The Infernal Triangle: Joe Lieberman: A remembrance of this most feckless of Democrats

These weekly chronicles of mine are intended to explain the “Infernal Triangle” that structures America’s democratic decline. The three sides: authoritarian Republicans, incompetent media, feckless Democrats. So far, sorry to say, I’ve been sleeping on the “feckless Democrats” piece. The passing of former Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman last week at the age of 82 is the perfect occasion to set things right. The undearly departed was feckless Democrats’ poster child.

You’ve surely read by now the liberal-left’s bill of indictment, if you hadn’t been reciting it to yourself already. There was Lieberman’s election to the United States Senate running to the right of his Republican opponent, Lowell Weicker, in a campaign backed by William F. Buckley and National Review. His warm welcome from Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, a ferociously right-wing Republican, and before that the leader of the “Dixiecrats”: “I understand we think a lot alike in the way we do things.” (“Yes,” the Connecticut Yankee replied, “I think we do.”) Then, Lieberman’s loyal service in the cause of the Iraq War, on behalf of both our government and that of “the only democracy in the Middle East.” And his “paternalistic tut-tutting that led Lieberman to join Tipper Gore’s ridiculous moral crusade against rap music,” as my friend Jeet Heer put it, akin to “the pious frauds who populate the novels of Charles Dickens.” His sabotaging of the possibility of a public option in the Affordable Care Act, on behalf of the nation’s dominant private insurers, based in his state, and Big Pharma, for whom his wife became a prominent lobbyist. His endorsement of John McCain over Barack Obama in 2008, then his refusal to support Obama’s re-election in 2012. His last act, fronting for No Labels, the exploding political pustule that treats a second Trump presidency as a small price to pay for defeating the Pol Pots they seem to think run the Democratic Party.

You may also have been hearing of Lieberman’s responsibility for tipping the scales that made George W. Bush president of the United States. Is that judgment fair? It’s more than fair. Is it worth dwelling on? It’s more than worth dwelling on. Few incidents better describe the way the least partisan political party on Earth has failed to protect us from the depredations we face now.

Start at the root of the problem: The idea that a Joe Lieberman would have seemed like a good running mate on a Democratic presidential ticket was loony in the first place. What was his glide path to the job? His willingness, during the 1998 impeachment trial of President Clinton for lying about consensual sex, to stand up and scourge Clinton as a threat to public decency itself.

To voters, the Republicans’ piously fraudulent impeachment crusade was about as popular as botulism. That was why, in a historic reversal, the party of the embattled president actually gained seats in that year’s off-year elections.

On the other side of the ledger, however, agenda-setting elite political journalists acted like Monicagate was worse than Watergate. The party’s Powers That Be—most particularly, vice president and presidential nominee Al Gore—sided with the media elite, tabbing Lieberman as just the man for the ticket. Voters? We don’t need no stinking voters.

Then, the near-tie in Florida. My ex-wife and I sat glued to MSNBC and Josh Marshall’s new Talking Points Memo blog for the monthlong minute-by-minute melodrama; we called it “The Florida Recount Show.” In the thick of things, it seemed absurdly labyrinthine. But an excellent podcast from Leon Neyfakh’s shop boils it down pretty admirably.

The Republicans fought it as an existential war, but with a strategy borrowed from playground bunko artists. You remember that annoying kid: the one who invited you to decide something by flipping a coin, then cried out, “Heads I win! Tails you lose!” Every step along the way, Republican schoolyard bullies ate poor Al Gore’s lunch. Pretty much, mainstream media stood with the bully and disparaged the nerd.

It started with an automatic recount triggered by the closeness of the statewide vote. That severely narrowed Bush’s lead, by a little bit in most counties, but a lot more in four particular counties. Originally, Bush was ahead by 1,784 votes. After the computer recount, he was only up by 327. So the Gore campaign’s next move was to request hand recounts, as the law provided, in those four counties. They just happened to be the state’s most urban, Democratic counties. So the Republicans claimed Democrats were cheating by not demanding recounts in every county—even though that was not practically possible. Their refrain: “Count every vote!” Heads we win.

You might think they had a point. Or rather, you might wish the Democrats had been that aggressive. Except, as Jeffrey Toobin discovered for his 2001 book Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election, 18 of Florida’s 67 counties never even bothered to carry out that statutorily required computer re-tally—the one that, in the 49 counties that did carry it out, narrowed Bush’s lead by 1,457 votes. And the Democrats proved so feckless they never bothered to object.

