Joe Lieberman: Traitor or Mole? or Dupe? and John McCain's Ambition

Frank Rich had a great column in Sunday's New York Times, "Palin and McCain's Shotgun Marriage". In it he states

[McCain] wanted to choose the pro-abortion-rights Joe Lieberman as his vice president. If he were still a true maverick, he would have done so. But instead he chose partisanship and politics over country. "God only made one John McCain, and he is his own man," said the shafted Lieberman in his own tedious convention speech last week. What a pathetic dupe.

Here are my thoughts about Rich's comments, and about McCain's ambition to become President.

I felt that Lieberman's speech was very intriguing, rather than tedious, as Rich described it. Quite a balancing act! I still feel that his super-sized ego has more to do with this than anything else. Given the way McCain has tacked to the right, much of what Lieberman said about him doesn't apply anymore.

However, Lieberman's comments about partisanship were straight out of Obama's playbook. When Biden and Palin are factored in, I'd say Lieberman's speech gave a convincing argument to vote for Obama. Does that mean that Lieberman might be a "mole", rather than a traitor? And if he's a dupe, as Rich says, just exactly what was he duped into? At least give the man some credit for following his principles in these days of bipolar political discourse.

I should also add that, with Lieberman, McCain would be getting more than just pro-abortion rights, but rather most of the liberal Democratic agenda. For example, Lieberman voted against the confirmation of Judge Samuel Alito as Supreme Court Justice in January, 2006. With McCain tacking to the right, a McCain-Lieberman ticket would resemble the Dukakis-Bentsen ticket of 1988, where the two candidates, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis and Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen differed on a variety of issues.

One thing is clear. McCain will do anything to get elected president. He refused to collaborate with his captors in North Vietnam, but he is willing to collaborate with those, like Karl Rove, who did him dirt in the South Carolina Primary in 2000*. From which we may conclude that John McCain values becoming President more than life itself.

* John McCain took the New Hampshire primary in 2000 and was favored to win in South Carolina. Had he succeeded, he would likely have thwarted the presidential aspirations of George W. Bush and become the Republican nominee. According to Ann Banks, writing in The Nation, "Bush strategist Karl Rove came to the rescue with a vicious smear tactic. Rove invented a uniquely injurious fiction for his operatives to circulate via a phony poll. Voters were asked, 'Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain...if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?' This was no random slur. McCain was at the time campaigning with his dark-skinned daughter, Bridget, adopted from Bangladesh. It worked. Owing largely to the Rove-orchestrated whispering campaign, Bush prevailed in South Carolina and secured the Republican nomination."

(There is no doubt that the smear occurred. Rove denied any involvement.)