so damaging to President Biden that America can only be saved by…Joe Manchin?Many smart, well-meaning people are involved in No Labels and should wake up to the damage they are doing to the American social fabric. Let the hateful alt-right carry the message that women of color can’t win in America. Stop what you are doing and focus on helping make history by contributing to the re-election of Kamala Harris.
At the end of the day, this is a legacy question for every person who is part of No Labels. If No Labels runs an independent candidate, the odds are overwhelming that it will help defeat Joe Biden. That will be the end of any chance No Labels has of playing a positive role in American politics and will be the organization’s legacy. Is that what No Labels supporters want? To end up on the same side as The Proud Boys?
No Labels is right about one thing: 2024 is a unique election. For the first time since 1860, a major American party is running against an incumbent president they believe is illegitimate. Democracy itself is on the ballot. This is not the time to indulge in Fantasy Football politics. No Labels should be part of saving democracy, not destroying the American Experiment. That means working for Biden-Harris not because they are perfect but because they are decent Americans who believe in democracy and are in the American tradition. Don’t blame Kamala Harris. Embrace her for the positive change she represents for this country we love. No Labels can help her make history, rather than going down in history as the group that re-elected Donald Trump.