Joe Lieberman and the Changing Vice-Presidency

cross-posted at Dagblog

So, Joe Lieberman is leaving. Or rather, Joe Lieberman is announcing that he's going to take his ball and go home, so that there's absolutely no way to get any leverage over him for the next two years. So I expect we'll all see much more written about him on the blogs.

Lots of blogs will deal with old grudges against Lieberman or grudging praise of him, and heaven knows I have some of both. But I'm most interested in Gail Collins' column, which confirms my own suspicion that Lieberman's political behavior since 2004 has mostly been driven by his anger at not gaining the party's nomination for the Presidency:

The vice presidential race was the high point of the Joe Lieberman story, even though he allowed Dick Cheney to eviscerate him in the debate. But he left it with the idea that he should be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004. Nobody else had gotten that message.

Lieberman, a big supporter of the war in Iraq, expected the party’s base to nominate a candidate who disagreed with them about the critical issue of the day, had failed at the most crucial task delegated to him during the previous presidential election and was one of the most sluggish and cliché-ridden public speakers in the history of oratory.

He was shocked when they decided not to.

“It wasn’t a personal rejection, but I never saw anybody take anything so personally. He became so bitter about Democratic liberals,” said Bill Curry, a former Connecticut comptroller and gubernatorial candidate.

Lieberman's passive-aggressive not-quite-exit from the national life interestingly comes as Sarah Palin's unfavorability ratings hit new record highs, and the American media actually begins to reflect those poll ratings in its coverage of her. Palin's bad numbers aren't an actual story; her poll numbers have been weak since a month or two after she was nominated for vice-president, and outright hideous since July, 2009. Her "record lows" of 53% unfavorable in the recent Gallup poll and 56% unfavorable in the last CNN poll, for example, are statistically identical with her previous lows of 52% and 55%. She has pretty much the same rotten poll numbers that she's had for a long time. What's changed is that her core constituency, the press, has started to believe that she isn't a viable candidate.

The conjunction of Palin's flameout and Lieberman's decision to rust makes me wonder if something has changed in the American vice-presidency, or at least in the the institution of the vice-presidential nominee. Going back to the election of 2000, five people have run for vice-president on major party tickets. The two who have actually been sworn into office, Dick Cheney and Joe Biden, have been senior statesmen types rather than potential successors. Biden may have previously run for the nomination, but seems to understand that any chance he might have once had has passed him by, and that he won't be at the top of the ticket in 2016. Cheney never seems to have coveted the Presidency itself. Meanwhile the three major-party running mates who have not taken office (Palin, Liberman, and John Edwards) have all campaigned poorly for the understudy job but come away expecting a shot at being president themselves. It's very peculiar.

That's a laughably small sample, and probably I shouldn't draw any conclusions, but it's interesting that we're seeing this happen as the Vice-Presidency has grown stronger during Gore's and then Cheney's terms, and after the last vice-president to gain his party's nomination for president failed to gain office in such a difficult way. Al Gore expanded the day-to-day policy muscle of the Vice-Presidency (accelerating a development that had started and stuttered in previous administrations) and was a strong addition to Clinton's ticket but had the Presidency slip through his hands and was ruthlessly second-guessed on campaign strategy afterward. Cheney consolidated even more power in the Vice-Presidency (although he seems to have lost some in his second term), but was clearly not interested in anything beyond Air Force Two.

It seems (although this might be reversed in a political eyeblink) that the "vice-president" role is gaining ascendance over the "running mate" role which had been much more dominant for many years. The last vice-presidents have been essentially Cabinet heavyweights without portfolio. There's less emphasis on the Veep's campaign-trail functions, and much much less emphasis on the Vice-President as political heir apparent. In fact, it's been ten years of veeps who are not heir apparents at all. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that the last "heir apparent" nominee lost the big prize in the Florida mudfight, and the successful heir apparent before that, George H. W. Bush, lost re-election and was unpopular with his party's base. When you flesh out that list of late-twentieth-century Veeps with Walter Mondale (who lost 49 states to Reagan) and Dan Quayle (a liability who could never be nominated for president), you can see why parties might move away from the anointed-successor model.

What's strange though is that the last three running mates who've lost seem so convinced that they would do better heading the ticket next time. What's even stranger is their evident conviction that they deserve the gig, even though they all fumbled the backup job.

How to Negotiate with Enemies: Lieberman Edition

Sometimes, Barack Obama says, you have to negotiate with your enemies.

