Lieberman thinking of running for president. He'll have to run on the Snakes R US ticket because that's the only category that fits that lying POS.
DAILY EXPRESS
Irreconcilable Differences
by Noam Scheiber
How can you read Joe Lieberman's recent jabs at Al Gore except as an attempt to wriggle out of his now-famous pledge to sit out the presidential campaign if Gore runs again? Lieberman has been making speeches in key presidential backwaters and raising money like a champ for well over six months. If not for that one mangy little comment uttered in that one fleeting moment of gratitude last spring, Lieberman might be well on his way to Democratic front-runner-dom. (Yes, yes, that's ignoring Lieberman's total lack of charisma and his record of unrepentant shilling on behalf of corporate interests. But bear with me.) So when Lieberman derided Gore's 2000 "us versus them" election strategy at last week's Democratic Leadership Council meeting in New York, many interpreted it as an attempt to put ideological distance between himself and Gore--the sort of distance that might require a mature adult like Lieberman to put aside any childlike notions of gratitude and do what's right for his party and his country.
On one level that's probably right. Even if Lieberman didn't quite mean to attack Al Gore as a Trotskyite deviationist, at the very least he probably meant to send up a trial balloon to see how attacking Gore as a Trotskyite deviationist would go over. But Lieberman's criticism probably had an important secondary intention, which has been largely overlooked in the subsequent tea-leaf reading. Rather than reinforce the ideological breach between himself and Gore, Lieberman may have wanted to create a very public, personal breach instead.
Why would Lieberman, by all accounts one of the nicest guys you'll ever want to be denounced by on the Senate floor, want to pick a personal fight with his former patron? Because it may be his only chance to break free of Gore's grip. Over the course of the last year-and-a-half, Gore has managed to hold Lieberman to his nettlesome little no-run pledge by publicly lathering him in praise. At the Florida State Democratic convention this April, for example, Gore told local Democrats that picking Lieberman as his running mate was the "single best decision" he made during the campaign. This strategy--call it the velvet stiff arm--allows Gore at once to appear magnanimous and to remind everyone just what a betrayal it would be if Lieberman were to challenge him for the nomination.
The problem for Lieberman is that merely highlighting narrow ideological differences between him and Gore isn't likely to help him. Back at the Florida convention, Lieberman's aides emphasized Gore's failure to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in his speech and noted, by contrast, their boss's thoughtful comments on the matter. But according to a recent NBC report, Gore has been unfazed by these little disagreements, pressing forward with his gracious, above-the-fray approach.
If, on the other hand, Lieberman suddenly began offering up pointed, personal criticisms on a subject Gore is clearly sensitive about--say, the way Gore ran his campaign--Gore might just get pissed off enough to stop showering Lieberman with public affection. After all, it wouldn't be the first time Gore was so blinded by personal animosity as to compromise his political judgment. It was Gore's bitter resentment toward Bill Clinton that reportedly prevented him from embracing Clinton during the presidential campaign--and quite possibly cost him the election.
At any rate, even Lieberman probably couldn't have imagined he'd get as swift a reaction as he got in Sunday's New York Times. Though Gore's much-talked about op-ed didn't mention Lieberman by name, you could practically feel Gore seething at his former running mate. "Standing up for 'the people, not the powerful' was the right choice in 2000," Gore wrote. "The suggestion from some in our party that we should no longer speak that truth, especially at a time like this, strikes me as bad politics and, worse, wrong in principle." Add "Joe!!!" to the end of each of those sentences and I suspect you'd more or less approximate Gore's initial reaction to Lieberman's critical comments.
The chink in this particular theory, of course, is that Lieberman appeared to back down when discussing the spat on "Fox News Sunday." Asked by Tony Snow how he would have revised Gore's "people versus the powerful" mantra, Lieberman meekly suggested that his difference with Gore was more rhetorical than substantive. "I would have added a word or two and said we believe in a government that will stand for the people, for the public interest against powerful private interests, including business if they treat people unfairly," Lieberman explained.
But far from undermining the idea that Lieberman is deliberately provoking Gore, this exchange only suggests he's going about it in typical Liebermanian fashion. Lieberman is by nature what you might charitably call conflict-averse--and what you might uncharitably call a slippery SOB. Often this results in him trying to be all things to all people, or different things to different people, or even different things to the same people at different times. Prior to becoming the Democratic vice presidential candidate in 2000, for example, Lieberman had publicly flirted with vouchers. After his vice presidential selection, when this little bit of education heterodoxy prompted a backlash from teachers' unions, Lieberman quickly disavowed his earlier stance. But almost the minute Team Gore threw in the towel on the 2000 election, the former vice presidential candidate renounced his brief anti-voucher interlude. "I am a person who has supported demonstration programs for vouchers," Lieberman announced in mid-December 2000, "and I still believe those were good votes, and if it happened tomorrow, I would vote for it tomorrow."
The melodrama surrounding Lieberman's current predicament seems to be following a similar pattern. It's possible that Lieberman made his presidential pledge out of his heartfelt devotion to Gore. But it's just as likely that any gratitude Lieberman felt at the time simply coincided with the politically necessary way to serve his ambition--which, somewhat counter-intuitively, was to disavow that ambition in order to repair his reputation as a stand-up guy. (Some had questioned Lieberman's devotion to the campaign after he declined to give up his Senate seat.) Now that "the pledge" has taken on a life of its own and come into conflict with his ambition, there's little reason to doubt that Lieberman will find a way to get out of it. (One could argue that violating the pledge actually harms Lieberman's prospects since his chief political asset is his upright reputation. But it's hard to see how anything could damage your chance of becoming president more than not running for president.)
But it will be regrettable if the way Lieberman gets out of his pledge is by prolonging, or even escalating, his public feud with Gore. That's because, much as it may pain either man to admit it, each could benefit from the other's advice. Gore, for one, is right in his rebuttal of Lieberman: Being a New Democrat isn't the same thing as being pro-business; it's also about being anti-special interest--not least when the special interest in question happens to be business. In his op-ed, Gore got at this point by arguing that "'when powerful interests try to take advantage of the American people, it's often other businesses that are hurt in the process'--most of all, smaller companies that play by the rules."
But Lieberman is also right. Gore did his best to obscure this important nuance by pushing his crude "people versus the powerful" line in 2000. Certainly an alternative--say, "public interest over the special interests"--could have packed the same rhetorical punch without scaring off middle-class voters. If Lieberman really wanted to be a team player, he'd stop his public posturing and make this point to his old running mate over martinis at the Palm. Instead, he's using it as a wedge to break up their old partnership and free himself to run for president. |
