Gore to endorse Dean!

re: potential running mates

Didn't Lincoln choose to make almost his entire cabinet up of those who opposed him?

 

Lincoln was a "keep your enemies close" kind of guy.

 

Boy oh boy. Joe is pissd off...
DURHAM, N.H. (Reuters) - Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman on Tuesday blasted former running mate Al Gore (news - web sites)'s endorsement of rival Howard Dean (news - web sites) as a step backward for Democrats and said he was "more determined than ever" to press ahead with his presidential bid.

"I was surprised that Al Gore would endorse a candidate who stands for so many things that Al Gore has not stood for," Lieberman told reporters in the first primary state of New Hampshire.

"I was surprised he would support a candidate that I am convinced will take this party back to where we were before Bill Clinton (news - web sites)," he said.

Gore, the former vice president who lost the White House to Republican George W. Bush in a bitterly contested 2000 election, endorsed Lieberman's rival Dean on Tuesday, saying he was the candidate who could lead the party to victory.

The move by Gore was a harsh slap to Lieberman, who had promised last year that he would not run if Gore did. Gore ultimately decided one year ago not to seek the White House.

Lieberman trails Dean badly in New Hampshire polls and has struggled to get his campaign off the ground, but shrugged off the effects of the endorsement and predictions from some analysts that Dean was headed for the nomination.

"This is an undecided race," he said hours before the nine candidates running for the White House square off in a debate at the University of New Hampshire. "There are a lot of days left between now and January when voting starts."

Lieberman said his campaign had been flooded with calls of support and donations had picked up in the 24 hours since Gore's decision became public.

GORE CALL CAME "TOO LATE"

He said he asked Gore for his widely sought endorsement as recently as a month and a half ago, and was surprised he did not hear from Gore before the news of the endorsement broke on Monday. Gore called him on Tuesday morning.

"It was about four or five minutes in length and too late," Lieberman said of the call from Gore. He refused to say if he was angry about the decision, or to question Gore's loyalty.

"I don't want to say anything today about Al Gore's sense of loyalty," Lieberman said when prodded by reporters, adding: "Here's the emotion I feel -- determination."

Lieberman, one of nine Democrats battling for the right to face Bush in 2004, had parted with Gore on several issues in the past year. He criticized Gore last year for his populist campaign themes in 2000 and was a strong supporter of the Iraq (news - web sites) war. Gore, like Dean, has been outspoken in his opposition to the war.

But Lieberman would not speculate about whether his criticism of the 2000 campaign had played a role in the decision by Gore. Before Tuesday morning, the two had last communicated by e-mail to wish each other a happy Thanksgiving holiday, he said.

Lieberman said Gore had fought to break down trade barriers during the Clinton administration and fought Republicans led by House Speaker Newt Gingrich when they tried to cut Medicare in the mid-1990s.

Dean was on the opposite side of both issues, Lieberman said.

"I can't understand how Al Gore can stand with someone who stood with Newt Gingrich," Lieberman said.

 

Joe should not be surprised. He was a lackluster candidate as VP nominee and a lackluster (at best) candidate for President. Furthermore, he wouldn't have been a candidate for President at all except for the fact that Gore picked him in 2000. Gore didn't ask him not to run until Gore knew what he was going to do... that was Joe trying to get all the Gore folks lined up behind him. Joe was once a good guy, but he tasted the power in 2000 and it corupted him, or at least blinded him to his own faults. Some guys can't handle it and Joe is one. He needs to drop out pronto.

 

Forgot to add that Rippi stood up and took the blame for blowing the logistics of teh announcement and not having it sufficiently under wraps to allow Gore to call folks before it broke. I'm not saying that's true, but I also have no sympathy for the whiners. Dean worked for that endorsement and Gore's been shifting into a MoveOn kind of mindset, which is where a lot of Dean's support comes from.

 

"Rippi" should be "Trippi."