President Bush, being a genius, disagrees. He knows that negotiating with enemies is a sign of weakness, which is why he wouldn't negotiate with North Korea while they were only trying to build nuclear weapons but waited until they had actually built them. That way Bush would have no leverage and could negotiate from a position of sufficient weakness.

This is also, of course, John McCain's model of tough diplomacy, and Joe Lieberman's. They too view Obama's willingness to actually talk to our enemies as a symptom not only of weakness, but of naivete. The fact that Obama is willing to talk to enemies, rather than simply threaten them, is taken as a sign that he's some simple-minded kid who will lose his lunch money to the Iranians before he even gets to the bus stop.

McCain and Lieberman's preferred method for dealing with international enemies, like Bush's, is to make bellicose public threats that they may or may not find themselves able to back up. It's very important that these threats not be made directly to the party being threatened, but to large domestic political audiences in front of international media. The goal is to humiliate one's opponents and make them lose face, while looking more impressive to one's own local admirers; essentially, this is the Gangster Rap School of Diplomacy. McCain or Bush or Lieberman let it be known around the neighborhood that they will give that other kid a beating, as soon as they see him. The plan is to undermine their opponent's standing, and intimidate him through third parties. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in fact uses the same technique all the time, ranting about how he will humble America, and Fidel Castro used to be a past master of it. You see how successful it has been, what with Iran and Cuba bringing us to our knees. And you can see how effectively our stump-speech threats have curbed their behavior.

The main purpose of these public threats is their main weakness: any leader who gives in to them will be humiliated in front of his own power base, and weakened. And because they were made in front of the whole world, the threatened party can't comply without admitting weakness. (If you hide when the neighborhood bully threatens you, you basically have to accept his bullying thereafter.) What American leader can give any concessions to Ahmadinejad, until he changes his tune? Threats like these give the opponent a powerful motivation to defy you, but punishes them for cooperating with you.

The other problem of course, is that when you threaten someone indirectly, they often doubt that you mean it. How often have you lost sleep over Castro's vows to bring us down? How often have you worried that those parade-stand threats were connected to anything concrete he was planning to do? Everybody knows that the neighborhood bully who goes around talking about how he will beat you up when he finds is not the same as the bully who actually finds you and then threatens to beat you up.

Sometimes, and I hope even our most hawkish compatriots would agree, you have to threaten your enemies in person.

That principle of tough diplomacy was seemingly on display in the Senate chamber today, when the naive and dewy pushover from Chicago, Obama, approached the hardened street tough from Connecticut, Lieberman. Roll Call, via the Huffington Post, has the story:

Furthermore, during a Senate vote Wednesday, Obama dragged Lieberman by the hand to a far corner of the Senate chamber and engaged in what appeared to reporters in the gallery as an intense, three-minute conversation.


While it was unclear what the two were discussing, the body language suggested that Obama was trying to convince Lieberman of something and his stance appeared slightly intimidating.

Using forceful, but not angry, hand gestures, Obama literally backed up Lieberman against the wall, leaned in very close at times, and appeared to be trying to dominate the conversation, as the two talked over each other in a few instances.

Still, Obama and Lieberman seemed to be trying to keep the back-and-forth congenial as they both patted each other on the back during and after the exchange.

Afterwards, Obama smiled and pointed up at reporters peering over the edge of the press gallery for a better glimpse of their interaction.

Was Obama threatening Lieberman? I can't say, and neither can you, and we're not meant to. Perhaps the new leader of the Democratic Party was simply giving Lieberman, who now caucuses with the Democrats but campaigns with the Republicans, an enthusiastic restaurant recommendation. Lieberman can certainly deny that any threats were made, which means he can cave in without losing too much face. This, of course, is the point.

Of course, the fact conversation wasn't supposed to be entirely private, although its substance was. The press in the galleries, and the other senators in the chamber, were supposed to notice that Obama was giving Lieberman some personal time, and that Lieberman wasn't enjoying it. It was important to establish that the new boss is, in fact, the new boss. Lieberman got a small taste of public humiliation, as payback for publicly dissing the leader of the party that gives him his committee assignments. But he also knows, and was intended to know, that the small taste could have been a full meal, and that Obama has the power to humiliate him much more publicly and thoroughly. Lieberman was also allowed the dignity of having the substance of the threat (if it was a threat) and the substance of the demand kept private so that he can comply with a minimal loss of position. And the "friendly" body language allows both parties to put the best possible face on things, and to stay in the negotiation. The move gives Lieberman the maximum reasons to cooperate, and the maximum penalty for not cooperating. It is, dare I say it, nuanced.

And that is the man whom Lieberman was calling soft.