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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Jeffrey Toobin discusses Joseph Lieberman's chances in 2004
Senator Joseph Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut and Al Gore's Vice-Presidential running mate, is seldom happier than when he is talking about his own Presidential ambitions, even his much discussed pledge regarding Gore. Last year, Lieberman promised that he would not seek the Presidency if Gore tried again. One night in October, the issue came up at a small fund-raiser in Miami Beach where fifty Lieberman supporters in south Florida had paid a thousand dollars each to hear the Senator in an intimate setting over dinner at a private house. The weather was hot and sticky, but Lieberman, mingling with the guests on the patio, never took off his jacket and tie, and his demeanor remained serious. After a brief talk, he took questions, mostly about Iraq and the Middle East. When one guest asked about his plans for 2004, Lieberman said, "Good question!" and beamed.
"I made a pledge last year that I wouldn't run if Al did in '04," he said. "It felt right then, and it feels right now. If there is a possibility for a Presidential candidacy by me, and I think there is, a lot of it comes back to him picking me. So I'm waiting to hear what Al decides. But here are some of the numbers that I'll share with you. There have been four big polls recently. With Gore in the race, Al always comes in first. With Gore out of the race, I have come in first in every one of the four." The audience applauded politely, urging him on. "So these numbers tell me that when I think about running for President I'm not 'inhaling.' " Much laughter.
With the joke, Lieberman was gently mocking his own reputation for sobriety, if not sanctimony. He may be a thoroughgoing moderate in his politics, but he is a true conservative in temperament and style. His world is an orderly place, where people wait in line, take their turns, and generally behave themselves. Lieberman wants badly to be the President, but decorum compels him to defer to Gore. Like Nick Carraway, Lieberman wants "the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever." When he was just a little-known senator, picking and choosing the issues he wanted to speak out on, this sense of rectitude served him well, but now the stakes are higher and the fights are grittier, and he seems perpetually disappointed, even surprised, when other politicians don't play by his rules.
Shortly after the September 11th attacks, Lieberman introduced a bill to create a Department of Homeland Security. At first, the Bush Administration opposed the proposal, but then, in June of this year, the Republicans suddenly made creation of the new department the centerpiece of their antiterrorism initiatives, and the bill appeared headed for easy passage. As the floor manager for the Senate, Lieberman had the most high-profile assignment of his thirteen years in office.
When the Senate began debating specific legislative language, a problem arose. President Bush asked for a provision allowing him to waive certain civil-service protections for employees of the new department if he thought it was in the interest of national security. Bush sought, for example, the authority to hire and fire at will in the new department. (He would still be bound by anti-discrimination laws, including those barring favoritism based on political affiliation.) The President's proposal also allowed him, in the name of national security, to exempt certain workers from collective-bargaining agreements. He already had that kind of authority over other parts of the government, and he had used it earlier in the year to prevent a union-organizing drive at the United States attorney's office in Miami. "The unions got very agitated about this," Lieberman told me one day in September, while the issue was being debated.
Lieberman seemed bewildered that this relatively obscure issue had come to dominate the debate over homeland security. "If you asked me whether civil-service protection would be the stumbling block, I would have never guessed it," he said. In the Senate, he tried to finesse the issue, helping to draft compromise language that appeared to have the support of more than half the Senate. But by threatening a filibuster Senate Republicans kept the compromise amendment from coming to the floor. They insisted on an up-and-down vote on the whole bill. Fred Thompson, who managed the bill for the Republicans, said recently, "I'm kind of prejudiced toward Joe from a personal standpoint, because we've had such a good relationship, but I really don't understand what he did on homeland security. We kept asking ourselves, 'What is it they are seeing here that we don't see here? Why are they fighting us on this?' This is Presidential national-security authority--that ain't got two sides to it." As John McCain, the Arizona senator and Lieberman's close friend, said, "Very frankly, they should have gone ahead and caved on it. It gave the appearance of being unpatriotic and beholden to the unions. The Republicans got a twofer out of it."
The decision to fight Bush on the union provisions of the homeland bill reflected a broader ideological evolution that Lieberman has undergone since Gore selected him, two years ago. At that time,...
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