 

It's just a shame that the one candidate who comesacross as dignified and witha real plan from the Democrats' side would be stabbed in the back as he did in such a vile, and repulsive manner that Gore (i.e, the Devil) has done...Lieberman believed in a lot of things I don't, but as a man, I respect him more than all the other idiot fools because of the way he speaks and comes across...

The flair for Dean, and the Devil, and slightly less so for Clark, and Kerry is to yell, and contort their faces in multiple mechanical positions while tirading with fingers pointing and shouting hate-laced rhetoric that is frankly Hitler-like...well I guess loser anti-christs share so much in common...

It is repulsive and disgusting...this manner of discarding a candidate who has tried to reach out, while holding to certain democratic principles with a plan has been the most vile, and the most disgusting thing in the political arena I have ever seen...This is too much! This is character-low and people have the nonsense to agree with it?...Damn you Gore!!! Have you no convictions? Have you no moral and ethical calling?...Of course you don't, you are the anti-christ as it has been written, and his sidious plan is to now gain a political foothold at the price of doing what is wrong!...

He should have picked up the phone, and did the responsible thing. Why didn't you call Gore? Why did you act in such a vile, and discreditful nature? Secretary of State?...In your dreams, Devil...Deans blashemy has been the War,...and what is his plan now?...Run, run away and wait to get hit again...get out, and grab your ankles as you wait to get screwed again?...These freaking morons want to bring us down! They want to kill us all, and the only plan Dean and the Devil have is to take you down to the abyss of common sense aspects and goals while your future and your children's future is thrown in the garbage like left-over crap...

 

Oh, I dunno, Batman. Just because he says Gore is, as a matter of fact, The devil shouldn't lead one to conclude that he doesn't have proof of these allegations. Maybe ROXRAN can prove that the sulfurous odor of Al is not flatulent in nature, as I'd assumed.

But what is certifiably insane is to call Leiberman a democrat in any way shape or form. He's more republican than McCain, by far.

 

Well I figured that it wouldn't take Saletan long to continue his series of articles opposing Dean. One has to wonder if Saletan will eventually endorse and vote for Bush their mutual support for the war and occupaton of Iraq.

Somehow you have to think that if Gore had endorsed the pro-war Lieberman, Saletan would have written an article espousing the courage, open mindedness and loyalty of Al Gore.

What is puzzling is the attempt to equate the non-counting of votes in Florida with Gore's endorsement of Dean and his call for unifying around the candidate he just endorsed. It really doesn't work. The attempt, though, will probably garner much praise in the National Review circles.

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Tom Hayden on Dean.
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The Anybody-But-Dean Syndrome

By Tom Hayden, AlterNet
December 9, 2003

CAMBRIDGE – As the January primaries quickly approach, the Anybody-But-Dean syndrome (ABD) is becoming as infectious as the flu among rival Democrat camps. To prevent a Dean victory in Iowa, millions of dollars worth of attack ads will choke Iowa television screens and mailboxes this month.


The ABD fear is that if Dean defeats Richard Gephardt in Iowa, his likely win in New Hampshire will propel him to the nomination early. But if Dean's momentum is blocked in Iowa, the ABDs think they have a chance to undermine him in later primaries.


The stakes are high for peace and justice activists, including Dennis Kucinich supporters and undecideds, who can tip the balance in the close competition between Dean and Gephardt in Iowa. A de facto Iowa coalition between Dean and Kucinich supporters, even if Kucinich himself stays in the race, would be a victory for the anti-war movement and grassroots activism in the Democratic Party.


On the other hand, if Dean is thwarted in Iowa, it will be a victory for "centrists" based in the party's Washington DC power centers, who supported Bush in Iraq. That would mean demoralization among Dean's 550,000 signed-up volunteers, and also open a space for an increasingly probable Ralph Nader candidacy.


To understand this drama, it is necessary to pause for a crash course in Iowa's caucus rules. They are as complicated as the Bush Administration's blueprint for governing Iraq, but with one difference: Grassroots Iowa Democrats, unlike Iraqis, have real power.


