Earlier positions dog running mate

By Walter V. Robinson and Yvonne Abraham, Globe Staff, 8/16/2000

OS ANGELES - It was a bold stroke for the instinctively cautious Al Gore: Pick a running mate from the party's conservative center, electrify the country by putting the first Jewish American on a national ticket, and hope that the decision will lure crucial swing voters to the Democrats.

Yesterday, the decision's downside was also on display.

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, who will be nominated for vice president tonight, spent an hour seeking to mollify a critical Democratic constituency, black voters, who were concerned about his 1995 statements that affirmative action programs ought to be scrapped.

Lieberman, distinctive in the Senate for his single-minded independence and best known to the country for his early condemnation of President Clinton's sexual affair, assured the party's most influential black officials that he did not really mean it. They left saying they felt reassured.

If the session solved one problem, it underscored another for Gore and his running mate. The very ideological iconoclasm that has so distinguished Lieberman, and made him a potential draw for the middle-of-the-road voters who will decide the election, has eroded. Lieberman has hardly morphed into another Gore. But in adjusting to his new role, he has publicly disavowed some of his more conservative positions.

To be sure, few voters will look past Gore and his GOP opponent, Texas Governor George W. Bush, when they choose the next president. Nonetheless, some Democrats fear that Lieberman's political strengths as Gore's ticket mate may expose vulnerabilities as well.

To win, Gore must tout the successes of the Clinton-Gore years, but he will do so standing beside the man who is best known for his condemnation of the tawdriest moments of Clinton's presidency, including Gore's own fund-raising excesses in 1995 and 1996.

And as Lieberman has retreated from his support for school voucher experiments and for allowing taxpayers to supplement their retirement savings by investing part of their payroll taxes, Republicans have found an avenue of attack.

The Bush campaign has spent much of the nine days since Lieberman was tapped by Gore arguing, sometimes hyperbolically, that Lieberman shares more with Bush than with Gore on several major issues.

Lieberman's retrenchment on some issues is nothing new for vice presidential nominees. In 1980, for example, Bush's father was accused of placing his manhood in a blind trust for the compromises he made to become Ronald Reagan's running mate. The elder Bush disavowed his view that Ronald Reagan's economic plan amounted to ''voodoo economics.'' And Bush, who had favored abortion rights, became a staunch opponent of abortion.

In both parties, the most successful politicians are most often the easiest to pigeonhole. Not so Lieberman. On some issues, like his support for the environment and abortion, he is among the Senate's most ardent liberals. On others, like school vouchers, welfare reform, and Social Security reform, he has sometimes voted with the Republican majority.

In hindsight, Lieberman's brief brushfire yesterday seemed inevitable, given the number of times he has taken positions counter to some of the the party's more influential factions.

Departing from party orthodoxy, in either party, can be costly: Former Senator Bill Bradley's primary campaign collapsed in the face of Gore's withering attacks on him for taking positions supporting school vouchers, raising the age for Medicare eligibility, and oposing ethanol subsidies. Bradley and Lieberman voted together on those issues.

While he was an undergraduate at Yale, Lieberman helped register black voters in the South. And the NAACP has given him a 100 percent rating. But in 1991, though he ultimately voted against the Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas after the airing of Anita Hill's sexual harrassment allegations, Lieberman initially angered liberals by announcing that he would vote to confirm the controversial jurist.

''He is willing to challenge the conventional thinking of the Democratic Party,'' said Senator John Breaux, Democrat of Louisiana, a friend who preceded Lieberman as chairman of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. ''His goals are the same as the party's goals, but his methods are different.''

But affirmative action, like abortion, is a risky issue for Democratic politicians seeking to stake out new ground.

Representative Martin Meehan, Democrat of Lowell, who knows Lieberman from their joint efforts on campaign finance reform, compared Lieberman yesterday with the late Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas, who often took positions that angered party traditionalists.

Like Tsongas, Meehan said, ''Joe Lieberman is very independent, always on the cutting edge when it comes to new ideas. ... But there are risks associated with being ahead of the curve.'' Lieberman's 1995 statements on affirmative action, Meehan said, ''represent one time he took a risk that wasn't in his political interest.''

Added Meehan: ''I'm sure Joe would like to take those comments back.'' That is what Lieberman effectively did later yesterday.

The controversy also serves to shine a spotlight on how Democratic attempts to paper over their differences are sometimes more obvious than when the GOP confronts similar divisions.

Lieberman's press secretary, Dan Gerstein, has asserted for several days that 1995 news accounts misrepresented Lieberman, that the senator has never said he opposed affirmative action programs, only quotas. But a transcript provided by Lieberman's office apears to contradict Gerstein, as do 1995 news accounts which the Globe cited in an article last week.

Also coming to Lieberman's defense has been the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Last night Jackson called the Gore-Lieberman ticket a ''dream team.'' But in 1995 Jackson swiftly denounced Lieberman's comments on affirmative action and led a protest against Lieberman in New Haven, where he called the senator a ''Demo-publican.''

The issue surfaced on March 9, 1995, the day Lieberman was installed as chairman of the centrist DLC, and just months after Republicans won control of the House with a conservative agenda that included an end to all affirmative action programs.

When Lieberman was asked about the issue at a news conference, he said, ''You can't defend policies that are based on group preferences as opposed to individual oportunities, which is what America has always been about,'' according to the transcript. He called such programs ''patently unfair.''

Then, Lieberman expressed suport for Proposition 209, the successful 1996 ballot initiative in California, which wiped out all public sector affirmative action programs.

At another point, he added: ''I think we all want to say we're against quotas and, ah, and against group preferences.'' Several news organizations, including the New York Times, the Washington Post and Scripps-Howard, reported that Lieberman was opposed to affirmative actions programs.

With Clinton then reviewing such programs, Jackson reacted swiftly. According to news accounts, he fired off a four-page letter to Lieberman, calling his March 9 remarks ''particularly irresponsible.'' On March 21, Jackson and Patricia Ireland, president of the National Organization for Women, organized a protest in New Haven, urging that Lieberman be defeated if he did not change his stand, according to the New Haven Register.

A day later, Lieberman appeared to modify his blanket criticisms of March 9, warning that ''those who refuse to acknowledge that there are problems with some government affirmative action programs risk dooming all afirmative action programs to defeat.''

Later that year, the Progressive Policy Institute, an arm of the DLC, issued a report calling for an end to government affirmative action programs, except those affecting college admissions. Jackson again visited New Haven, where, the Hartford Courant reported, he said, ''I've been surprised and disappointed'' with Lieberman, adding, ''Usually people expand their visions. His seems to have narrowed.''

Later that day, Lieberman issued a statement saying he believed that ''many affirmative action programs must change because they are inconsistent with the law and with the basic American value of equal treatment and oportunity.''