Defeat Will Present More Opportunities For Lieberman

By Chris Powell

 Whither Joe Lieberman in this presidential election without end?

 If Al Gore pulls a rabbit out of the hat in Florida and becomes president, Lieberman’s rising with him to the vice presidency will do what some Democrats feared when he chose to seek re-election to the Senate even as he ran for vice president: preserve the Republican majority in the Senate.

If Lieberman stays in the Senate, it will be tied between Democrats and Republicans, 50-50. While the new vice president, Dick Cheney, will break ties in favor of the Republicans, including the crucial organizational vote, Democrats will have a claim on half the Senate’s staff and maybe even some committee chairmanships – substantially more power than they have now.

 But if Lieberman resigns to become vice president, Governor Rowland will appoint a Republican to succeed him for the two years until the next federal election, and then the Republican margin in the Senate will become 51-49, without need of the vice president’s vote and without need of sharing Senate resources equally. That will not improve Lieberman’s standing in the party, though the party is sure to get over it in time.

 But perhaps ironically, Lieberman’s political future may be more promising if he loses the vice presidency and stays in the Senate.

 A vice president’s path to the top is blocked by his boss, usually for eight years. But if George W. Bush becomes president, Gore’s national political career probably will be over on account of his poor showing in advantageous circumstances, and the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 will be wide open. Except for the senator-elect from New York, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Lieberman then might be, by virtue of his vice presidential candidacy, the best-known Democratic presidential prospect in the country – and Mrs Clinton’s renown comes with possibly prohibitive divisiveness.

 As his colleague in the Senate from Connecticut, Christopher J. Dodd, did by becoming national Democratic chairman in 1995, Lieberman has just performed a service for the party that came at a high personal price. For as the party’s candidate for vice president, Lieberman sacrificed his national reputation for independence – abandoning, for the sake of party unity, the positions he had taken that had made him the Democratic hero of conservatives. And since Election Day he has become more partisan than senators profit from being. He almost has become Gore’s attack dog on the Florida recount issue, where there sometimes has been more sloganeering than reasoning.

 Regardless of whether Connecticut ever gets the old Joe Lieberman back and whether he ever again finds ways of breaking out of the liberal mold while remaining a good Democrat, at least the party nationally will owe him.

 Does Lieberman want to be president?

 Before this year it would have been hard for anyone from Connecticut to be taken seriously as a presidential candidate. But Lieberman added much to the Democratic ticket. His selection as vice president seems to have been what turned Gore’s prospects around in August. Lieberman was well received everywhere.

 Indeed, that Gore made a tie out of what became the crucial state, Florida, which had been expected to go Republican, was to a great extent a matter of Lieberman’s rallying to the Democratic ticket Jewish voters and even Cuban-Americans, by virtue of his friendship with the anti-Castro movement – a connection little known back home in Connecticut.

 And even if Lieberman was not a spellbinding speaker with set speeches, who was one this year? Lieberman excelled in ordinary interviews and dialogue and was more likely to be thoughtful than merely rhetorical. Indeed, it was generally agreed that both the vice presidential candidates this year were more impressive than the presidential ones.

 Since he brought strength to a weak ticket, Lieberman will be considered a national leader of the Democratic Party and a potential presidential candidate whether he has that much ambition or not. He might as well think about it. For it won’t help his new standing if he returns to the Senate by disclaiming all ambition right away.

(Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.)