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Sen. Joseph Lieberman, often regarded as the “Republican’s favorite Democrat” because of his support for a number of conservative foreign and domestic policies, represents Connecticut as an Independent Democrat in the U.S. Senate. First elected to the Senate in 1988, Lieberman announced in early 2011 that he would not run for reelection in 2012. In announcing his decision, Lieberman said: "At the end of this term, I will have served 24 years in the U.S. Senate and 40 years in elective office. For me, it is time for another season and another purpose under Heaven."[1]

Lieberman is one of the Senate’s leading hawks, often teaming up with like-minded colleagues—including Republican Sens. John McCain and Jon Kyl—to press militarist security policies. He was an outspoken supporter of the invasion of Iraq and is a frequent supporter of neoconservative-led advocacy campaigns pushing for interventionist policies in the Middle East.

Lieberman has also been among Congress's most strident hardliners regarding Iran, pushing through sanctions and advocating for an aggressive U.S. posture. In comments made at the William Kristol-led Foreign Policy Initiative shortly after the 2010 midterm elections, Lieberman asserted that Congress would pressure the Obama administration for more sanctions against Tehran and possibly military action. Arguing that he was skeptical that economic sanctions could prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, Lieberman contended there was a “broad bipartisan base of support” for taking military action against Iran.[2]

Becoming an Independent Democrat

Lieberman's support for the Bush administration's "war on terror"—as well as his cozy relationship with President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney—spurred questions about his vulnerability to challengers in the 2006 midterm elections. He won as an Independent,[3] but only after upstart Democrat Ned Lamont had earlier beaten Lieberman in Connecticut's 2006 Democratic primary. Some observers attributed the primary defeat to Lieberman's Senate vote on June 22, 2006, in which he was one of only six Democratic senators to vote against two resolutions aimed at limiting U.S. involvement in the Iraq War.[4]

Earlier, in December 2005, Lieberman chastised Democrats for pushing for withdrawal from Iraq, arguing: "we undermine the president's credibility at our nation's peril." The comments drew public praise from both Vice President Dick Cheney and then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Said Cheney: "On this, both Republicans and Democrats should be able to agree. The only way the terrorists can win is if we lose our nerve and abandon our mission.”[5]

In early July 2006, Lieberman announced if he lost to Lamont in the August primary he would run as a "petitioning Democrat," sparking widespread criticism among antiwar Democrats.”[6] Responding to the announcement, Lamont supporter and Daily Kos blog founder Markos Moulitsas told the New York Times: "An interesting kind of 'Democrat,' Lieberman thinks he is. One who doesn't respect the wishes of his state's Democratic voters, one who will split his state's vote on the left and potentially hand the election to a Republican.”[7]

Comments like this by Moulitsas and other pundits in the blogosphere sparked a spirited debate over Lieberman and what his fate might mean for the Democratic Party. Some, like Marshall Wittmann, a fellow at the right-leaning Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), contended that Kos and other "McGovernites with modems" are playing a dangerous game in attacking Lieberman, a game that ultimately plays into Republicans' hands.[8] Harold Meyerson, editor-at-large of the left-leaning American Prospect, saw the issue differently, writing in an op-ed for the Washington Post: "Lieberman's ultimate problem isn't fanatical bloggers, any more than Lyndon Johnson's was crazy, antiwar Democrats. His problem is that Bush, and the war that both he and Bush have championed, is speeding the ongoing realignment of the Northeast. His problem, dear colleagues, is Connecticut."[9]

In one of his first moves after winning the 2006 midterm, Lieberman announced that his new spokesman would be Wittmann, whom the New York Times once described as "one of the great ideological contortionists.”[10] An idiosyncratic ideologue who has been associated with a bewildering array of political factions—including the Trotskyites, the neoconservatives, the Christian Coalition, and various Republican politicians—Wittmann has long promoted efforts to push hardline policies in the Democratic Party as a senior fellow of the Progressive Policy Institute and the DLC. In a press release regarding Wittmann's appointment, Lieberman said: "There is no better person to take the helm during this new time in my Senate career than Marshall. Marshall has been a trusted outside adviser to me for some time now and I'm glad he will be bring his experience and wisdom to my staff. Those qualities, along with his independence and diverse background, make him the ideal captain of my new Senate Communications team."[11]


