(I realize 2000 is “ancient history” but that may be all the more reason to bring this forgotten matter up. Lieberman is being discussed in a current-politics thread, but the question I raise seems important enough to deserve its own thread.)
In 2000 Joseph Lieberman ran for both Vice President and Senator. Had he won both elections, he would have been required to resign from the Senate and the Republican Governor of Connecticut would have appointed a Republican to take his place. Had Lieberman not run for Senate, a Democrat would have been heavily favored to win election.
In other words, due to Lieberman’s decision, a Gore-Lieberman Administration would have had one more Republican Senator to confound the government. The parties were close enough that the Senator might well have been the crucial 51st Republican but even a 47th Republican might be troublesome since Democrat Senators do not always vote with their leaders.
This seems like a big deal to me but I had to hunt just to find any on-line mention of it.
Lieberman’s motives are of little interest to me, although they hardly seem to be those of a loyal Democrat. My question, rather, is: What did other Democrats think? Did Al Gore foresee the problem, and if so, why didn’t he insist Lieberman do the loyal thing? Do “Democrats” like Lieberman (and Gore?) just think it isn’t important whether their party have a Senate majority?
Why weren’t Democrats astounded and enraged by Lieberman’s disloyalty?
As long as we’re talking about ancient history: why aren’t you, as a Neanderthal, astounded and enraged by the GENOCIDE of Neanderthals by Homo sapiens?
Jesus Christ, if there is one more leading, rhetorical, self-serving “why aren’t you outraged by this petty bullshit that happened when I was in diapers” OP…I’ll eat a steak or something.
The goal of any politician is to be re-elected. Lieberman hedged his bets and succeeded with his back-up plan.
Where you’re going wrong here is you have this idea that politicians step aside for “party unity”. That’s a crock. They step aside only when they know they cannot win or they’re ready to retire anyway and they lard it with “good of the party” nonsense for people like you to swallow.
You can bet your last nickel that Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, et al. would throw every single member of their party under the bus if it meant that they would be re-elected. There should be no doubt in your mind about that. Fine, you’re upset that Lieberman almost hurt the Democrats in 2000. Guess what? Other than using the party as a nominating apparatus they don’t care. Once they’re in they carefully calculate their voting patterns and behaviors to ensure re-nomination, which voters dutifully do more than 9 times out of 10.
Cynical, isn’t it? Yet it’s absolutely true. You need only look at Lieberman’s last election to see that.
Not only that but we in PA just watched both Toomey and Sestak throw Arlen Specter under the bus for different reasons at different times. It’s a constant of politics regardless of platform or party.
(throwing this in before someone makes a snide comment about Airman only using liberal examples)
In 2000, the Democrats didn’t care about one seat more or less because they were in the minority in the Senate, as your link says, and a one seat difference wouldn’t have changed it.
Yes, it was possible in theory that they could have picked up enough seats to get into a majority. So what? It was also possible that they wouldn’t, or that they would pick up so many that losing Lieberman’s seat wouldn’t have hurt. And it may be that the party leaders didn’t see a strong candidate waiting in the wings to step up in place of Lieberman.
And apparently there wasn’t one. IIRC, some guy named Lamont(?) beat Lieberman in the next primary, and Lieberman later mopped the floor with him in the general.
Airman that’s an overly cynical view, and demonstrably false. The most recent example – Chris Dodd. Dodd is battling personal scandal in Connecticut right now, so he’s retiring in order to keep the seat in Democratic hands. If he were as you suggest, he’d still be in the race, which he could well win, or could well lose. But he’s not, because he thinks having Connecticut represented in the Senate by someone who shares his values is more important than having Connecticut represented by him personally.
As to the OP, there was some comment on it at the time. But Lieberman was picked as the running mate in August, after (I assume) he had already qualified for the CT Senate ballot. Withdrawing in favor of another Dem w/o statewide recognition and possible ballot issues might not have been such a sure bet as you propose. Plus, no one realized at the time that Lieberman would be the 50th vote in the Senate, so it didn’t seem that one Senate seat either way would make the difference.
If he thought he could win for even a second he wouldn’t be dropping out. Since he knows he can’t win he’s doing the “good of the party” routine. There is nothing about Chris Dodd’s situation that contradicts my assertion.
