Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: $Mogul who wrote (31479)	8/23/2000 7:30:58 AM
From: Tom Clarke	Respond to of 769670

Lieberman's flip-flops: Yes, there were only a handful of issues on which Lieberman broke with the pack. But these issues--affirmative action, school vouchers, Social Security, Clinton scandals, tort reform--were the core issues that defined what it meant to be a New Democrat. It meant, precisely, standing up to the party's controlling special interests on these litmus tests. Without this, there is no true New Democrat position. It is not an exaggeration to say that the rise of the New Democrats and the rise of Lieberman--and these are nearly synonymous--rest on this handful of stand-up moments. Well, the Democrats' stand-up guy stands no more. Recently Lieberman, the man with the iron backbone, has become Lieberman, the human pretzel, performing, now in the big top, every day, Amazing! Stupendous! Truth-defying! Acts of Contortion, as he erases the man he was and morphs into whatever it is that the people who pull the levers in the party want him to be. A few examples: On privatizing Social Security by allowing workers to invest some portion of their taxes in the stock market, Lieberman had this to say in a 1998 interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune: "I would support that. . . . We now have decades-long history of an average 10 percent return on stocks. . . . So, yes, I would support it. . . . It doesn't make sense anymore not to do that with this enormous investment pool that we're supposed to have for Social Security. . . . I think in the end that individual control of part of the retirement/Social Security funds has got to happen." In an interview on Aug. 8 with Larry King, Lieberman maintained that it was "not true" that he had ever favored privatization of Social Security; he had merely been "intrigued" by the idea. In remarks to AFL-CIO members in Connecticut, Lieberman attacked George W. Bush for proposing to "savage" Social Security with "a privatization scheme that would take $1 trillion out of the nest egg that belongs to every worker in America and jeopardize the program's stability and the security of the working future of the American people." washingtonpost.com