COME ON IN JOE, THE WATER'S FINE

Holy Joe, Corporate Joe, G.I. Joe: Will the real Senator Lieberman please stand up? (Doug Ireland, JULY 11 - 17, 2003, LA Weekly)

On March 9, 1995, in remarks at the National Press Club, as chairman of the pro-corporate Democratic Leadership Council, Lieberman denounced the case for affirmative action as "an un-American argument because it's based on averages, not individuals," and went on to praise Ward Connerly's Proposition 209, the misnamed "California Civil Rights Initiative," which outlawed affirmative action: "I can't see how I could be opposed to it, because it basically is a statement of American values." The year before, the New Haven Advocate's excellent Paul Bass - who's covered Lieberman for 22 years - wrote, "After meeting with racist scholar [and Bell Curve author] Charles Murray, Lieberman promoted Murray's idea of taking children away from mothers on welfare and putting them in new government-run orphanages (rather than, for instance, boosting support for agencies seeking to keep together families in crisis)."

Lieberman didn't always talk that way - he started out in politics as a supporter of Robert F. Kennedy and an opponent of the Vietnam War. When he represented a
half-African-American New Haven district in the state Senate, he paraded himself as a liberal friend to the poor. What changed?

Ambition, pure and simple. In the Reagan-landslide year of 1980, Lieberman ran for Congress - and lost to a GOPer who cut Lieberman's 17-point lead in the polls by attacking him as "too liberal." "After he lost, Joe was advised by party stalwarts he couldn't continue to be a progressive across the board if he wanted to move up," recalls Irv Stolberg, the liberal former speaker of the Connecticut House, and later the founder of the state's progressive Caucus of Concerned Democrats. It's hardly surprising that Lieberman listened to the party bosses: His undergraduate thesis - published in 1966 as a book, The Power Broker - was a hagiography of the tough and cynical John Bailey, Connecticut's legendary ham-fisted Democratic boss, whose creed was "You do whatever you have to do to win." [...]

All in all, as a Democrat, Lieberman makes a great Republican.

Would anybody be surprised to see him switch parties if the 2004 election goes as expected? Posted by Orrin Judd at July 10, 2003 9:12 PM