Lieberman Promises to Stand United With Gore

Battling the crosscurrents of ideology on the eve of the Democratic convention, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman on Sunday defended his views on television violence, affirmative action and school vouchers that have unnerved party liberals.

Speaking on five television interview shows, the vice presidential nominee-in-waiting did not retreat an inch from his record. He acknowledged he had differences with the more standard Democratic positions advocated by putative presidential nominee Al Gore but suggested that added an element of strength to the ticket.

“This is, if I may say so, a different kind of expression of what Al Gore has been talking about, which is standing with the people against the powerful,” Lieberman said of his unwavering feud with Hollywood over the risque content of television programs and movies.

The senator from Connecticut pledged his allegiance, if elected, to Gore’s views.

“If I’m fortunate enough to be honored to be elected vice president, after the internal debates that Al and I have, his position will be my position,” the senator added on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “That’s constitutionally necessary.”

The continued attention to policy rifts concerned Democrats who are eager to broadcast red-white-and-blue unity at the four-day televised gathering. As further evidence of attempts to quiet roiled waters, Gore campaign manager Donna Brazile met Sunday afternoon with a group of teachers union delegates and reassured them that Gore supports public education and opposes school vouchers. Lieberman has supported an experimental use of vouchers, which labor opposes.

In preparation for tonight’s opening gavel, delegates streamed into town by plane, bus and car, and event organizers put the last television-worthy touches on the elaborate convention stage erected at Staples Center. Several thousand protesters marched in the streets, but the day passed peacefully.

Gore, campaigning in Cleveland, said the convention would be his chance to “introduce me for what I am . . . not as a vice president who stands on stage without saying too much.”

“I have had a career before the vice presidency,” Gore told the NBC television affiliate in Cleveland, WKYC.

“I want people to know who I am, the 24-year career that I’ve had working for working families, fighting for the people, not the powerful,” he added in a second interview, with WJW, the Fox News station there.

Gore and Lieberman enter the convention as decided underdogs in most national polls. Their partisans were cheered, however, by an NBC-Wall Street Journal poll released Sunday that gave Republican nominee George W. Bush only a 3-percentage-point edge, within the survey’s margin of error.

The vice president’s task, in the four nights that will serve as Clinton’s valedictory and a celebration of his successor, is difficult and perhaps contradictory. He must rally to his side the party’s liberal base, which has been occasionally lukewarm about him, and establish his centrist credentials to appeal to moderate and independent voters.

His choice of Lieberman has heartened the latter but not all of the former. The potential schism was on full display on the Sunday morning talk shows, where Lieberman defended his backing of a California measure that banned affirmative action, his support for experimental use of school vouchers, his anger at Hollywood violence and his criticisms of some questionable Clinton-Gore fund-raising tactics.

Affirmative Action Stance Is Defended

The newest dust-up arose over affirmative action, which has the strong backing of influential segments of the party, including minorities and women. Lieberman acknowledged that in 1995 he had backed Proposition 209, the state anti-affirmative action measure, after a reporter read its text to him.

“I began in the mid-’90s, like a lot of people, to question whether quotas were an appropriate way to realize the goal of equal opportunity,” Lieberman said. But, he added, he later supported Clinton’s “mend it, don’t end it” approach, which tinkered with the programs.

He also said a Supreme Court decision outlawing quotas in affirmative action programs made a national version of Proposition 209 unnecessary.

“I wanted to ban quotas, and I think that’s basically happened,” he told ABC’s “This Week” program.

Proposition 209 passed in California with the support of almost one-third of Democrats--and, notably, 6 in 10 independents. Four of five Republicans also backed the measure.

Even as Clinton was dining with Hollywood--having lunch Sunday with Barbra Streisand--Lieberman defended his long-running battle with the fare produced by Hollywood’s movie and television studios.

“There’s still too much violence, too much sex, too much incivility in entertainment, which makes it very difficult for parents who are working so hard to give their kids values and discipline to do so,” he told ABC. He did not spare ABC’s corporate parent, the Walt Disney Co. “The Disney Company does a lot of great stuff, but there are parts of their operation that don’t do such good stuff that I think hurts our country and our kids.”

Lieberman also went out of his way to laud Tipper Gore, the vice president’s wife, for her 1980s campaign against explicit music lyrics. The Gores have consistently tried to play down that effort, which made the couple years-long targets of industry rancor.

Sensitive to the hometown industry’s reaction to Lieberman, movie director Rob Reiner campaigned with the vice president on Sunday and issued his own defense of the vice presidential pick.

“There might have been some knee-jerk kind of reaction because he’s been so critical of Hollywood,” said Reiner. “. . . He’s clearly setting down challenges for Hollywood to act more responsibly. And there’s nothing wrong with that. He’s right about that.”

Lieberman, in his round-robin interviews, also acknowledged holding a different view from Gore on school vouchers. The vice president has ruled out the stipends; Lieberman’s backing of some, for poor children, came under an agreement that public schools would not lose money.

Striking another ideological chord Sunday was Cardinal Roger Mahony, the leader of the Los Angeles archdiocese, who conducted a morning Mass for about 100 delegates and guests in a ballroom of the Wilshire Grand Hotel.

“We are called to be in the forefront of those who stand on the side of all who may be threatened in our communities,” Mahony told the assembled crowd, which included Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and national AFL-CIO President John Sweeney.

“Human life remains threatened in our country, most clearly because of legal abortion but also by the continued use of capital punishment and the movement to allow physician-assisted suicide.”

Gore favors abortion rights and the death penalty and has not spoken out against physician-assisted suicide. The Roman Catholic Church is officially opposed to all three.

“In the end, God will not rely on polling data to judge our fidelity to the gospels,” Mahony said. “God will not convene focus groups to determine our moral integrity or our ethical fitness.”

Gore himself campaigned Sunday on the issue of health insurance for children, a theme on which he has hammered for months. He will not arrive at the convention until Wednesday. He is making his way here slowly with a tour of swing states, which ends Tuesday with a passing-the-torch event in Michigan with Clinton. Clinton will leave the convention Tuesday, just hours after his speech tonight.

Clinton on Sunday continued his sentimental journey through the fund-raising salons that have helped finance his success, sounding more bittersweet by the moment as he prepares to cede center stage to his vice president.

The presidency, Clinton told movie icons gathered late Saturday for a tribute to him, “was an affair of the heart; that every slogan I ever used was something I believed.

“I still believe we should put people first. . . . I still think we should never stop thinking about tomorrow,” he said, emotionally reprising the titles of the policy book he released during the 1992 campaign and the Fleetwood Mac song that was played endlessly at the New York convention where he was nominated in 1992.

Clinton Praises Gore as Key to Future

Clinton also praised Gore, whom he plucked from the Senate that year to serve as his running mate.

“He understands how to keep this magical prosperity going and how to spread it to the people that, I regret to say, are still left behind,” Clinton said.

While they may be divided on some issues, Democrats are predicting a convention that lathers up Gore in much the same way as the GOP convention in Philadelphia did Bush two weeks ago. Democrats argue that it will be more substantive than the Republican confab, although GOP activists will be on hand here to argue the point.

For his part, Bush headed Sunday to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, where he will remain through the Democratic convention. He said he will not watch the proceedings on television. “I know what they’re going to say about me,” said the Texas governor.

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Times staff writers Mark Z. Barabak, Dana Calvo, Edwin Chen, James Gerstenzang, Josh Meyer, Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, Nicholas Riccardi and Jeff Rabin contributed to this story.