I know why: sabotaging the Democratic Party is his raison d’etre
This No Labels gambit is such utter bullshit I’m hard pressed not to just start screaming into the void. I’ve been watching Joe Lieberman take a wrecking ball to the Democratic Party for decades now and he’s not done yet.
In this article in the Atlantic, he insists that he doesn’t want Trump to be the nominee and that he just wants to provide a “moderate” “centrist” option since that’s what he believes everyone in America really wants. But he’s very hard pressed to answer why he is determined to threaten his old friend Joe Biden:
Lieberman is clear about his distaste for Trump, but he’s hazier on the question of why—or even whether—Biden has fallen short. He’s said repeatedly that if the choice came down to Biden or Trump, he’d vote for the Democrat, and he speaks affectionately of a man he first met nearly 40 years ago and with whom he served for 20 years in the Senate. Yet he’s still hunting for a better option. I asked him whether he supported a third-party ticket because Biden had done a bad job or because voters think he’s done a bad job. “I think it’s both,” Lieberman replied. “He’s an honorable person, but he’s been pulled off his normal track too often” by pressure from the left. That’s a frequent talking point from Republicans and a complaint Manchin has made from time to time.
The perception that Biden has veered too far to the left, though, is not what has driven his low approval ratings. Indeed, in many ways Biden is the kind of president for whom moderates like Lieberman have long been clamoring. Yes, he signed two major bills that passed along purely party-line votes (the American Rescue Plan Act in 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act a year later), but he has repeatedly prioritized negotiating with Republicans, most recently over the debt ceiling. Lieberman credited Biden for his bipartisan infrastructure law and the budget deal he struck with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy this spring. “He’s done some significant things,” Lieberman said, also praising the president’s initial handling of the coronavirus pandemic. When I asked him what specifically Biden had veered too far left on, he initially declined to list any issues. Then he pointed to No Labels’ policy plan, noting that it included “commonsense” proposals on guns and immigration.
Although he’s been out of office for more than a decade, Lieberman, at 81, is less than a year older than Biden. He said he believes the president remains up to the job, both physically and cognitively, and he was reluctant to call on him to stand down. But Lieberman gently suggested that might have been the better course. “I’m struck by how intent he is on running again,” he said with a chuckle. “It would have been easier for him not to run, and he could retire with a real sense of pride and just an enormously productive career in public service.”
This is Joe Lieberman in full effect. He’s doing this to own the libs which he relishes and lives for as much as the average deluded Trumper. It’s what he does.
Biden’s record is hardly some wild-eyed liberal freak show. He managed to pass two huge bills in this closely divided congress with bipartisan votes! Is that not exactly what Lieberman says he wants? Well, yeah, but what he really wants is to stab progressives in the back over and over and over again. And if it empowers the right, which it always does, he’s just fine with that.
Lieberman’s life’s work in the last 20 years is to destroy the left. He is, therefore, objectively pro-fascist.