It was totally in character that Joe Lieberman’s final public mission was pushing No Labels, a heavily-bankrolled faux third-party “movement” that has threatened to drain votes from Joe Biden and help elect a fascist. Joe was on TV a lot last year, pleading, “I mean, give us a chance here. We’re creating an option.”

That was Joe, infuriating to the very end.

You may remember Joe, the former Democratic-turned-independent senator who died yesterday at 82. Twenty four years ago he came within a few hanging-chad ballots of becoming vice president of the United States, and indeed may well have served if the five Republican appointees on the U.S. Supreme Court hadn’t halted the recount in pivotal Florida. That near-miss in 2020 was Joe’s high-water mark, and I’ll give him that. But over the many decades, whenever I think of him (and I’m far from alone about this), I can only shake my head. He was an opportunistic political animal who cloaked his calculations in public sanctimony.

I knew him when. Back when he was a state senator in Connecticut and I was a Hartford-based columnist – this was circa 1980 – he had a knack for alienating fellow Democrats with ideological gyrations that he passed off as High Principle. He was known as a slow-motion ruminator. He wore a perpetually troubled expression and fancied himself the conscience of the state senate chamber. Some of us in the press corps nicknamed him “Hmmm” because in conversation his favorite word was “Hmmm.” He once sent me a note after I wrote a column that displeased him; he lamented that “it wounded me.” I showed that note to some Dems, and they said, “Oh, that’s just Joe, the ‘wounded’ thing. He’s always good at making someone feel guilty.”

Of course! Because he was always Right, which means that those who questioned his motives were by definition morally lacking. During his 24-year stint as a U.S. senator, which ended in 2013, people in Connecticut liked to joke, “I hated Joe Lieberman before you hated Joe Lieberman.”

There were all sorts of reasons, like his unquenchable ardor for George W. Bush’s Iraq war, which was launched on lies about non-existent weapons of mass destruction and wound up killing hundreds of thousands of people; his leading role in extending the Bush tax cuts for rich people; his pivotal vote to kill the public health insurance option (he was loyal to Connecticut’s private insurance companies), thus preventing millions of Americans from getting the kind of government coverage he enjoyed in the Senate; his belief that hospitals should not be required to offer morning-after pills to rape victims (“In Connecticut, it shouldn’t take more than a short ride to get to another hospital”), and many more stances that Joe framed as principled. Like when he warned in 2010 that the Chinese telecom giant ZTE might be spying on Americans, but after leaving office became a lobbyist for ZTE.

Granted, he deserves credit for some of his moves. He voted to keep Clarence Thomas off the Supreme Court after Anita Hill’s testimony; he voted for a (rare) federal minimum-wage hike; he helped end Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and thus cleared the way for gays to serve openly in the military; he said yes to Obamacare, albeit without the public health insurance option. But I (and others) have a hard time forgetting how he stabbed Obama in the back before Obama was even president:

In 2006, Joe was in big trouble back home. Connecticut Democrats, angry about his fealty to the Iraq war, refused to support him. He lost the party’s primary and had to run for re-election as an independent. He needed some Democratic senators to come up and campaign for him. One guy who answered the call was Obama. Obama helped save his ass.

Two years later, when Obama was running for president, Joe repaid the favor by showing up at the Republican National Convention and denouncing him.

In this case, the High Principle was that Joe was in thrall to GOP candidate John McCain. So much so that, on national television that April, when somebody asked Joe whether Obama was a Marxist, Joe replied: “Well, you know, I must say that’s a good question.” So much so that when Joe got a speaking slot at the GOP convention, he featured this passage about Iraq: “When others wanted to retreat in defeat from the field of battle, which would’ve been a disaster for the USA – when colleagues like Barack Obama were voting to cut off funding for our American troops on the battlefield – John McCain had the courage to stand against the tide of public opinion…” (Italics are mine.)

That was a classic half-truth from the Republican playbook. A year earlier, in 2007, Obama had voted against one particular troop-funding bill because it had no provisions for bringing troops home down the road; as Obama stated at the time, “We must fund our troops, but we owe them something more. We owe them a clear, prudent plan to relieve them of the burden of policing someone else’s civil war.” (Epilogue: As late as 2021, Lieberman still insisted that Saddam had WMDs in development, and refused to apologize for his principled warmongering.)

By now you may be faulting me for speaking ill of the dead. I can stipulate that he was always personally cordial with everyone, but that’s beside the point. Joe reveled in being a public figure (when he was briefly between public jobs in 1981, he told me, “I want to get back in”), and, like all such people, he needs to be judged on his record. And so I have.