Quote of The Day: The Battle Over The Lieberman Vice President Option
Ailing conservative columnist Bob Novak is still going to write occasional columns, and he provides us with the quote-of-the-day over the battle within the McCain ranks as to whether Connecticut independent Sen. Joe Lieberman should get McCain’s Vice-Presidential nod:
Reports of strong support within John McCain’s presidential campaign for Independent Democratic Sen. Joseph Lieberman as the Republican candidate for vice president are not a fairy tale. Influential McCain backers, plus McCain himself, would pick the pro-choice liberal from Connecticut if they thought they could get away with it.
But they can’t get away with it — and this has been made clear to McCain by none other than Joe Lieberman himself.
Lieberman surely doesn’t know that much about Republican politics, but he has close Republican friends. One of them prevailed on Lieberman to tell McCain that a McCain-Lieberman ticket would be a disaster for all concerned, and especially for the GOP.
What’s going on? According to Novak, there’s a tug-of-war going on between the Bush people and the McCain people:
McCain’s top strategists argue that the Bush coalition that won the last two presidential elections is dead and must be replaced by a new one that extends to the left, as Lieberman would. Bush strategists disagree, asserting that McCain is getting around 90 percent of the old Bush vote and can win the election with a few moderates added in.
If this is true, it’d be yet one more indication that the Bush faction of the Republican Party has worked to create the antithesis of what many moderate and independent voters have sought from both parties: parties that truly seek and cater to a wider tent, rather than becoming political mechanisms to hit left-and-right hot-buttons and demonize those who aren’t pure enough on either side or in the middle.
Whether you like Joe Lieberman, hate him or feel ambivalent towards him, the larger issue really isn’t Lieberman in this Novak quote. The real issue about how politics will be perceived and practiced. I’ve often said it before and this quote underlines it again: George W. Bush proved to a President of the base, by the base and for the base.
4 Responses to “Quote of The Day: The Battle Over The Lieberman Vice President Option”
And McCain has to be the same.
No mavericky Veep selections allowed!
McCain's VP pick is going to be a major indicator on whether or not he has truly flipflopped from a maverick Republican or embraced the dark side of the Grand Ol Party. Either way it will certainly be an bellwether of the degree of change he would actually bring to the republican party, White House and fundamental shifts in policy.
As a person torn between the two candidates, it will have a huge impact on the way I view McCain as a candidate going forward. As an optimist who hopes this election could represent real changes on both sides of the party line and two worthy candidates and a lively election season, McCain choosing an independent leftist VP would be a bit of a thrill to watch, if nothing else.
McCain needs to choose a real conservative to appeal not only to that “base” but to offer a true alternative to the Dems. Choosing Lieberman makes him even more a Dem Lite and may simply be a max-effort attempt to poach Clinton voters if one wants to be extra cynical about it. Otherwise, Lieberman _is_ a natural match for McCain (and a friend). To me the “real” choices are either to go with a real conservative (Thompson, Brownback), something similar in Huckabee in an appeal mainly to the Religious Right and less so broadly conservative, or to instead go with Lieberman.
Romney is what most people expect to be his choice but is simply a numbers game (in a way, like Obama taking Clinton as VP — logical, strong, but not necessarily the best).
JG : “If this is true it’d be yet one more indication that the Bush faction of the Republican party has worked to create the antithesis of what many moderate and independent voters have sought from both parties: parties that truly seek and cater to a wider tent”
Agreed. If there is any extra width to the Bush faction of the GOP tent, then it's made of the same material the emperor's new clothes were made of… which certainly doesn't mean it won't be imagined to provide shelter by many not so well informed R's.