A rallying cry of “party unity” is useful if it helps energize your supporters and get you re-elected. But if your supporters, for one reason or another, aren’t on board with that particular strategy, then the party goes out the window. In fact, you might even be well served by slagging off the rest of your party and talking about how it needs a new direction (and you will, of course, be happy to take the lead, for the good of everyone).
Another thing is that the people who elect you, the people in your district or state, often have a different set of priorities than people on the national stage and in the media. If you bring boatloads of cash and other government pork to your constituents, then they probably don’t care if you’re caught sodomizing a 15-year-old page boy while smoking crack.
Look at New York congressman Charles Rangell, at the center of a whole bunch of ethics inquiries right now. The Democratic leadership has been pushing him to step aside, and a bunch of challengers have emerged against him in his Harlem district, but he still has massive support in the area because he’s a senior politician who’s been in Congress for 40 years, knows lots of people, and can get things done. He was the chair of the Ways and Means Committee before this scandal broke, although he has now stepped down from that. As long as the electors think that he can get more for them than any potential replacement might be able to get, they will probably vote for him, and these sorts of calculations happen all over the country.
It is indeed ancient, ancient, ancient history. There’s no outrage because everybody expects politicians to be thoroughly self-interested. Joe Biden did the same thing in 2008, but with different results.
Not only that, but I seem to recall there were people who did complain about it at the time, especially just after election day, when the outcome of the Presidential election was in doubt and the senate was divided 50-50.
The governor of Deleware in 2009 was almost certainly going to be a Dem, though. The governor of CT in 2000 was a Republican So Biden’s stepping down simply replaced himself with another Dem, if Gore/Lieberman had won, it would’ve lost the Dems a Senate seat in the following Congress.
FWIW, there was some grumbling about Lieberman’s decision not to step down to run for VP (and some grumbling about Biden, though in that case it was about his timing his resignation to help his son rather then disadvantaging his party).
What’s the difference between Joe Lieberman and a hypothetical Republican replacement?
That wasn’t a joke. I’m actually asking if anyone would have noticed.
In any case, it’s far from certain that a Republican would have been appointed to take Lieberman’s place; there seems to be something of a consensus that governors in states who get to appoint replacement Senators should do so from the party of the Senator not being replaced, not based on their own preferences.
The political climate in the summer of 2000 was less contentious than it is now, in my opinion. I’m not sure why. Part of the reason may have been that the blogosphere hadn’t swung into full gear–this may also explain why you couldn’t find much when you searched. But basically, I don’t think too many people were thrilled about either candidate. And if people were having a hard time getting excited about the presidential race, Lieberman’s wonkish maneuvering wasn’t going to cause much outrage. But I’d wager that 75% of voters never knew what Lieberman was doing.
Secondly, to clarify what I think others are saying, it would only have been an issue if Gore won and the Dems missed control of the Senate by that one vote. You can certainly infer that Lieberman’s #1 priority is Lieberman, but apparently Gore felt he brought enough to the ticket to allow Lieberman hedge his bets. There are worse problems to have than the presidency and a divided senate. I mean, it would beat the hell out of losing the election. So Gore took what he figured was his best shot. Pity he couldn’t manage to carry his home state.
Refresh my memory, folks: Gore was projected to win the election pretty much all summer, wasn’t he? Not by a wide margin, but he generally ahead, yes? And who were the other possible VP candidates?
No, Gore had a brief blip of a few weeks at the end of the summer where he was ahead in polls, but otherwise he was consistanly behind Bush for basically the whole year prior to the election. See here
Its actually kind of impressive he managed to win the popular vote.
Hell, even the SDMB in the summer of 2000 was less contentious. I think the SDMB of 2000 would be well-nigh unrecognizable to most newcomers: “You mean that threads in GD and the Pit didn’t always devolve into political shouting matches???” Well, yeah, they didn’t.
I think Bush-Gore changed more about the United States than most of us would want to admit. The crystallization of America into red and blue camps that are bound to hate the other is a fairly new thing. Oh, sure, you had people on both sides that hated each other. But there’s a new level to it all now.
Lieberman votes pretty solidly Democratic on most issues. He’s pro-union, pro-gay rights, pro-environment, pro-choice. He’s just a hawk on foreign policy and national security issues, but any Republican senator from Connecticut would be to the right of him on most issues.