A reminder to paying subscribers — our book club on C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity is tonight at 8 PM Eastern. Expect a Zoom invitation in your inboxes late this afternoon.
It is impossible for me to think of an American in politics who lived a life as full of hope as Joe Lieberman. Long past the point where all others would have given up and thrown their hands in the air in frustration, Lieberman was making the case even to the end for an end to partisan warfare, and a willingness to work across party lines to make a difference for the American people. Just last week he was out in public pushing for the No Labels ticket — a thorn in the side of both major parties — while criticizing Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer over his speech on Israel. Joe was always evenhanded in his critiques — he didn’t know how to do it any other way.
His time in the Senate often saw him navigating through whirlwinds on either side, as partisans became increasingly frustrated with his resolve that tested members in both parties and ensured no one would get everything they wanted. One week the left side of the editorial pages would love him. The next, he was a menace to progress who should be tossed from the Democratic caucus. He paid it no mind.
The point was what he believed in his conscience was right — not who he worked with to get there. And he was willing to work with anyone toward that end. People thought of him as a centrist. But the truth was he would take positions on the left and on the right — he wasn’t just a weathervane, muddling along like a politician who lacks a spine. He just believed the right thing was the right thing, and believed pursuing that for the country was the highest aim.
In Lieberman’s book, In Praise of Public Life, in which he argues that the solution to lack of trust in government is for more everyday people to get involved in our politics, his prologue opens:
There are times, now and then, when my mother will read something critical about me in the newspapers, or she’ll hear the fatigue in my voice during an evening phone conversation from my home in Washington to hers in Connecticut.
“Sweetheart,” she’ll say, in that voice I’ve heard all my life, “do you really need this?”
I laugh and answer, “Yes, Mom, I really do need this. I love it.”
He really did love it. I know this because I got to know Joe Lieberman as a politician before I was fortunate enough to know him as a friend. Some of my fondest memories of him are sitting outside at dusk in Arizona, at the end of the dinner table with John McCain, debating a point of foreign or domestic policy for hours as others drifted away in discussions that were marked by disagreement, not disrespect, but with a fair bit of ball-busting and laughter along the way.
When John died, Joe and his wife Hadassah were there for us and our family at every turn. They supported us in every small thing that matters through the death of a towering figure who also happens to be a beloved father, mentor and a symbol for so many. And whenever the opportunity arose to get together in New York, it would be a chance to reminisce, but also to think about the future of the country — a future about which Joe was always hopeful.
It’s a strange thing what happened after the fractious controversy of the 2000 election. For Al Gore, it seemed to break him. For Joe, it was as if he had an irrepressible quality to move forward without regret. He never let politics poison him. He always thought it was worth doing. Again, from In Praise of Public Life:
The summary of our aspirations was in the Hebrew phrase tikkun olam, which is translated “to improve the world,” or “to repair the world,” or more boldly “to complete the creation which God began.” In any translation, this concept of tikkun olam presumes the inherent but unfulfilled goodness of people and requires action for the benefit of the community. It accepts our imperfections and concludes that we, as individuals and as a society, are constantly in the process of improving and becoming complete. Each of us has the opportunity and responsibility to advance that process both within ourselves and within the wider world around us. As Rabbi Tarfon says in the Talmud, “The day is short and there is much work to be done. You are not required to complete the work yourself, but you cannot withdraw from it either.”
We will miss Joe Lieberman’s voice of reason in a fractious age. But if we are about coming together, about becoming complete, we will need more people who heed what he had to say. RIP.
RFK’s Running Mate Bankshot
Welcome to Thunderdome, where this week we have the first named Vice Presidential candidate from a 2024 challenger — Nicole Shanahan, who I know little about outside of this glossy profile in People magazine. Forget the child of immigrants rags to riches story or any of that stuff. On paper she seems like an extremely wealthy progressive California attorney with all the various interests of such a type — yoga, natural living, meeting your third spouse at Burning Man and so on. But none of that matters, and none of it will matter — which is why this choice strikes me as potentially ingenious on the part of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Understand this: No one, absolutely no one, votes for a president based on their vice presidential candidate. No one voted for Joe because of Kamala, Trump because of Pence, Obama because of Joe, or George W. because of Cheney, and on and on. Voters just don’t think that way. A vice president can only become a drag, they’re never a reason to vote for the guy at the top. Political obsessives overthink this. And while I am a bit surprised that RFK didn’t choose the type I assumed he would — a Rust Belt type that would double down on his message to the working class — the more you think about it, the more this move makes sense.
Imagine if instead of being a warm bucket of spit, a vice president was a human treasure chest? Because that’s what this California woman looks like to me.
Above all, RFK’s campaign still needs ballot access — while the campaign claims to have met signature requirements in multiple swing states, it is only officially on the Utah ballot at the moment — and will have to fight the Democratic legal machine tooth and claw to get it. The capability to instantly inject $200 million into that effort is a potential game changer.
