Wayne O'Leary

No Labels, No Sense

Generals, it is said, always fight the last war. The classic example, often cited, was France’s strategic reliance on the Maginot Line, a supposedly impregnable complex of fortifications constructed prior to World War II as a safeguard against German aggression; it was built with the stationary trench warfare of the previous world war in mind. Unfortunately for the French, the mobile German invaders of 1940, using the concept of blitzkrieg (lightning war), simply went over and around the static Maginot Line, outflanking France’s defenders and winning militarily in no time.

Politicians are often like generals, fighting the last campaign or reengaging in the last policy debate. Many observers have noted that our present party politics was set in concrete a generation ago, the lines of demarcation based on where you stood on the Vietnam War or marijuana use or countercultural values like long hair or sexual freedom.

For a whole generation of Republicans, ’60s child Bill Clinton became the symbol of “sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll”; they still view his party, the Democrats, through that prism — a vehicle for disseminating immorality and undermining traditional values. This is notwithstanding that Clinton was at heart a conservative who represented the center-right of his party and that the latest GOP standard-bearer, Donald Trump, is the very personification of immorality. No matter. Decades after the fact, we’re still fighting culture wars that originated in the 1960s and 1970s.

The foregoing is a roundabout way of making the point that the new centrist political movement and/or party, No Labels, is a stale, reconstituted version of politics past. Billed as a potentially moderate, bipartisan alternative to the extreme Democrats (too left wing) and Republicans (too right wing), No Labels is the supposed future Goldilocks of politics; it’s “just right” to those who support it. But the group — it’s not yet a formal third party, pending a planned organizational and presidential-nominating convention in early 2024 — represents nothing fresh or new. It’s an amalgam of recycled ideas, such as tort reform, abroad in the political system for a decade or more.

The roots of No Labels extend back to the apostasy of onetime Democratic senator and vice-presidential candidate Joe Lieberman, current leading spokesman and public face of No Labels, who, acting on behalf of the medical-insurance industry, singlehandedly blocked the inclusion of a healthcare public option in the 2010 legislation creating the Affordable Care Act (ACA); it’s a destructive accomplishment the former Democrat turned independent looks back on with pride.

The same year the public option died, Lieberman joined with another conservative Democrat, activist Nancy Jacobson, to become one of the founding co-chairs of No Labels. Jacobson, board president of the centrist organization since its creation in 2010, justly claims it as her brainchild. The initial stated goal was promoting bipartisanship in support of “moderate” social and economic policies, innocuous-sounding aims that have broadened considerably since then and become strongly ideological — culminating in opposition to Build Back Better in 2021.

Jacobson’s biography reveals much about No Labels. She started out as a standard-issue centrist Democrat and moved rightward, working on Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign, then as finance director for both the conservative Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and conservative Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.). She also served the latter as political strategist when he ran for president from the Democratic right in 2008. Jacobson’s husband is the progressive-baiting, Sanders-hating Clinton apologist Mark Penn, who dispenses DLC-style wisdom to receptive Democrats when not operating on Wall Street or in the executive suites.

If the Lieberman-Jacobson leadership component of No Labels is insufficient to dispel notions of its fresh-faced bipartisan idealism, consider the recognizable names on its donor or supporter list. They include sympathetic “blue dog” Democrats like Maine Congressman Jared Golden and token Democratic civil-rights figures like Benjamin Chavis, but on balance, formal members and unaffiliated sympathizers alike lean strongly Republican.

The conservative contingent includes, for example, Harlan Crow, Texas billionaire and close friend of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas; Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.); former Govs. Larry Hogan (R-Md.) and Pat McCrory (R-N.C.); and assorted corporate executives or retired CEOs, several of whom are past donors to Donald Trump and the GOP (e.g. Woody Hunt, chairman of Hunt Companies), or to right-leaning faux Democrat Michael Bloomberg.

Without doubt, however, the leading high-profile figures discussed in connection with No Labels, other than its ubiquitous spokesman Joe Lieberman, are progressive nemesis Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and ex-Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr (R-Utah), whom the Great Mentioner has singled out as the nascent party’s most likely presidential and vice-presidential candidates, respectively, should it actually enter the lists in 2024. Manchin, who appears anxious to run, is of course a Democrat, but a Democrat in name only, so the conservative bias of No Label holds true to form.

Not only is the No Labels cast of characters familiar, drearily so in the case of Manchin, but its approach to policy is totally contrived. The group’s centrist manifesto, released in July, offers a political grab bag of positions often in contradiction with each other — an effort to keep expatriate Democrats and Republicans equally happy and in the fold.

On gun control, No Labels defends the absolute, unfettered right to bear arms under the Second Amendment, while calling for universal background checks and age restrictions on weapons purchases. On immigration, it calls for ending the release of undocumented migrants into the country, while expanding legal immigration and offering an accelerated path to citizenship for those already here. On abortion, it tries to reconcile a woman’s reproductive rights with society’s presumed obligation to safeguard human life. On energy, it supports, apparently at Manchin’s insistence, an “all of the above” policy, simultaneously endorsing both renewables and fossil fuels.

In short, No Labels tries to satisfy all sides. The only area where it refuses to dissemble or waffle is in a throwback commitment to revive the flinty-eyed austerity of the Bowles-Simpson fiscal commission of 2010-11, adopting its crusade to slash entitlement spending and reduce the deficit. No Labels wants to cut Social Security in particular because it’s supposedly “going broke.” That unambiguous policy proposal shows where the organization’s conservative heart truly resides. It’s also in keeping with Joe Lieberman’s elimination of the public option.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2023

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