On election night, thousands of voters show up at precincts across the state where they are herded into candidate preference groups. Each of those precincts is accorded a set number of convention delegates based on the Democratic vote in the last statewide election. To be eligible for any delegates, however, a presidential candidate must reach a threshold line of 15 percent of the participants in a local caucus. If Kucinich, for example, has less than 15 percent in a given caucus, his supporters in that caucus room can transfer their support to another candidate. If Dean is at 25 percent versus Gephardt at 24 percent in a given caucus, the Kucinich supporters might determine the winner.


The problem is that Kucinich supporters are likely to oppose Dean more than other Democrats because they feel pre-empted and marginalized by his peace candidacy. They complain that Dean, unlike Kucinich, has not laid out a broader strategy for global peace. They feel slighted when Dean attacks "inside-the-Beltway Democrats" without mentioning Kucinich's early and consistent leadership against the war. The question is whether they can transcend this understandable bitterness or will take the opportunity to inflict payback on Dean.


Dean needs to reach out to the Kucinich campaign, his most natural allies, without pandering. Dean needs to build bridges to the supporters of other candidates who will be blasting him in Iowa. It's a difficult task in the crossfire, but a test of how well Dean can unite and expand the party in the long run.


Who are these ABDs? Do they have a candidate who can win both the nomination and the November election? Do they think they can trash Dean and somehow win over his passionate constituency?


A perceptive article by Ryan Lizza in Nov. 29 issue of The New Republic reduces the Democratic split as "the party of Dean" versus "the party of Clinton." This is an oversimplification, as Lizza himself admits, because it omits unpredictable factors such as the role of Al Gore or Sen. Ted Kennedy should Sen. John Kerry lose in the early primaries. But I have heard similar portrayals of the division by national reporters traveling with the campaigns. One said, "they [the Clinton people] don't want Dean to win because they've got nothing there. They want a candidate who will keep saying good things about the Clintons to set things up for Hillary. It's like Nixon, who sat out 1964 to run in 1968."


Said another source, "They [the Clintons] have a formula for winning, and it's not nominating a governor from Vermont, it's finding a candidate from the South – the model of Clinton, Gore and before them Jimmy Carter. So it's a candidate like Clark or Edwards." Sen. Joe Lieberman, darling of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), is left hanging in this analysis, although former Clinton operatives like Mandy Grunwald and Mark Penn are embedded in the Lieberman camp.


The most salient ABD claim is that Howard Dean can't win, based on a regression analysis of a mountain of computer data on voter types. The problem with this approach, of course, is that it couldn't detect the rise of Dean from insurgent-outsider to front-runner, or the scale of MoveOn.org or the breadth of anti-Iraq sentiment in the country. Since the "best and brightest" consultants were wrong last year in counseling Democratic presidential candidates to stand with Bush on Iraq, they might be wrong now in asserting with pseudo-scientific aplomb that Dean can't beat Bush.


Computers can predict a model candidate on paper but not the spirit of that candidate on the trail. They can analyze the percentage of church-going Christians for Bush but not the likelihood of a worsening Iraqi quagmire during the 2004 election. In any event, the early polls show Bush ahead of all the Democratic contenders by eight to 10 points. So other questions become pertinent in addition to who can win. Which campaign will galvanize the greatest energy against the Second Coming of Bush? Which candidacy will be the most progressive and hard-hitting? Which would be most likely to win over Nader voters? Which Democratic Party do Democrats want to build for the future? Or is this about waiting for Hillary?

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This captures much of my thoughts on Joe.
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Hey Joe
Where you going with that hanky in your hand? Why Gore doesn't owe Lieberman an endorsement -- or an apology.
Michael Tomasky


Can someone please enlighten me: Why the pity party for Joe Lieberman?

The Connecticut senator has been parading around for the last few days, since Al Gore's endorsement of Howard Dean, with the mien of a virtuous spurned lover, trying to position himself much as Princess Di did after her positively beastly treatment by Prince Charles. Diana pulled it off successfully because she did, in fact, deserve some pity. Lieberman does not.

