Troubled Waters
Caldwell, Christopher
Troubled Waters Joe Lieberman’s Maxine problem. BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL Los Angeles JESSE JACKSON was just minutes into his address to the Democratic convention last Tuesday night when a...
...But the mostly white delegation didn’t get it...
...Lieberman’s abject appeals secured a promise from Waters to campaign with him, but showed him to be a moderate in style only—wholly available to the race-counting left in substance...
...This is exactly what Alexis Herman was doing in Los Angeles when she announced that Joseph Lieberman’s positions, because of his weak “understanding,” were no reflection of what Joseph Lieberman believes...
...He said he hadn’t realized that 209 would do away with affirmative action...
...And there was scandalfanning Schadenfreude from the press, queasy because Waters appeals to the same angry inner-city constituents as Louis Farrakhan, the country’s most conspicuous anti-Semite...
...But since it rests on classic Democratic politics, it undercuts Gore’s claims that Lieberman is a “different kind of Democrat...
...Treating it as an ‘ethnic breakthrough’ was probably unnecessary, and even wrong, given the heights Jews have already reached in politics...
...While Waters has no record of specific hostility to Jews, early press reports portrayed the confrontation in strictly racial terms...
...But he gave Brazile a total pass by pronouncing her words meaningless: He issued a statement that “the comments of Donna Brazile were not a reflection of what the Gore campaign is doing...
...Sending Alexis Herman and Eleanor Holmes Norton to help everyone live with a pick he’d already made is not pandering, it’s the opposite...
...Lieberman has often won in battles with the party’s left, but this week’s events have shed light on just how “stylistic” those victories were...
...He was late, and he couldn’t very well say, Any black people want these...
...delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton and labor secretary Alexis Herman to “sell” Lieberman to their fellow blacks...
...Herman’s claim was that Lieberman had backed Proposition 209 because he hadn’t “understood” it...
...If Gore had picked Paul Wellstone—to take someone on her wing of the party—you wouldn’t have heard from her...
...He was carrying a pile of cardboard made-for-TV placards that said “African Americans for GoreLieberman...
...Last Tuesday, Lieberman went before the DNC’s Black Caucus and (metaphorically) signed the confession Herman had prepared for him...
...BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL Los Angeles JESSE JACKSON was just minutes into his address to the Democratic convention last Tuesday night when a long-haired, white Democratic operative started rushing up and down the aisles of the California delegation...
...The long-term damage from the controversy may be not to blackJewish relations but to the Democrats’ centrist image...
...No matter: “I have supported affirmative action,” he told the Black Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Confusion about who speaks for black voters in the Democratic party was, to the Gore campaign’s chagrin, the story that dominated the first two days of the convention...
...Back then, Lieberman played today’s Waters, and Brazile played Lieberman...
...At the Democratic convention, Lieberman made a pact to restore the strategy he once so eloquently condemned...
...Lieberman’s cease-fire with Brazile was strange behavior for the head of the DLC, which reacted to the Four Pillars gaffe by warning that Brazile’s “ ‘base constituency group’ strategy was central to the failed Democratic presidential campaigns of the 1980s...
...Most in the conservative Democratic Leadership Council considered Brazile’s remark a swing-voterrepelling catastrophe, but it was Lieberman who as DLC chairman took the hardest line, appearing on television and radio over the next few days to denounce it...
...This may not have been fair, according to one longtime liberal Senate staffer, but it was Gore’s fault...
...Caucus, “I do support affirmative action, and I will support affirmative action...
...What you’re seeing about Maxine is ideological, not ethnic,” says Cal State Fullerton political scientist Raphael Sonenshein, a longtime top aide to Waters and author of Politics in Black and White (a study of how black-Jewish coalitions provided the power base for L.A...
...mayor Tom Bradley...
...For instance, the Waters-Lieberman spat is a mirror image of the giveandtake last November between Lieberman and Gore-campaign manager Donna Brazile...
...The rationale Sonenshein lays out is an honorable one...
...L.A.’s inner-city congresswoman Maxine Waters said on convention eve that she was not sure she could support Joe Lieberman as vice president, largely because he’d supported California’s anti-affirmativeaction Proposition 209 in 1996...
...Oh, no, she was only running it...
...Brazile announced that the Democratic party had “four pillars”— women, blacks, labor, and minorities...
...Those are activist groups, but they don’t constitute the Democratic party,” he said, “and they certainly don’t constitute a majority of the country...
...There were differences on the issues between Waters and Lieberman, but the public had no way of knowing that until the story had already run for 48 hours...
...As a result, the signs wound up being waved by white schoolteachers from Pacific Palisades and white firemen from Fresno...
...But back then, Lieberman was such a scathing critic of preferences that he even received a dressing-down from Jesse Jackson...
...So he handed them to the delegates on the aisle and asked them to pass them down the row...
...Reactions were sudden and strong...
...By the time Gore sent Norton and Herman out as emissaries, he had basically tutored American voters to view the response as a race-obsessed Democratic party sending two blacks to calm down other blacks who were mad about a Jew...
...The way the Lieberman pick was handled by Gore set the stage for this,” he says...
...There was panic in the Gore campaign, which set up a “task force” under D.C...
...Pandering is what used to happen when a candidate sent aides out to meet Mayor Daley before the pick, and waited for his thumbs-up...
...Sonenshein thinks the Waters-Lieberman imbroglio is the kind of coalition-firming difficulty Democrats encounter in every race, and even thinks Gore handled it in a more gutsy way than his predecessors would have...
Vol. 5 • August 2000 • No. 47
