When Al Gore chose Joe Lieberman to be his running mate, I thought it was kind of a cool selection. At the time, I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to the individual votes of Senators. With Clinton in charge and making appointments, there were a lot fewer Democrats crossing over to defy the party and infuriate the base. I thought it was courageous of Gore to select a Jewish running mate. I mainly knew Lieberman through his amiable appearances on the Don Imus radio show and his famous rebuke of Clinton during the l’affair Lewinsky. I thought his rebuke was calculated to help Clinton and I didn’t hold it against him.
Once Joe was selected and I started reading about his record, I realized that he was a lot more socially conservative than I had suspected, that he was heavily influenced by corporate donors, and that he had flirted with school vouchers, ending affirmative action, and privatizing Social Security. I wasn’t exactly happy to learn these things, but I didn’t care a whole lot because Vice-Presidents don’t didn’t set policy.
Since that time there have been three moments of clarity for me about Joe Lieberman.
The first was realizing that he is a favorite of neo-conservatives. For example, he is one of the few recipients of political contributions from former DCI James Woolsey. He’s also been praised by right-wing hacks and demogogues from Sean Hannity to Ann Coulter to Michelle Malkin to Rush Limbaugh. That’s a major warning sign.
The second was his statement:
“It’s time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge he’ll be commander-in-chief for three more years,” the senator said. “We undermine the President’s credibility at our nation’s peril.”
He said this in response to the Democratic leadership’s attempts to force an investigation into the prewar intelligence. For me, there is nothing more important than punishing those that got us into a land war in Asia. Whether we find out the truth and punish the guilty or not, it is not going to do a damn thing to salvage the disaster in Iraq. We brushed Iran-Contra under the rug in the interest of national unity and it was a major mistake.
The third and final thing that Lieberman did was make the following comment:
Lieberman said he believes hospitals that refuse to give contraceptives to rape victims for “principled reasons” shouldn’t be forced to do so. “In Connecticut, it shouldn’t take more than a short ride to get to another hospital,”
That was my personal final tipping point. All you have to do is imagine taking your daughter, wife, or girlfriend to the hospital after a rape and being told that she he has a moral obligation to carry any resulting pregnancy to term. Having the hospital refuse emergency contraception and tell you to drive her to some other hospital while you are both in shock and feeling emotionally traumatized? It’s hard to describe the level of contempt I have for anyone that would do that to the victims of a rape.
Suffice to say, that I have an extreme low regard for the character and compassion of Senator Lieberman. I could never vote for him. And if there is one issue that lost me forever, it wasn’t the Kiss, it wasn’t the war, it was the “short rides” comment.
A lot of Democrats feel the same way and that is why Ned now has a double digit lead.