This is not high tea. This is politics. It's a tough game, and, as they say in sports, you have to make your own breaks and earn it on the field. So the question: What has Lieberman done to earn Gore's endorsement?

The answer is, "not much." He hasn't performed. I know at this point exactly what Lieberman partisans would say: that if one looks at the national polls, he's running pretty well (usually third behind Dean and Wesley Clark, sometimes second, occasionally fourth), and he's very much in this thing.

But everyone knows those poll standings are all about name recognition (and, of course, he has such wide name recognition because of . . . Al Gore, who made him an international celebrity by putting him on his 2000 ticket). To anyone watching the race closely, it does not feel as if Lieberman's got anything going for him besides name recognition -- no real oomph behind those numbers, no particular momentum. And if one looks at statewide polls in the important early primary and caucus states -- that is to say, states where voters having been laying eyes on the candidates -- Lieberman isn't much of a factor. His best early state is South Carolina, where he typically runs third or fourth. Not much to brag about.

The full story is even worse. If one looks at the entire arc of this race, Lieberman has actually gone down in the polls. Gore announced that he would not seek the 2004 nomination back on Dec. 15, 2002. That event sparked a new wave of polling. When Hillary Clinton was included, she led. But when she was excluded (because she again issued a round of denials concerning 2004), guess who led? An ABC/Washington Post poll from January 2003 had Lieberman at 27 percent, Dick Gephardt at 14 percent and others trailing. According to the Los Angeles Times, 10 days later those numbers read Lieberman 25, Kerry 20. So Lieberman led in the campaign's early days but has gone in reverse ever since. At the same time, who stood at 3 percent in that ABC/Washington Post poll and at 1 percent in the Times version? Dean.

Lieberman came into this race with every advantage, or at least two gigantic ones: universal name recognition (I would place its market value, in terms of what candidates usually have to spend to achieve the same degree of name recognition, at $10 million or more) and the sympathy of Democrats everywhere for having been part of the team that was robbed in 2000. If he had run an imaginative and engaging and compelling race, he could have established something close to a lock on the nomination by now, or at least a formidable lead.

But he didn't. Now, one can say that Lieberman has suffered because his hawkish war position is at odds with Democratic primary voters -- that is, that he has suffered because of his principles. But who's to say that his war position is any more principled than Dean's -- or, for that matter, anyone else's in the race? Anyone who thinks that the candidates who were seated members of Congress when the war resolution came up cast their votes with no hint of political calculation is obviously a fool. And there's nothing wrong with that; in politics, political calculation is a legitimate factor. Gephardt took Lieberman's war position, too. But Gephardt is doing better right now, and still has a shot at being the nominee, because he has defended that position more persuasively and has other proposals that have resonated with portions of the electorate in a deeper way than anything Lieberman has managed.

Then, on top of that, Lieberman has been the race's most negative candidate. Others have attacked Dean, and fought amongst themselves, in a variety of ways. But almost all of these feuds have been substantive and confined to particular differences. Only Lieberman has said -- or strongly, unmistakably implied -- that another candidate (he meant Dean) was unelectable. No candidate should say that about another candidate in his party. Lieberman was in essence saying that if Dean is the nominee, he might not be able to endorse Dean. I waited for days after Lieberman made that statement on Aug. 4 for Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe to crack the whip publicly. I'm still waiting.

And then, on top of that, it must be noted that Lieberman hasn't limited his criticisms to Dean. Last September, Lieberman lit into Gore himself at a Democratic Leadership Council meeting, saying that Gore lost in 2000 because he used phrases like "the people not the powerful." If loyalty is the subject here, what sort of loyalty is that? For that, Gore owes Lieberman an endorsement? Or even a phone call?

With virtuous types, it's always somebody else's fault. Iowa's too pacifist. New Hampshire's too flinty and independent. Gore's too this. Dean's too that. Please. Get out and earn votes.