The media, though, bought the Republican narrative. Strikingly, they also bought the one that came next.

Gore then stated that he agreed with Bush that there should be manual recounts in every county—to count every vote, according to standards agreed to by each party (“hanging chads,” “dimpled chads”—don’t get me started). He also proposed a meeting between the candidates: “not to negotiate, but to improve the tone of our dialogue in America” and “call on all of our supporters to respect the outcome of this election, whatever it may be,” to “affirm our national unity.”

George Bush cried foul. His eyes shot daggers into the assembled TV cameras: “The outcome of this election will not be the result of deals or efforts to mold public opinion. The outcome of this election will be determined by votes and the law.”

The law, after all, said don’t count every vote, because the Florida election code didn’t allow a candidate to ask for a statewide recount, just county by county.

See how this game works? Tails, the Democrats lose.

Several turns of the screw later, Lieberman stepped onstage. A Democratic lawyer pulled together a guide to the rules for challenging improperly cast overseas absentee ballots: ones with postmarks after Election Day, for example, or with no postmark at all. You know, the better to determine the outcome of this election by votes and the law.

The memo leaked. The Republicans brazenly claimed that this was a Democratic plan not to count every vote, by way of the overseas ballots.

No, scratch that: not “the overseas ballots.” Since the majority of these were from military personnel, Republicans began referring to them as “the military ballots.” The brazen, power-mad zealots marching behind Vladimir Ilyich Gore were actually seeking to disenfranchise our brave boys risking their lives for freedom overseas.

The Fourth Estate bought that one hook, line, and sinker too.

Readers of a certain age will recall that the pope of the Washington media elite, round about then, was Tim Russert, host of NBC’s Meet the Press. The “military ballot” story broke on November 16. Lieberman appeared on Meet the Press three days later. Russert ventriloquized the Republican talking point:

“How can a campaign who insists on the intent of the voter, the will of the people … accept knocking out the votes of people of [the] armed services?”

Or, in fewer words: How dare you.

The correct reply—correct in accuracy, correct politically—was obvious: “Democrats are for counting every vote, provided it was cast legally, and my friends across the aisle, any more than I, would never want any citizen, whatever their profession, to get to cast a vote after Election Day,” blah blah blah blah blah.

Instead, Lieberman said this: “Al Gore and I don’t want to ever be part of anything that would put an extra burden on the military personnel abroad who want to vote. We don’t want to benefit from any votes that we don’t deserve,” so “military ballots” [sic] should “get the benefit of the doubt.”

And so they did.

The New York Times did a six-month investigation on the matter—just in time for America’s new president to report back that he had just looked into the “soul” of Russia’s Vladimir Putin and found him an “honest, straightforward man” who “loves his family.” They concluded that 608 clearly illegitimate overseas ballots had been counted. One hundred sixty-nine came from voters who were not registered, didn’t sign the envelope, or never requested a ballot, as federal law required. One hundred eighty-three were mailed from inside the U.S., also in violation of federal law. Five were received after the deadline.

And 344 were not postmarked on or before Election Day, and 19 were from people who also voted in person. Eighty percent of these illegitimate votes came from counties that George Bush won. They were only giving those ballots the benefit of the doubt, after all, just as Sen. Lieberman said they should. Heads they won.

I just learned something new about this travesty by googling Lieberman’s Meet the Press vote concessions, which I had originally pulled off LexisNexis. It was an article by a scrappy new journalist on the scene from the alternative outlet Salon. “According to a knowledgeable Republican operative,” he reported, “the Bush camp even discussed a strategy that, if implemented, would have broken the law … according to the knowledgeable GOP source, on Saturday, Nov. 11, Bush’s political team held a 60- to 90-minute conference call for campaign operatives scattered throughout Florida. In the course of the discussion, they discussed having political operatives near overseas military bases encourage soldiers who had registered to vote—but never did—to fill out their ballots and send them in, more than four days after the voting deadline.”

The reporter became progressively less scrappy in the fullness of time, until he ended up host of State of the Union with Jake Tapper, CNN’s Sunday morning rival to Meet the Press. Joe Lieberman went on to smaller and dumber things. Condolences to his family for their loss and all that, but dear God, I’m grateful it happened before he could do any more damage.

Extra! Extra! Got Infernally Triangular questions you’d like to see answered in a future column? Send them to infernaltriangle@prospect.org.