By the geriatric standards of the Senate, the retirement of 68-year-old Sen. Joe Lieberman comes at a relatively young age. But Wednesday’s news that the Connecticut Democrat plans to leave the stage in 2012 surprised no one: It was clear the role he played was outdated and even clearer that he was thoroughly unsuited for the modern political era.
The circumstances surrounding Lieberman’s decision not to seek reelection attest to that. In the span of just a decade, he went from celebrated vice-presidential nominee—he was the first Jewish candidate on a major party ticket in American history—to near-pariah status within his own party.
The speed and arc of his political decline is stunning: In 2000, Lieberman won reelection to a third Senate term in a landslide, even as he spent the bulk of his time campaigning outside his home state as Al Gore’s running mate. By 2006, Lieberman couldn’t even win the Democratic nomination for his own seat. He was forced to run as a third-party candidate, winning with a bare 50 percent of the vote.
The pendulum swung so far for Lieberman that he got a serious look to be Republican Sen. John McCain’s running mate in 2008. Both Gore and McCain saw in Lieberman the same thing, in mirror image: a moderate-to-conservative grown-up, whose very presence would signal to voters that the man at the top of the ticket wasn’t as extreme as he might appear at first blush, either to the left or to the right.
But these days, at a time when most politicians prefer to pledge devotion to bipartisanship while not actually practicing it, a man with a foot in two parties really has no party. And therefore, really, no political future.
The first hint of the troubles to come for Lieberman surfaced in 2004, when he embarked on his own presidential campaign—a bid that never got off the ground. The senator had gone old school, waiting for Gore to make a decision before announcing his intention to run. But Gore himself didn’t show him the same courtesy, abandoning Lieberman, with no notice, for Howard Dean.
For Lieberman, a run for a fifth term in 2012 would have been marked by great uncertainty, beginning with the most simple question of all—under which party label would he, or could he, run?
Part of the problem Lieberman faced was stylistic. He was politician built for radio, not cable television. He was not the kind of public figure who could be asked if he wore boxers or briefs, or counted on to make incendiary remarks. The sobriety and civility that marked his approach belonged to another era, as did the issues on which he first gained national notice: violent movies, video games and gangsta rap.
Likewise, his ideology proved out of sync with the times. He rated as the most conservative Senate Democrat in a region that serves as a liberal citadel, a hawkish centrist in a party where the energy is on the left and the path back to power was paved by resistance to two overseas wars.
The Connecticut senator alluded to his estrangement from his party in his remarks Wednesday announcing his retirement.
“I have not always fit comfortably into conventional political boxes—maybe you’ve noticed that — Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative,” he said in his hometown of Stamford. “I have always thought that my first responsibility is not to serve a political party but to serve my constituents, my state, and my country, and then to work across party lines to make sure good things get done for them.”
Lieberman also sought to highlight that it was the political environment that had changed, not his own beliefs.
“The politics of President Kennedy—service to country, support of civil rights and social justice, pro-growth economic and tax policies, and a strong national defense—are still my politics, and they don’t fit neatly into today’s partisan political boxes anymore either,” he said.
None of that stopped Lieberman from evolving into a key player in the Senate. Even as his political fortunes waned back home, he remained as important as ever in Washington. He played a prominent role in homeland and national security issues in the post-9/11 era and emerged as an important voice in support of President George W. Bush on the use of force in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Yet it was that role that nearly led to his defeat in 2006 and irrevocably damaged his relationship with the Democratic base. Bush’s embrace of Lieberman after delivering his State of the Union speech in 2005—known to the senator’s growing legion of detractors as “the kiss”—affixed to Lieberman like a scarlet letter. A year and a half later, Lieberman was denied renomination by wealthy businessman Ned Lamont.
While some of his Democratic Senate colleagues supported him in his third-party bid that fall, many in the party did not. His longtime delegation partner, Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd, endorsed Lamont, even going so far as to cut an ad for him.
While Lieberman was cautiously welcomed back into the caucus after his victory in November 2006 and claimed the chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, it wasn’t necessarily because all was forgiven—his vote served to put Democrats into the majority in an almost evenly divided chamber.
In any case, it wasn’t long until Lieberman’s relationship with his party could be declared irreparably broken. He attended McCain’s 2008 Republican National Convention and drew serious consideration for the ticket. At the time, Lieberman was viewed as a transformative pick that would disassociate McCain from Bush and the damaged GOP brand — just as he had been picked eight years earlier to distance Gore from the legacy of Bill Clinton.
McCain decided instead to tap Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a very different model of transformative running mate and one much better suited to the demands of contemporary politics.
After his dalliance with the GOP, Lieberman’s political options back home diminished even further. By the fall of 2010, his support in the polls was at rock bottom levels. His only path to reelection appeared to be on the GOP line, but even that would be a dicey endeavor since his approval ratings with Republicans were below 50 percent.
That left Lieberman in a remarkably similar position to the man he ousted to win the seat in 1988—former GOP Sen. Lowell Weicker. At the time, Weicker was also buffeted by tectonic political forces that made him one of an endangered species—the Northeastern Republican. He had thumbed his nose at conservatives, staked out a lonely position on the left flank of a party that was breaking to the right and emphasized his independence with a slogan that read, “Nobody’s man but yours.”
Given the choice of running a similar campaign or moving on to the next phase of his life, Lieberman wisely chose the latter. He already knew how the movie ended.
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