August 4, 2006
Joe Lieberman and Jacob Javits Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:25 PM EST If the polls are to be believed, next Tuesday something extraordinary is going to happen. Joe Lieberman, the three-term United States senator from Connecticut and one-time Democratic vice-presidential nominee, will lose his primary bid for a fourth term. By a wide margin. According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, Lieberman now trails his opponent, the businessman Ned Lamont, by 54 to 41 percent. The senator has indicated that he is prepared to run as an independent in the November election should he lose next Tuesday, thus setting the scene for a three-way race between Lieberman, Lamont, and a little-know Republican nominee. Much has been written about this race. Lieberman’s trouble owes to a multitude of reasons, including his unflinching support for the unpopular war in Iraq and his rhetorical attacks on critics of the war, whom he accused of undermining the military effort; his vote for cloture on Samuel Alito’s Senate confirmation (notwithstanding his subsequent vote against Alito); his hemming-and-hawing on Social Security privatization; his cozy relationship with the financial-services and insurance industries; his vote for cloture on the Bush administration’s bankruptcy bill (though, again, he subsequently voted against the bill); and his holier-than-thou posturing on cultural and social questions, which might play well among exurban evangelicals who tend to vote Republican, but which doesn’t sit well with Connecticut’s Democratic loyalists. And it hasn’t helped his cause a bit that he announced his intention to run as an independent should he lose the party’s nomination, while Lamont has promised to remain loyal to whatever ticket the primary voters choose. There are several historical parallels here, the most recent of which is New York’s 1980 U.S. Senate election, in which Republican primary voters booted four-term Senator Jacob Javits for a little-known Long Island politician, Alfonse D’Amato. Javits, who was extremely liberal and generally voted with the Democratic majority on most important domestic and foreign policy questions, chose to run on the Liberal party line, thus setting up a three-way race that included the Democratic nominee, Elizabeth Holtzman. Ultimately, Javits ran an anemic, defeatist campaign and polled only 600,000 votes. D’Amato won the state by about a margin of about 130,000. The bulk of Javits’s voters would surely have backed Holtzman had the senator dropped out of the race. Instead, he gave into pride, stuck it out, and helped send a very conservative Republican to Washington. It was a sad ending to an otherwise distinguished career. Democrats are similarly concerned that Lieberman’s independent candidacy might split the Democratic vote and deliver a safe Democratic seat to the Republicans. In other words, New York all over again. This seems unlikely. Lieberman is, and Javits was, a career politician, that rare breed of human being that starts running for office at 25 and never stops. But there the comparison ends. Lieberman is still in the prime of his career and will surely mount a much more aggressive challenge than did Javits, who had lost much of the fire in his belly by 1980. The Republican candidate is an unknown and nowhere near as strong as Liz Holtzman was in 1980. So the race is more likely to come down to a squeaker between Lieberman and Lamont, come November. However things shake out, Tuesday is looking like a sad day for Joe Lieberman, just as it was for Jacob Javits in the fall of 1980, when he lost his primary. Stay tuned for the results.
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