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Celerity

(44,478 posts) Fri Feb 9, 2024, 02:38 AM Feb 2024

What Election Is Joe Lieberman Watching?

flashback.................................................

The centrist fantasies of his glib, nonpartisan No Labels group aren’t the cure for today’s angry politics. They’re the target.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/04/no-labels-centrist-fantasies-are-the-problem-not-the-solution.html

Former Sen. Joe Lieberman, co-chairman of the nonpartisan “problem-solving” advocacy group No Labels, has a novel theory of what we’re seeing this campaign. “Take a look at the two most interesting, surprising candidacies of the presidential year,” he said Thursday at an event celebrating the release of No Labels’ “policy playbook” for the 2016 election. “They want people to do something different. The best politics may be unconventional politics.” Lieberman, unconventionally, was explaining why he believes the moment is ripe for entitlement reform.

Perhaps No Labels has been watching a different election. Anger and the appetite for breaking the status quo in Washington are absolutely the gusts lifting the campaigns of Donald Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders. But working people across the country are not packing these rallies to demand the sort of technocratic dickering No Labels offers in its new 60-point policy platform, introduced Thursday at a luncheon in Washington’s luxury Mayflower Hotel. There has been bipartisan energy linking the anti-establishment bases of both parties this year, which theoretically should please No Labels. That energy, however, has been populist and directed at the sort of Washington elites whom they no longer trust to represent their interests. For today’s discontented voters, the sort of ballroom-luncheon centrism practiced for so long by the likes of Lieberman is more the target than the solution.

No Labels was founded in 2010 as a group comprising centrist Democrats and Republicans to counteract the entrenched gridlock that had begun to define the Obama era. (Another purpose: to offer sinecures to figures like co-chairmen Lieberman and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, whose political careers were ended due to lack of popularity within their respective political parties.) A cursory glance at the news suggests that such gridlock still exists six years later and shows little sign of abating, ever.

No Labels aspires to change all that through its 2016 election project, the National Strategic Agenda, a name clearly devised without much thought to its acronym. On Thursday, the nonprofit released a list of centrist policy proposals that it believes the next president and Congress, whether Democratic or Republican, can implement. It employed one gimmick that it hopes will critic-proof its proposals: A pollster tested out each idea under consideration, and the final list of 60 ideas includes only those that earned a majority of support from Democrats, Republicans, and independents.

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