Imagine if this RFK State of the Union ad or excerpts of it was playing round the clock on YouTube, and you get the idea. There’s no need to run things through clunky Super PACs — the funding is coming from inside the house! And while naming someone this progressive may preclude RFK’s nascent attempt to reach out to the Libertarian Party, that’s hardly a sure thing. Shanahan’s money is a sure thing, and for someone who’s already the highest rated candidate in personal approval, it could be the difference between a candidacy that matters and one that doesn’t.
Nearly all the analysis of RFK’s effect as a third party candidate has been through the lens of the two major parties, and which side he takes more from. Statistically, most polling shows it’s almost even, with a slightly higher number coming from Democrats disappointed in Biden than from anti-Trump Republicans. In the latest Fox News poll, a Trump-Biden head to head shows Trump with a 5 point lead. When you add third party candidates into the picture, it once again shows Trump with a five point lead.
Part of what’s driving this is that RFK’s appeal is less about taking away die hard partisans from backing their party leader — it’s about speaking to disaffected voters, people who’ve dropped out of the political scene for one reason or another. Consider this RFK voter from a piece in today’s Politico:
[Burke] Cahill, 50, is a formerly reliable Democratic voter who was alienated by what he sees as a leftward drift into policies he can’t abide — like a Covid-19 vaccine mandate that almost cost him his firefighting job. On Tuesday, he got up early, driving nearly two hours from the Sacramento area to Oakland, just so he could witness — in person — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announcing his running mate. (That would be attorney/philanthropist/documentary producer/fellow former Democrat Nicole Shanahan.) As Cahill sees it, Kennedy’s fierce independence from a sclerotic two-party system is just what the country needs.
Kennedy, he tells me as he heads into a rally for RFK Jr., has what it takes to heal the partisan wounds bedeviling the nation. His relatives, on the other hand, aren’t convinced. To the contrary. The Cahills are distantly related to the Kennedys and Cahill says he “grew up holding the Kennedy family as royalty.” His embrace of a RFK Jr., a passionate anti-vaxxer at odds with his own family, has opened a rift.
“They’re old-school Democrats, and they think they’re being loyal,” Cahill says of his family. “This can’t even be talked about without it being contentious.”
And then there’s this:
On the way in, Delane Dale, a quality assurance director from San Jose, fretted about Kennedy aiding Trump “by taking votes from Biden” and wondered about the family’s transformation. She was driven there by a form of morbid curiosity. “I love the Kennedys,” she says. “What happened to this guy?”
She and her partner had shown up to heckle Kennedy. But after the rally, Dale says they’ve had something of a change of heart: They were impressed by both by RFK Jr. and what his surrogates have to say.
The threat of a second Trump term “still scares me,” Dale says. But she listened when Kennedy and Shanahan talked about contaminated food and soil. Pandemic shutdowns had exacted a toll on her family and a college-aged son.
Maybe she was open to voting Kennedy after all.
“I’m thinking about it,” Dale says. “Trump’s terrifying. But at the same time, I learned a lot.”
Thanks to the Shanahan pick, RFK looks to have a lot more people learning about him in the coming months. For both the major candidates, that could spell chaos.
The big fault line in politics: culture, not class
Nate Silver writes in his (strongly recommended) Substack:
Again, this is preliminary — it’s only March. But the polls show that Biden’s decline relative to 2020 is entirely among voters making $50K or less. He’s doing just as well as in 2020 with the $100K+ group and roughly as well among the middle class.
Could that be a hangover from inflation? Perhaps. Inflation is generally thought to hit the poor harder, in part because the wealthy are more likely to have net worth in real estate (which can be an inflation pass-through if housing prices are rising with everything else) or the stock market (also something of an inflation hedge, although that story is more complicated). Whether the most recent bout of inflation during Biden’s term disproportionately affected the poor is less clear, however.
But all of that assumes that economic voting is a thing when it may have become less of one. Certainly, class politics have become trickier to navigate for Democrats. They represent the cultural and intellectual elite, which isn’t entirely new; Hollywood and academia have long been left-coded. But they are also increasingly the party of the economic elite, if only because the coattails of educational polarization drag some high-income earners into the Democratic coalition.
Sometimes this makes for strange bedfellows. Obama’s rise was correlated with the rise of Silicon Valley and the often very wealthy tech elite. That relationship is becoming rocky; Silicon Valley elites — by which I mean VCs and founders, not rank-and-file tech workers — are sour with Democrats over what I call Social Justice Leftism but everyone else calls wokeness. I spoke with enough Silicon Valley types for my forthcoming book to believe those concerns are sincere — however, cultural issues can also be a convenient scapegoat because it’s in the economic interests of these Silicon Valley leaders to vote Republican for lower taxes and fewer regulations on business.
You can tell something of the same story for finance. The finance guys I know are liberal-ish on social issues, but it doesn’t take that much to push them into complaints about high taxes, how the private schools they’re sending their kids to have become too left-wing, and so on. Now, finance and tech may not cost Democrats all that many votes, or at least not outside of California, Connecticut and New York. But they exert pressure on the party through their financial and cultural influence.
