Lieberman: Bush Legacy Ejector Seat?
Yes, the sins of the parties have been visited upon their candidates. But can Lieberman break McCain out of Bush’s orbit? So David Brooks argued last night on Jim Lehrer’s convention-night show [scroll down]:
I think […] tonight and especially the last couple nights puts a lot more pressure on John McCain, especially the vice presidential pick.
They are trying so hard to tie John McCain to George Bush, I think it incredibl[y] strengthens the case for him to pick Joe Lieberman. He’s got to show somehow he’s not George Bush.
And I think that — you take a look at the case that was made by Joe Biden tonight, that’s the obvious rejoinder.
I was sort of on the fence about whether he should pick Joe Lieberman as his running mate, but now I think it’s the clear answer to the very strong case that both Bill Clinton, John Kerry, and Joe Biden made, which is Bush-McCain, Bush-McCain. He’s got to show some difference, because they made that case pretty well tonight.
Plain as it is that Joe Lieberman, unlike the President, is a liberal Democrat, I’m afraid I see real trouble ahead for McCain if he thinks he can blast out of Bush’s orbit by picking his old pal Joe. As I put it in this week’s column at Culture11 :
John wants Joe in order to flout ideology; Joe’s neoconservative boosters want him in order to flaunt it. If McCain picks Lieberman, he will be unable to do so for his own reasons, and his campaign will become a contraption set to mangle him at the wheel. He will be sucked from the seat of Maverickdom into the sausage-grinder of a Movement.
Of course, the heavy subtext here is that McCain must pick Lieberman to show he isn’t Bush because, if he picks Romney, his body will be colonized and exploded by parasitic Bush breeders leaving their now-dead former host. McCain will wake up one morning with Romney standing beside him holding up a mirror and McCain will look into the mirror and see George W. Bush and then look past his new reflection at the guy holding it and see that Romney, too, is also Bush. Then he will start raving about amnesty and appoint Joe Lieberman his Goodwill Ambassador to the World, and he will lose like a stupid bet.
Maybe. Romney’s worst problem from McCain’s perspective is how flamboyantly he’s hugged the Bush administration during the primaries. But there’s another Romney. You remember. Cool, collected, sophisticated pragmatist. Problem solver. Still, that Romney’s been claimed, too, by the establishment conservative movement (as opposed to the neoconservative movement). McCain’s biggest problem overall is that two of his main choices will pull him into movements he isn’t a part of. Under the circumstances, he may be too weak to prevent that fact from screwing up his candidacy. Which is why I make the insinuation I do at the end of the column. Nonetheless, I do think McCain can win with Romney, but will go down like a cold air balloon with Lieberman.
Every McCain VC pick has negatives that overwhelm their positives. You very well pointed out Lieberman and Romney’s. Palin and Jindal are great pols who definitely deserve a shot at national office, but they would just remind people of McCain’s status as an old white guy with no executive bona fides.
(Incidentally, I seem to remember McCain’s flaunting of his leadership of “the largest naval air unit” or some such in Vietnam as executive experience to balance Romney’s executive experience, which I thought was an extremely effective rejoinder. It takes a lot more leadership to make life and death decisions in war than to run a company, no matter how talented private sector executive can be. I’d like to know how inflated that claim was, but anyway this election is not /exactly/ about executive competence, to say the least.)
That leaves one. Pawlenty. Boring, unexciting? Yes. But he’s ready for prime time, he has an optimistic message, so he definitely seems like the least bad of all options, which is really what a VC pick should be about.
Of course he could take a hint from Ross and make an unexpected choice to take advantage of the yawns that surrounded the Biden pick (Meg Whitman? Colin Powell?), but I’m not sure how smart that would really be, as any non-boring pick would just be a reminder of McCain’s flaws.
— PEG · Aug 28, 01:44 PM · #
“Every McCain VC pick has negatives that overwhelm their positives. You very well pointed out Lieberman and Romney’s. Palin and Jindal are great pols who definitely deserve a shot at national office, but they would just remind people of McCain’s status as an old white guy with no executive bona fides.”
Didn’t the Biden pick just remind folks that Obama is “just a young black guy with even fewer (or no) executive bona fides?” The boring Biden pick is precisely a reminder of Obama’s flaws.
— Patrick S. Allen+ · Aug 28, 02:14 PM · #
“…if he picks Romney, his body will be colonized and exploded by parasitic Bush breeders leaving their now-dead former host.”
Well done.
— matt · Aug 28, 02:26 PM · #
@Patrick, I agree, which is why I wouldn’t have picked Biden. My understanding is that Obama made a government decision, not a campaign decision. He essentially wants Biden to be his Cheney.
— PEG · Aug 28, 02:36 PM · #
I do feel like the guy who ran the Olympics and Bain and governemd MA was a hell of an interesting guy not much in the Bush mold (I’m ignoring the creepy/nast dog-on-the-roof thing) and it’s a shame that candidate “Romney” killed that guy and then had a flesh coating in his image made to cover his evil robotic exoskeleton. But it seems to me there’d have been any number of other choices for McCain that Brooks didn’t consider because basically they never came up at all.
For example, there’s Bill Weld, who was bascially the model for the “old” Romney and isn’t corrupted by having become the new one. There’s Pete Wilson — kinda the same. Or really outside the box, what about Christine Todd Whitman? There’s somebody who’s gone to pains to assert again and again that she is in fact a Republican, but she’s also broken pretty hard with the administration. So I kind of feel like McCain never cast the net wide enough.