Member of the Neocon Network

Often called a "neoconservative Democrat," Lieberman has frequently aligned himself with some of the more notorious advocates of hawkish U.S. policies. In 2002, Lieberman became an honorary co-chair, along with George Shultz and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, an advocacy outfit spearheaded by a number of neoconservative stalwarts, including Jeane Kirkpatrick, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Richard Perle, James Woolsey, and Eliot A. Cohen. According to the group's mission statement, "The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq was formed to promote regional peace, political freedom, and international security by replacing the Saddam Hussein regime with a democratic government that respects the rights of the Iraqi people and ceases to threaten the community of nations."

Lieberman has served as a distinguished advisor to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a purportedly nonpartisan think tank, which according to its website was formed shortly after 9/11 by "a group of visionary philanthropists and policymakers to engage in the worldwide war of ideas and to support the defense of democratic societies under assault by terrorism and militant Islamism." Though the foundation had once included on its advisory board other Democratic congressmen, the leadership council and board reads like a who's who of neoconservatives, several of whom teamed up with Lieberman to support the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, including Perle, Kristol, and Woolsey. Other prominent neoconservatives include Charles Krauthammer, the syndicated columnist for the Washington Post. Rounding out the foundation's list of board members and advisers are well-known conservative figures Gary Bauer, Newt Gingrich, and Steve Forbes.[12]

In 2004, Lieberman teamed up with the usual suspects to revive the Cold War-era anti-communist group, the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), which Lieberman then co-chaired with Woolsey, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), and George Shultz. Among the familiar names on the CPD's list of members are Gaffney, Cohen, Forbes, and Gingrich. Reflecting the trend of similar neoconservative-aligned initiatives, the CPD also enlisted a number of well-known liberal figures, including Vaclav Havel and Elie Wiesel, giving the CPD a patina of nonpartisanship. At the June 2004 press conference announcing the rebirth of the CPD, Lieberman claimed the aim of the group was "to form a bipartisan citizens' army, which is ready to fight a war of ideas against our Islamist terrorist enemies, and to send a clear signal that their strategy to deceive, demoralize, and divide America will not succeed."[13]

Iran Policy

Lieberman was the first prominent Democrat after the invasion of Iraq to champion expanding U.S. military intervention in the region to include Iran. In April 2006, he declared his support for preemptive attacks to stop Tehran from developing nuclear weapons. In an April 2006 interview with the Jerusalem Post, Lieberman said the aim of air strikes would be "to delay [the nuclear program] to deter it hoping that you set the program off course so that by the time they catch up back to where they were there's been a change in government. That's the limited objective that I would see.”[14]

By mid-2007, Lieberman had expanded his agenda to include attacking sites in Iran near the border with Iraq. He argued the sites were being used to arm and train insurgents. Frustrated with the lack of political will in Washington to support U.S. strikes without sufficient proof of complicity of Iranian support for attacks in Iraq, Lieberman called on June 11, 2007, for a "strike over the border into Iran, where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers."[15] In September 2007, Lieberman and Kyl cosponsored an amendment urging the State Department to officially label the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as a "foreign terrorist organization." According to the Agence France Presse, the non-binding amendment, which passed 76-22, "says that senators agree it is in the critical national interest of the United States to prevent Iran turning Shia extremists in Iraq into a 'Hezbollah type force."[16]

History of Conservative Support and Influence

Lieberman has a long history of joining forces with Republicans to support hawkish and interventionist defense policies. Throughout the 1990s, he supported Republican-led initiatives to ramp up efforts to build a missile defense system, becoming one of only a handful of Democrats to vote in 1995 against cutting spending for space-based missile defense programs.[17] In 1998, he cosponsored with McCain the Iraq Liberation Act, which made the overthrow of Saddam Hussein official U.S. policy.[18] And as previously mentioned, he has broken with large numbers of his Democratic colleagues in his continued support for Bush's war in Iraq and his call for intervention in Iran.