Gore already did Lieberman his favor. By announcing his withdrawal from the race as early as he did, he said to Lieberman, "It's all yours, Joe." If he'd wanted to gum Lieberman up, Gore could have waited until March 2003, or even June 2003, to decide, by which time all the money people and consultants would have been hitched to other posts. But Gore rather graciously gave Lieberman plenty of time to build on his instant lead in the polls and make the best of it. Instead he's made very little of it. Cry me a river.

 

Dean's Band of Outsiders


By Harold Meyerson

Wednesday, December 10, 2003; Page A31


There are two kinds of Democrats in George W. Bush's America: those who are on the outside and know it, and those who are on the outside and don't. And the peculiar fascination of the Democratic presidential campaign is to watch the interplay between these two groups.

It is the Bush White House and the Republican Congress that set up this dynamic. By winning office with a negative 540,000-vote margin and then proceeding to govern in the most relentlessly partisan fashion from the right, the president has made unmistakably clear that the concerns of Democrats are of no interest to him. On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, the Republican leadership relies solely on Republican votes to get its measures passed, going so far as to exclude mainstream Democrats from conference committees. When America's new laws are to be negotiated, Republicans talk only to themselves.

Disastrously, it's been the Democrats in Congress who've been the slowest to pick up on their new marginality. Some of the Democrats who voted to authorize the Iraq war in October 2002 did so -- or say they did so -- in hopes of prodding Bush to embrace a more multilateral approach toward Iraq.

Call this the Tony Blair Fallacy -- both the prime minister and our own legislators failed to realize that Bush wanted only their permission, not their advice. And this year it was Ted Kennedy -- long the wisest liberal head on the Hill -- who calculated that the Medicare bill would grow more palatable the longer it was deliberated. In any previous Congress, that could well have been the case. In this Congress, however, no Democrats are allowed into the deliberations that matter.

Today the Democrats finally have a legislative leader -- San Francisco's Nancy Pelosi, who heads the party in the House -- who understands that dealmaking with the likes of Tom DeLay is a chimera, and that the business of the Democrats is to oppose. The overwhelming vote of House Democrats against the Medicare bill is testimony to her success. Her tenure casts a cold light on that of her predecessor, Dick Gephardt, who, in his eight years as minority leader, never assembled a united opposition to the malignant follies of Gingrich and DeLay.

While the nation's Democratic leaders were unable to understand just how marginal they'd become, however, millions of rank-and-file Democrats and just plain disgruntled Bush-haters intuitively grasped what was going on. Bush was bent on repealing the New Deal and replacing the internationalist order that the United States had erected after World War II with a more nationalist vision of his own. If you weren't with him, you were against him. And he was against you.

Howard Dean's initial appeal has been to those Americans who always knew they were on the margins of George Bush's America. Not the socioeconomic margins, not the African American and Latino communities, but the political, cultural and existential margins -- the young, urban, white middle class in particular. Dean's are the people who were bowling alone -- not churchgoers, not union members. They shared a set of beliefs on which they'd never before had an opportunity to act collectively.

The secret of Dean's success has been twofold. Alone among the serious Democratic candidates he understood that the party was shirking its obligation to oppose -- indeed, that the grass roots was furious at the failure of its leaders to realize this. Second, his campaign became the real Meetup for millions of Americans who'd had no place to go to affect politics in the age of Bush. Dean's edge is that his campaign has provided thousands of young Deaniacs with a dimension of meaning that their hitherto disaggregated lives may have lacked. No other candidate is within light-years of offering that.

In a sense, Al Gore's decision to endorse Dean is emblematic of the growing realization of the party's establishmentarians that they're outsiders after all. But Gore's been on this path for some time now. He was, we should remember, the first major Democrat to oppose Bush's war, speaking out against it in August 2002. Since losing the presidential race at the Supreme Court, he's also called for single-payer health care and recently come out against renewing our new-age version of star chamber justice, the USA Patriot Act.

