Lieberman seemed to have suddenly and violently become an ultra-radical Bush supporter, after having run against Bush in 2000. He slams the Democratic presidential ticket in a speech that was - and I say this in as nonpartisan a spirit as I can - not entirely made up of truthful statements.
Yet he continues to pretend he is not a member of the Republican Party.
Can someone explain to me - **preferably with facts only **- what the heck his deal is?
He’s not pretending he isn’t a Republican. He isn’t a Republican. He sides with them on national security and foreign policy issues, but on every other issue I’m aware of (gun control, abortion, labor), he’s a Democrat. That’s not enough of a Democrat for some people, which I understand, and I think you can present a very good argument that he’s a me-first guy even by political standards - he ran for re-election to the Senate at the same time he was running for VP, which would have flipped control of the Senate to the Republicans had he and Gore won.
At least part of it is as follows:
Back in 2006, Lieberman got primaried (meaning, some Democrats found someone to run against him in the Democratic primary) and lost. Ned Lamont earned the party’s bid.
So Lieberman ran as an Independent Democrat, or something like that. He got some backing from Democrats, such as Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. And he won, and now he’s paying the Democrats back by ::checks forum:: defecating in the Senate and running gleefully back to McCain, Graham et al. and watching as Reid et al. clean up his leavings and pretend he has a future in the party.
And why haven’t Reid et al. left him out to dry? Why does he still have his committee chairships?
Because the second Reid punishes him, Lieberman “suddenly” decides to caucus with the Republicans, and the 51-49 Democratic majority in the Senate goes 50-50, and Darth Cheney is the tiebreaker.
There is a chance, though I wouldn’t invest your nest egg (or mine) in it, that the Democrats will get a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate next cycle. If they get 61 Democrats (and I haven’t look at the poll numbers in at least a week or two), expect Lieberman to become “Lieber-who?”
And even if they don’t get a filibuster-proof majority, if enough Republicans senators get the picture that their constituents aren’t going to put up with more obstructionist rubbish, we might actually not have another two years of relative logjams.
Facty enough for you? I’d link to all the fun this has been, but it gets very depressing very quickly, and one feels bad for Harry Reid.
What’s in this for Lieberman? If I understand that whole “primaried” thing this is all about spite? He wants to screw over the Democrats because they pissed in his punchbowl in Connecticut…ok. What’s the longterm upside for him? I have to think that he’s dead meat in soundly Democratic (and presumably McCain hating) Connecticut now. Is he really just committing political suicide out of spite?
You wonder. There’s already talk of stripping him of his committees if the Dems pick up some seats in November. (The Dems don’t dare do it now for fear that he will defect to the Republican Party and give them a majority in the Senate.)
He’s dead to most Democrats now, Connecticut or otherwise. If he ran for mayor of his house in Connecticut, he’d lose.
So he’s betting on the Republican ticket. He’s betting that he can run on his previous service to the state, maybe get some old Democrats to stump for him for a share of the cash raised, and become a moderate Republican (thus his votes on the war): liberal on social issues, conservative on the issues he thinks Connecticut Republicans care about.
The longterm upside for him is staying in the Senate. Or, should McCain and Palin win, he’ll escape the Senate and get himself a nice Cabinet position, maybe an ambassadorship. Then he’ll have won.
And if not, he’ll go down fighting. He might even get Clinton to appear at a fundraiser again in 2012. Or maybe he’ll get Zell Miller (who pulled a similar act in 2004). Who knows?
He’s doing what he thinks will get him elected or what got him elected in the past - his criticisms of Bill Clinton during the impeachment scandal helped get him on the Gore ticket - in some combination with what he thinks is right. He’s not just screwing the Democrats over. For example I believe he gave money to the Democratic Senate election fund. He just doesn’t feel a lot of loyalty to the party itself at this point, since there was a significant effort to beat him in the last election. A lot of established Democrats supported him against Lamont in the primaries, but once he lost, they threw their support behind Lamont and tried to get Lieberman to stay home instead of running as an independent. That didn’t work and I’m sure he took it personally.