The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
How Lieberman got stuck in ‘the Big Muddy’
When I think of former U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, who died last week at the age of 82, I think of Pete Seeger’s song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.”
For those of you under 60, the popular Vietnam-era ballad, based on a true story, tells of an army lieutenant who foolishly leads his men into a river and ignores repeated warnings that the water is getting too deep.
“We were waist deep in the big muddy, and the big fool said to push on,” the chorus goes.
Lieberman was the lieutenant, and the river he helped lead America into was the Iraq War. Whether he would admit it or not, the ensuing catastrophe is his greatest legacy. His stubborn insistence on entering that river and pushing on even as the water covered our heads left tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead, injured and haunted by PTSD, the Middle East badly fractured, America’s prestige, power and moral standing severely diminished, Russia, China and Iran empowered and the country bitterly divided.
Even worse, Lieberman never admitted he’d been wrong or took responsibility for the catastrophe he helped create. As recently as 2021, he gave a TV interview in which he continued to defend the war, even going so far as to insist that Iraq and the world were better off for it.
Fallout from the Iraq War wasn’t confined to foreign policy. Nothing with the possible exception of the 2008 Financial Crisis undermined Americans’ faith and trust in their government and elected leaders more than the disaster in Iraq. That the casus belli for the war — Saddam Hussein’s supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction — turned out to be false left many Americans feeling understandably angry, misled and used. Those feelings played a key role in the rise of Donald Trump and MAGA, and they reverberate to this day. The Iraq War is a major driver of the new isolationism that has all but taken over the GOP and is threatening to cut off aid to Ukraine as it desperately fends off Russia’s unprovoked invasion and pull us out of NATO.
This too is part of Joe Lieberman’s legacy.
Joe would disagree. He would say his legacy is bipartisanship. But he had an odd definition of bipartisan. Starting around 9/11, it usually meant giving in to whatever George W. Bush and his fellow Republicans wanted. One of the most egregious non-Iraq examples of such behavior was his initial receptiveness to W’s harebrained scheme to privatize Social Security, a position he only backed away from after a tsunami of angry criticism and talk of a primary challenge.
That challenge, driven primarily by his stubborn refusal to acknowledge the failure in Iraq, came anyway and led to his 2006 primary defeat. After he managed to win reelection as an independent, his fetishization of bipartisanship only grew more extreme and took on a new edge. Proclaiming himself “liberated,” he seemed to take an almost boyish glee in poking his finger in the eye of his former party and twisting it, speaking at the 2008 Republican National Convention and singlehandedly killing Obamacare’s Public Option — all in the name of bipartisanship.
It was not a good look, and Connecticut’s voters soon soured on it. By 2010, his approval rating had tanked into the low 30s, and he retired in 2012.
In his final years, Joe returned to the national stage as a leader of No Labels, which seeks to nominate a moderate third party presidential ticket this year. It immediately became clear he’d learned nothing. Polling universally showed No Labels had zero chance of winning and would almost certainly tip the election to Trump, an outcome Lieberman acknowledged would be catastrophic. Yet he soldiered on, insisting against all evidence that the magic elixir of bipartisanship would at some point miraculously overcome the toxicity of Trump-era American politics and carry the day.
Facing another rising river, Joe couldn’t wait to plunge back in.
In closing, let me say that I don’t think Joe Lieberman was a bad man. The times I interviewed him as a reporter he was always sunny, engaged, thoughtful, gracious and, unlike many politicians, willing to answer questions instead of dodge them. I have no doubt that he loved this country and sincerely believed he was doing the right thing. I think he did a lot of good as attorney general and earlier in his Senate career. But that doesn’t excuse his huge post-2000 errors, mistakes that ultimately cost him his Senate seat, undermined his reputation and helped send America careening into a ditch.
How did Joe, once one of Connecticut’s most popular and respected elected officials, go so wrong? I didn’t know him well enough to render an opinion. But if one thread ran through the second half of his career, it was his failure to acknowledge reality and listen to criticism.
In the end, Lieberman’s story is a tragedy for both him and the nation, a grim warning of just how badly things can go when you refuse to face facts, admit mistakes and change course. In these trying times, it’s a lesson all of us, especially our elected officials, should take to heart.