Gore's old entourage, however, remains, literally and figuratively, on K Street, from where his former chief of staff, Ron Klain, helps steer the insider-dominated Wesley Clark campaign. There are no outsiders on K Street; it's where Democrats go when they want to make deals even when they're otherwise on the outs. Gore clearly has decided that K Street's not for him, and so much the better for Gore.

Can a band of outsiders beat George W. Bush? Clearly, the congressional wing of the Democrats can only benefit from embracing its outsider status, but is the same true for the aspiring presidential wing? There are limits to the Meetup approach to building a presidential majority, but no one's ever tried it before, and we don't know what those limits are.

 

Good read, Rimrocker. I have been a fan of Harold Meyerson for many years.

It looks like he might be coming on board the Dean movement.
The last article I read by Meyerson on Dean was saying that he thought that Dean would lose as he couldn't carry the blue collar voters in Ohio, which he said were needed to offset Florida, where he expects Bush to win.

I think Gore's endorsement and the endorsement of several major unions might be changing Meyerson's view.

The stealing of the vote in Florida has radicalized quite a few Americans. Is it any surprise that it might have somewhat that effect on Gore, who afterall personally was shafted.

The real Democrats are taking back the party and getting ready to take it to Dubya and Tom Delay. Time to get rid of that old softy Tom Daschle and replace him with someone with some cojones. The tide is turning.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62447-2003Dec13.html

Gore's Hands of Stone

Sunday, December 14, 2003; Page A04


Al Gore, to paraphrase Abba Eban, never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. There he was last week, throwing his considerable weight behind Howard Dean and giving the former Vermont governor a potentially decisive edge in the Democratic presidential competition.



But in doing so, he neglected to alert his former running mate, Joe Lieberman (Conn.), who loyally promised that he would not run if Gore did. And the manner in which he handled Lieberman also antagonized a great many of his former aides -- not a few of whom are distributed among the other presidential campaigns.

Many former Gore staffers and aides sent e-mails to Gore and left phone messages for him to express their dismay. The complaints, according to one member of the former Gore staffers' peanut gallery, ranged from "disappointed" to lamenting that he had "hurt his legacy and stature in the Democratic Party." And there was a biting voice mail from a 2000 campaign worker asking: "Haven't you done enough harm to the party already?"

One prominent Gore aide from the 2000 campaign said the Lieberman slight reminded him of a nickname aides secretly gave the candidate four years ago. Playing off of his Secret Service code name, Robert Stone, they dubbed him "Los Manos de Piedras," or "hands of stone" -- a reverse-Midas knack of touching potential political gold and somehow turning it to stone. "It is the unique skill of being able to engender the greatest amount of enmity from the largest number of people," the former aide said.
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And you know Gore is regretting that endorsement now. It's just bad timing and bad luck, but in my opinion this backfire couldn't have happened to a more deserving person.

 

Why and why?

 

The endorsement was just an endorsement. One democrat endorsing another democrat...Plain and simple.

 

Lets see...

Republicans do not want separation of church and state here in the USA.
But they DO want separation of church and state in Iraq.

Republicans demonize foreign people that act out against US invaders, yet if the tables were turned (an occupying force in the US), we'd claim it was for righteous reasons to defend oneself (or even to act out; fight back; expel the invaders).

As long as the US does it, it's for "good" and for "just" reasons. But if others do it, it's "evil" and "demonic."

Excuse me while I role my eyes....


Remember a time when "Christian" Republicans (60's) used terms like "them *****s." Or "lynch those ***** bastards!" But then used the Bible to justify their views. Were they "right?" Sounds like "us vs them" or "with us or against us" or "black and white" think to me.

How do you keep an perpetual war going? Keep antagonizing your enemies. Then, when they attack you, you can always point and say, "See, they ARE "evil!" They are attacking us for "no" reason."

The "enemy manufacturing business?"...Hmmm....sounds profitable. $$$