Former Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman passed away due to a fall. He was the chair of the “No Labels” Party. Many in the media have described Lieberman as a centrist. There certainly is a lot of rhetoric that seems to support such an argument. But there’s another way to evaluate that. We could also look at Lieberman’s voting record, as rated by a series of interest groups.
In this analysis, I look at whether or not the politician in question uses centrist language. Additionally, I analyzed how others in the media described this particular politician, by ideology. Then, I will examine the voting record of the political figure in question, as rated by interest groups on a number of issues. This will help us determine whether or not the rhetoric matches the reality.
In 2021, Senator Joe Lieberman wrote The Centrist Solution: How we made government work and can make it work again. In the book’s description “In the telling, Senator Lieberman extracts clear lessons and proven methods of centrist collaboration that can carry us forward after years of partisan warfare and legislative inaction. The centrist solution leads to government truly of the people, by the people, and for the people―a citizenry looking for solutions, not extremist standoffs.”
In describing the late Senator Lieberman, there were 279,000 Google hits on the label “Lieberman +Centrist.” News sites claiming Lieberman was a centrist include the Boston Globe, NPR, CNN, Politico, and CBS. That contrasts with Google mentions of “Lieberman +Liberal” which were 316 in number, such as Bloomberg News, which claimed Lieberman shifted from being liberal to centrist. And Lieberman went on to serve as the chair of the “No Labels” party, seeking a “centrist” candidate or pair of them to run for president and vice-president, as Andrew Solender with Axios reports.
Others believe Lieberman was a centrist because he lost the Democratic Party nomination for the U.S. Senate in his 2006 reelection bid by a progressive candidate, Ned Lamont (currently the Connecticut Governor). Yet Lieberman won another term that year, as an independent candidate, fueling the perception of him as a centrist, as PBS documents. Yet it is telling that Lieberman still chose to caucus with the Democratic Party for the rest of his career in the Senate, also noted by PBS.
The next part of the equation is to evaluate Lieberman’s voting record. As Tom Curry wrote in NBC News “While some Democrats see Lieberman as a conservative, the conservatives themselves don’t. After all, Lieberman is decidedly liberal on gay rights — getting an 88 out of 100 rating from the Human Rights Campaign, the gay rights advocacy group, and an endorsement from the League of Conservation Voters, who called him “a top environmental leader in Congress, fighting every day for the environment, health, and quality of life of Connecticut families.” The American Conservative Union (ACU), a leading right-wing vetting group, gives Lieberman a low 17 out of 100 lifetime conservative rating, putting him in the same ACU basement as Sen. Joe Biden, D- Del. and Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada.”
It’s worth noting that this article was written in 2006, before Biden was nominated for Vice-President in 2008, or elected president in 2020. My own research in the magazine The Observer in 2019 shows that Biden’s voting record was not too different from Lieberman’s lifetime ACU voting rating.
To further examine former Senator Lieberman’s voting record, I looked at the Congressional voting scores from other groups, as researched by progressive blogger Matt Smith in 2006. Liberal groups like the Americans for Democratic Action (80), the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (86), the American Civil Liberties Union (83), the National Organization of Women (75), NAACP (88), the League of United Latin American Citizens (100), NARAL (75), Planned Parenthood, and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence (90). Conservative groups like the Christian Coalition (0), National Right-to-Life (0), and the NRA (F), gave Lieberman very low ratings for his votes.
Was Senator Lieberman lying in his 2021 book? No. On a number of occasions, which Senator Lieberman writes about in his book, he did work across party lines, with fellow Democrats and Republicans, to shed traditional ideological labels and forge a compromise. These came on a variety of issues, ranging from The Clean Air Act of 1990, The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 and the repeal of the anti-gay “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.
The fact that Senator Lieberman and other Congressional Democrats worked with House and Senate Republicans, and the fact that he was Democratic Party nominee Al Gore’s running mate in 2000 and was seriously considered for vice-president by the Republican Party nominee John McCain in 2008, led many in the media to think of him as a centrist. But evidence from his voting record shows he was a mainstream Democrat, who put aside his liberal ideology to work with the GOP on a bill.
John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia. His views are his own. He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu. His Twitter account is JohnTures2.