Meanwhile, some of the policies that Democrats advocate for benefit the managerial and professional class more than the working poor. Student loan debt cancellation by definition helped Democrats’ college-educated coalition, but it was actually somewhat economically regressive. The SALT tax deduction that suburban Democrats in high-tax states advocate for is highly regressive, meanwhile. COVID lockdowns are a more subtle example; work-from-home benefitted the laptop class more than essential workers or small-business owners.
Don’t get me wrong; if I were a poor person voting solely out of economic interest, I’d vote for Biden and be thankful for the strong labor market recovery. And I’d be carefully tracking Republican efforts to cut Medicare and Social Security.
But some of the other things I’d want, like a public option for health care, have been low priorities for the administration. And some things about Biden’s messaging would turn me off, like the emphasis on Trump, Trump, Trump. In Biden’s re-election kickoff speech in January, he mentioned “democracy” 31 times and Social Security zero times. Personally, I’m somewhat persuaded by the “democracy is on the ballot” stuff or at least some diluted version of it. But I’m not the sort of voter Biden needs to win over. It’s messaging targeted at the educated classes, not the working class.
Class depolarization also makes it harder for either party to tout its economic accomplishments. Take a look at (or read the transcript of) Reagan’s 1984 convention speech.
Reagan is very focused on a single message here, which I’ll paraphrase as follows: Democrats may say they’re the party of the working class, but look at the scoreboard — it’s actually Republican policies that are lifting the economy up.
That’s a powerful message, because it ran parallel to what was then a prominent political fault line between the rich (Republican) and the poor (Democrats). Reagan was saying: I’m the guy for people like you. It cleverly exploited class politics. And it worked: Reagan won 26 percent (!) of Democrats in 1984. Meanwhile, when the economy performed well during a Democratic presidency, a Democratic nominee could say the same thing: I’m the guy for people like you, and the condition of the economy proves it. It was economics as culture wars, not just for its own sake.
With class lines muddled, it’s harder to make that argument. Republicans are the party of rich guys in manufacturing, fossil fuels and real estate, but Democrats are the party of rich guys on Wall Street, and in Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Republicans are the party of the white working class, but Democrats are the party of the Black and Hispanic working class. The parties can bend their pitch to the contours of this more complicated fault zone. But “it’s the economy, stupid” is no longer as much of a straight line through it.
One more thing
There is something deeply ironic about the reaction from the resistance left to the news that a California judge has ruled in favor of attorney John Eastman's disbarment. People who hate Trump world obviously greeted the news with glee, but the actual effect could be to boost Donald Trump's chances of avoiding legal consequences. How can you penalize him when he's the client getting terrible advice from his attorney, advice that he followed because he trusted said attorney? The lawfare efforts to go after the former president always seem to turn inward on themselves and tie the resistance into knots -- it's one of Trump's most consistent super powers.
Feature
Items of Interest
Foreign
Fears grow for families of Americans held in Russia.
Gordon Sondland now lobbying for Ukraine.
What the ISIS attack means for Russia and Afghanistan.
Domestic
MTG’s play at Johnson ouster could prove chaotic.
Insurers face record $3 billion bill for Baltimore bridge collapse.
Most Americans now favor legalizing marijuana.
How Oregon drug decriminalization failed.
Maryland Democratic Senate primary heats up.
Bob Good on the rocks with Trump, conference.
Pennsylvania voters must now date their ballots.
Ritzy DC neighborhood wracked with more crime.
Phetasy on her first year in Texas.
Lawfare
Hunter Biden’s bid to dismiss tax case meets skepticism.
Trump falsely claims daughter of judge in hush money trial made posting.
2024
Byron York on the latest Fox News poll.
Fearing a legacy-breaking loss, Obama and Clinton back Biden.
The ex-presidents come to Biden’s aid.
Chris Christie rules out running with No Labels.
RNC struggling with staffing in swing states.
Media
Karli Kloss plans to relaunch LIFE magazine.
Ronna McDaniel and the newsroom power shift.
Why the RNC should ignore NBC News now.
McDaniel seeks windfall from NBC fallout.
How misinformation experts pave the way for censorship.
Joe Scarborough attacks Fox women: “playing with Barbies.”
Health
Puerto Rico declares an epidemic after dengue cases spike.
Ephemera
The Ringer profiles Ian Eagle.
More questions about Shohei Ohtani’s financial decisions.
Revisiting the firing of Melissa Barrera.
Murray: In defense of forgiveness.
Quote
“In the old days, when there was less education and discussion, perhaps it was possible to get on with a very few simple ideas about God. But it is not so now. Everyone reads, everyone hears things discussed. Consequently, if you do not listen to Theology, that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong ones — bad, muddled, out-of-date ideas. For a great many of the ideas about God which are trotted out as novelties to-day are simply the ones which real Theologians tried centuries ago and rejected.”
— C.S. Lewis