And as for Lieberman, thanks to Ned Lamont the Democrats have been painting him as a Bush clone for a while now, so justified or not the tools and history are in place to paint his selection as not so radical as Brooks wishes it to seem. I think Whitman (CT, not Meg) would look like more of a break with Bush, really, and would underscore McCain’s enviro-cred and might even bring along some PUMAs.
— Sanjay · Aug 28, 02:43 PM · #
The election is going to be fought on middle-class economic concerns. Iraq is going to be less of an issue since while Obama can claim he was correct to have opposed invasion and McCain can claim he was correct to support the surge, neither has a clue of how best to take things forwards.
Therefore Pawlenty is the best pick since middle-class economic concerns are something he can talk knowledgeably about in concrete, practical terms unlike Maverick, the One and the 35-year Senate FoPo\Judiciary vet.
Romney is yet to prove he’s a competent politician. Where would he be without his money? Powell, Whitman and Hutchinson aren’t bad but picking them would seem like pandering. Lieberman’s too liberal and only of interest to the national greatness conservatives.
— Ali Choudhury · Aug 28, 04:49 PM · #
And another thing.
Romney would be unique among Vice Presidential picks in failing to bring with him any significant regional appeal.
And how did that happen? A few years back, folks might have expected that a “sophisticated pragmatist/problem solver,” Republican gov who won over Democratic New England state might have been able to deliver a solid base if he moved to the national stage, including some each from:
* technocrats and businessmen
* financial community
* blue collar ethnic New England
* conservative Catholics
But Romney picked up almost none of those this year.
Business people: focussing on movement conservatism meant Romney expended huge amounts of time on cultural issues (esp. displaying animus to gays and immigrants) where he has almost no traction, and spent way little time on actual economic issues. In the end, he raised some money from the business community, but actual support remained cool.
Old-school Catholics: he seemed to think joining the culture wars would have serve him well among conservative or single-issues Catholics (the type who pick one agony issue such as abortion or marriage restriction and swear to live or die by it).
But oddly enough, it never did. For some hardcore rightists, the fact that Romney changed positions and moved right meant he was never “trustworthy” because he wasn’t with them from the start. For others, his membership in the exotic (in Massachusetts) Mormon minority remained a turn off. Not logical, but then again, that’s one of the pitfalls of faith-based candidacy. If you want votes based on sectarianism, you better pick a large sect to belong to. There’s the problem too, that the further over you slide towards right-wing Evangelicalism, the more the creepy anti-Catholicism of the Bible Belt shows up. So, he never really took off among the papists, either.
General blue collar New England. The basic problem here is just the cost of being a phony.
Even people who might agree on paper with a list of Romney positions look down on him because he dissed the very state that made him Governor. Around my city in New England, among builders and firemen and small business men who are generally Reagan Democrats, it became like “go back to Utah, Mitt.”
Bashing Massachusetts in Texas may play well to a bunch of chubby donors in cowboy hats, but the cost? Millions of centrist guys on the coasts and in the Midwest who might have given you a shot just think you’re a dick. Someone who didn’t respect the very voters to whom he fibbed to become governor.
I’m not so sure all this would be enough to sink a McCain/Romney ticket. But add “BTW, my state hates me” to the liabilities you very wittily describe.
— lizkdc · Aug 28, 05:14 PM · #
Got curious: Weld supported Romney and advised him in the primaries, and has now endored McCain. Not that anyone’s looking at him, I suppose, but he’d probably be as good as McCain could have done.
— Sanjay · Aug 28, 05:58 PM · #
Like this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRWb2whWeIo
Or this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxrPGFjOUYI
— McBush · Aug 28, 07:50 PM · #
I wonder if all of what’s been said, is the reason McCain keeps mentioning Tom Ridge. I get the feeling that his gut wants to pick Ridge, but his brain is screaming out, “No!”
Though Ridge, even as a pro-choice pol, was able to be elected governor of Pennsylvania. There were a few dust-ups about possibly denying him communion back in Erie, but nothing ever came of that. He did pretty well in getting out the Catholic vote.
— Tel · Aug 28, 08:06 PM · #
THe fact that he doesn’t have better choices shows me how screwed up the Republican party is. To win they have to pander to two crackpot consitiuentcies: what Sullivan calls Christianists and neo-con militarists. Romney destroyed whatever reputation pandering to these groups. Liberman destroyed his reputation over the Iraq war. At least LIberman did it for Israel, a cause he actually believes in. So of the three—McCain, Romney, Liberman—I guess I have to respect Liberman the most. Which is weird. Even when he was running with Gore I thought he was increadibly smarmy.
About my descritptions of the two crackpot constituencies: a rational case could be made for being for an aggressive, globally active military—not that I would agree with—but republican militarists don’t make a rational case. They talk about moral duty, partriotism, american exceptionalism, and a mythical worldwide struggle between the west and islam for control of the globe, ect… As for conservative christians, I don’t think there is any case to be made for Christianizing our government.
— cw · Aug 28, 08:11 PM · #
Bill Weld would have been a great choice. I always thought very highly of the guy, more so after he washed his hands of politics to write books and get a real job.
If it’s Lieberman, there is no way I vote for them.
— wph · Aug 28, 10:36 PM · #