Lieberman also teamed up with Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney, in 1995 to set up the private American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), which in 2000 gave $3.4 million to colleges and universities. While its various boards and advisory committees include elites from a diverse array of backgrounds, it was then populated with a number of the usual neoconservative-aligned suspects, like Irving Kristol, Martin Peretz (New Republic magazine), Philip Merrill (who passed away in early 2006), William Bennett, Donald Kagan, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Hillel Fradkin, and Leon Kass. According to its mission statement, ACTA "is the only national organization that is dedicated to working with alumni, donors, trustees, and education leaders across the country to support liberal arts education, uphold high academic standards, safeguard the free exchange of ideas on campus, and ensure that the next generation receives a philosophically balanced, open-minded, high-quality education at an affordable price."[19] 



Some have questioned the group's support for "the free exchange of ideas." In October 2001, for example, ACTA issued a report assailing the response of U.S. universities to the 9/11 attacks, which reportedly attacked dozens of college professors and students for their supposedly less-than-patriotic reactions to the terrorist attacks. Several months later in February 2002, ACTA issued a "revised and expanded" edition, which included "a sampler of the many responses" to the original report. The revised edition, authored by ACTA staff, claims in its "Acknowledgements" that "no public official—including Lynne Cheney and Sen. Joe Lieberman—has endorsed or been asked to endorse this report." 



The revised report is in essence a compendium of some 100 statements recorded by ACTA that reveal what it calls "moral equivocation" and outright hostility toward the United States among academic elites. Such statements include: "Just because a grotesque act was committed against this country, does not mean any response is justified; it does not grant this country special license to use the sword;" "[Americans should] bring ourselves and our country to justice, not just the perpetrators;" and, "War created people like Osama bin Laden, and more war will create more people like him." While the original version cited the names of particular professors, leading to charges that the report resembled a blacklist, the revised edition suppressed the names "to focus discussion on the content of the views expressed, rather than the individuals who expressed them." Also excised in the new edition were a number of scathing judgments from the original that were cited in press reports, such as the charge that "colleges and university faculty have been the weak link in America's response" to the attacks, and "when a nation's intellectuals are unwilling to defend its civilization, they give comfort to its adversaries."[20]

Lieberman has worked from the inside to pull the Democratic Party rightward through his involvement in the DLC, a non-profit organization founded by right-center Democrats after Ronald Reagan's landslide defeat of Walter Mondale in the 1984 presidential election. Touting themselves as "New Democrats," the DLC has counted among its members some of the more prominent Democrats, including Al Gore and John Kerry. In 1990, then-Gov. Bill Clinton agreed to be the DLC's chair. In his profile of the DLC, IRC's Tom Barry writes, "In many ways, it was Bill Clinton—not the DLC—who succeeded in giving a human face and viable political program to the New Democrats. Although Clinton adopted most of the DLC platform as his own, he softened its hard ideological edge through compromise and inclusion, drawing in the party's left-center and center-right."

On foreign policy, the DLC has often advocated hardline positions that closely parallel the agenda of hawkish and neoconservative elements in the Republican Party. According to Barry, "In the late 1980s, DLC Democrats supported aid to the Contras, applauded President Reagan's 'Evil Empire' rhetoric, and offered their support to those militarists calling for missile defense and rejecting arms control negotiations. While the neoliberals foresaw an end to the Cold War, the DLC still viewed the Soviet Union as an unmitigated threat."[21]

Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute and one of the main architects of the DLC agenda, argued in a June 22, 2006 article for The Democratic Strategist that Democrats had to "put security first" in order to seize ground from Republicans. To "close the national security confidence gap that has dogged them since the era of Vietnam protests," wrote Marshall, Democrats must reclaim "the party's venerable tradition of muscular liberalism—the Truman-Kennedy legacy that helped America win the Cold War."[22]

Despite the DLC's efforts to, as Barry puts it, "subsume all Democrats under its ideological umbrella," many of the Democratic Party's progressive voices, including former Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), resisted associating themselves with the group. During his presidential election campaign, Howard Dean called the DLC "the Republican wing of the Democratic Party," prompting strong criticism from many Democratic leaders, including Lieberman, who said that Dean's criticism "essentially pushes Bill Clinton out of the Democratic Party" along with "hundreds of governors and local officials" who consider themselves part of the New Democrat movement.[23]


Please note: IPS Right Web neither represents nor endorses any of the individuals or groups profiled on this site.