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.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.