Gore selects antidote to GOP attack

Journal Record, The (Oklahoma City), Aug 9, 2000

WASHINGTON (NYT) -- Joe Lieberman went to bed Sunday night convinced that he was not going to be on the Democratic ticket. Al Gore went to sleep knowing otherwise.

The vice president, whose quest for the White House spans more than a dozen years, knows that Lieberman is the Democratic antidote to every venomous argument made by Republicans last week in Philadelphia.

In speech after speech, the GOP portrayed Democrats as spoiled baby boomers, driven by polls, seduced by the trappings of power and lacking the ethical moorings to preside over the White House.

Gore is apparently gambling that such charges will have a hard time penetrating a ticket containing Lieberman.

The senator's liabilities were evident to the pundits, whom Lieberman acknowledged he spent too much time listening to over the weekend; he comes from a region of the country that is already solidly Democratic; his conservative voting record bothers liberals; and his Judaism is a political risk that is hard to calculate.

Yet Republicans are trying to make the 2000 campaign about character. And no one questions Lieberman's honor or his devotion to public service. No one can accuse him of being a "smash mouth" campaigner from the attack-dog school of politics. And no one will say of him what Texas Gov. George W. Bush said of Gore last week: that he is "running in borrowed clothes."

"Joe Lieberman has an identifiable moral compass," said the Rev. Lou Sheldon, the social conservative who has attacked Democrats over so much as a sniff of impropriety.

"He's someone who is independent," said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D- Calif. "He goes by an inner compass that guides him."

Of course, there will be sharp disagreements over the direction of that compass.

Sheldon condemned Lieberman's support for legal abortions, gay rights and social spending.

Many liberals are disappointed by Lieberman's support for vouchers, school prayer, the death penalty, his opposition to a gas tax and his inclination to allow workers to privately invest their Social Security savings. Lieberman is a devotee of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council at a time when Green Party candidate Ralph Nader is threatening to take votes from the party's liberal base.

Yet Lieberman is seen as a Democrat who has been able to stay above the partisan fray, and his inclusion on the ticket deprives Republicans of the moral high road that they signaled in Philadelphia would be a central part of their campaign.

"Joe Lieberman is a good man, who certainly has the personality and temperament of a statesman," said David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, who gave Lieberman a "worst and dimmest" award last year based on 25 votes cast against "conservative" causes.

Through the final days, Gore considered a number of running mates, including war heroes, women, liberals and promising young party stars. But ultimately he settled on a man who, among other things, would inoculate him against the moral failings of President Clinton.

"This is a cleansing choice, a separating-from-Bill-Clinton- choice," said California state Assemblywoman Carole Midgen, D-San Francisco, a member of the National Democratic Committee and a strong Gore supporter.

After President Clinton's admission in August 1998 that he had misled the nation and had an "inappropriate" relationship with Monica Lewinsky, Lieberman was the first Democrat to take to the Senate floor, and in his deliberate, gravelly voice, said: "Such behavior is not only inappropriate, it is immoral and it is harmful.

"It is wrong and unacceptable and should be followed by some measure of public rebuke and accountability," said Lieberman, who had been a close friend of Clinton for 30 years since he first ran for state Senate from New Haven and Clinton was a young volunteer in his campaign.

In the end, Lieberman's harsh words may have helped save Clinton, by providing Democrats an example of how they could condemn his behavior without calling for his ouster. Lieberman voted against removing Clinton from office and was persuaded by Democratic leaders to drop his push for a censure.

Lieberman's moral approach to politics, rooted in his religion and his belief that government service is a high calling, is outlined in his recent book In Praise of Public Life. In the book, Lieberman calls on public figures to make decisions about their personal life based not upon the calculation "Is it legal?" but upon the question "Is it right?"

"When public figures begin to separate these two questions, the foundation of trust between the people and their leaders is compromised," Lieberman writes.

"I assume that everything I do in my life -- everything -- could possibly become public, and therefore I should not do anything privately that I could not justify publicly," he continues.

Lieberman argues that the public's distaste for politics is partly the responsibility of negative campaigning, which he equates to "Kmart launching an all-out advertising offensive against Wal-Mart, and Wal-Mart doing the same in return. "The net effect would be that fewer people would shop at either place," he concludes. Lieberman also finds blame for the media, which he accuses of turning every policy argument into a political bloodbath.