What will U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman do in ‘retirement,’ now that he has announced that he won’t run for reelection in Connecticut?
He won’t be a newspaper columnist; that is the road to financial and psychological ruin. The murky world of Washington lobbyists is certainly open to him, but he doesn’t really have the back-slapping personality for such stuff.
An overtly political appointment would be complicated by Joe’s ‘independent’ status of late, which won him reelection last time around, but reinforced the complex nature of his political identity.
This is Joe Lieberman, Al Gore’s vice presidential running mate; who sort of fell in love with Republican John McCain’s presidential run; who is more hawkish on defense than many Democrats; who confounded both sides when he and McCain cooked up a cap-and-trade carbon swap plan that was more market-oriented than the Democrats would have preferred, but still made most conservative Republicans run from the room, screaming.
The ‘think tank’ route may be a way to go. The American Enterprise Institute has a conservative flavor and is a happy home for many scholars with a Neocon enthusiasm for strong national defense. The Heritage Foundation is the blue-ribbon conservative mainstream — an outfit that tends to avoid social issues, which would be fine for Joe. Brookings is more liberal, but veers toward middle ground on some regulatory and urban affairs issues.
The few super-liberal outfits wouldn’t invite Joe in for a cup of coffee. He isn’t Libertarian enough for the Cato Institute; despite the left-wing criticism, Joe remains reasonably comfortable with the notion that we are all in need of a big group hug from the government.
Joe will certainly write another book or two; he enjoys that — and he might be able to snare a scholar-in-residence thing at Yale or somewhere similarly snobby.
And yet, none of this seems quite right. Lieberman needs that perfect niche where he can infuriate almost everyone, with a reasonable, coherent argument that makes folks squirm in their seats.
Aha! There is such an issue, close to Joe’s heart and sufficiently prickly as to keep him on the front pages for the rest of his days. Joe Lieberman is a member of a relatively small cult of Democrats (Oh, get over it. He’s a Democrat.) that ardently support school vouchers; ‘educational choice’; a market-mechanism ticket-out-of-town for kids stuck in hideous public schools.
Most of his Democratic pals run from the issue. The teachers’ unions don’t want market-oriented competition. Most Republicans don’t think the issue has legs in comfortable GOP suburbs where the schools are just fine.
Joe has been a voucher supporter for years; he continues to be a key player in defending the Washington, D.C. voucher program from death sentences handed down by the Congressional Democrats and the Obama White House. Needless to say, Obama didn’t send his kids to the D.C. public schools; he could afford that ‘choice’ without any voucher at all.
Joe Lieberman: Voucher Czar. He could take over one of the existing school-choice advocacy groups, or, he could entice one of the multi-billionaires who enjoy scattering money all over the educational landscape to crank up a new initiative for vouchers.
During his tenure as Al Gore’s running mate, Lieberman had to promise to keep his mouth shut about vouchers, because liberal Democrats don’t get elected by making teachers’ unions angry.
But Joe’s back in the saddle again. The last week of January was ‘National School Choice Week,’ endorsed by the likes of Bill Cosby and John McCain and former Florida governor Jeb Bush. And, of course, Joe Lieberman.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
