John Kerry and George Bush are tied at 44 percent of Florida RV’s, according to a new Quinnipiac University Poll conducted 10/22-26 .The Poll also found that, among the 16 percent of Flordians who have alread voted, Kerry leads by 56-39 percent.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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March 28: RIP Joe Lieberman, a Democrat Who Lost His Way
I was sorry to learn of the sudden death of 2000 Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Lieberman. But his long and stormy career did offer some important lessons about party loyalty, which I wrote about at New York:
Joe Lieberman was active in politics right up to the end. The former senator was the founding co-chair of the nonpartisan group No Labels, which is laying the groundwork for a presidential campaign on behalf of a yet-to-be-identified bipartisan “unity ticket.” Lieberman did not live to see whether No Labels will run a candidate. He died on Wednesday at 82 due to complications from a fall. But this last political venture was entirely in keeping with his long career as a self-styled politician of the pragmatic center, which often took him across party boundaries.
Lieberman’s first years in Connecticut Democratic politics as a state legislator and then state attorney general were reasonably conventional. He was known for a particular interest in civil rights and environmental protection, and his identity as an observant Orthodox Jew also drew attention. But in 1988, the Democrat used unconventional tactics in his challenge to Republican U.S. senator Lowell Weicker. Lieberman positioned himself to the incumbent’s right on selected issues, like Ronald Reagan’s military operations against Libya and Grenada. He also capitalized on longtime conservative resentment of his moderate opponent, winning prized endorsements from William F. and James Buckley, icons of the right. Lieberman won the race narrowly in an upset.
Almost immediately, Senator Lieberman became closely associated with the Democratic Leadership Council. The group of mostly moderate elected officials focused on restoring the national political viability of a party that had lost five of the six previous presidential elections; it soon produced a president in Bill Clinton. Lieberman became probably the most systematically pro-Clinton (or in the parlance of the time, “New Democrat”) member of Congress. This gave his 1998 Senate speech condemning the then-president’s behavior in the Monica Lewinsky scandal as “immoral” and “harmful” a special bite. He probably did Clinton a favor by setting the table for a reprimand that fell short of impeachment and removal, but without question, the narrative was born of Lieberman being disloyal to his party.
Perhaps it was his public scolding of Clinton that convinced Al Gore, who was struggling to separate himself from his boss’s misconduct, to lift Lieberman to the summit of his career. Gore tapped the senator to be his running mate in the 2000 election, making him the first Jewish vice-presidential candidate of a major party. He was by all accounts a disciplined and loyal running mate, at least until that moment during the Florida recount saga when he publicly disclaimed interest in challenging late-arriving overseas military ballots against the advice of the Gore campaign. You could argue plausibly that the ticket would have never been in a position to potentially win the state without Lieberman’s appeal in South Florida to Jewish voters thrilled by his nomination to become vice-president. But many Democrats bitter about the loss blamed Lieberman.
As one of the leaders of the “Clintonian” wing of his party, Lieberman was an early front-runner for the 2004 presidential nomination. A longtime supporter of efforts to topple Saddam Hussein, Lieberman had voted to authorize the 2003 invasion of Iraq, like his campaign rivals John Kerry and John Edwards and other notable senators including Hillary Clinton. Unlike most other Democrats, though, Lieberman did not back off this position when the Iraq War became a deadly quagmire. Ill-aligned with his party to an extent he did not seem to perceive, his presidential campaign quickly flamed out, but not before he gained enduring mockery for claiming “Joe-mentum” from a fifth-place finish in New Hampshire.
Returning to the Senate, Lieberman continued his increasingly lonely support for the Iraq War (alongside other heresies to liberalism, such as his support for private-school education vouchers in the District of Columbia). In 2006, Lieberman drew a wealthy primary challenger, Ned Lamont, who soon had a large antiwar following in Connecticut and nationally. As the campaign grew heated, President George W. Bush gave his Democratic war ally a deadly gift by embracing him and kissing his cheek after the State of the Union Address. This moment, memorialized as “The Kiss,” became central to the Lamont campaign’s claim that Lieberman had left his party behind, and the challenger narrowly won the primary. However, Lieberman ran against him in the general election as an independent, with significant back-channel encouragement from the Bush White House (which helped prevent any strong Republican candidacy). Lieberman won a fourth and final term in the Senate with mostly GOP and independent votes. He was publicly endorsed by Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani, among others from what had been the enemy camp.
The 2006 repudiation by his party appeared to break something in Lieberman. This once-happiest of happy political warriors, incapable of holding a grudge, seemed bitter, or at the very least gravely offended, even as he remained in the Senate Democratic Caucus (albeit as formally independent). When his old friend and Iraq War ally John McCain ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, Lieberman committed a partisan sin by endorsing him. His positioning between the two parties, however, still cost him dearly: McCain wanted to choose him as his running mate, before the Arizonan’s staff convinced him that Lieberman’s longtime pro-choice views and support for LGBTQ rights would lead to a convention revolt. The GOP nominee instead went with a different “high-risk, high-reward” choice: Sarah Palin.
After Barack Obama’s victory over Lieberman’s candidate, the new Democratic president needed every Democratic senator to enact the centerpiece of his agenda, the Affordable Care Act. He got Lieberman’s vote — but only after the senator, who represented many of the country’s major private-insurance companies, forced the elimination of the “public option” in the new system. It was a bitter pill for many progressives, who favored a more robust government role in health insurance than Obama had proposed.
By the time Lieberman chose to retire from the Senate in 2012, he was very near to being a man without a party, and he reflected that status by refusing to endorse either Obama or Mitt Romney that year. By then, he was already involved in the last great project of his political career, No Labels. He did, with some hesitation, endorse Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in 2016. But his long odyssey away from the yoke of the Democratic Party had largely landed him in a nonpartisan limbo. Right up until his death, he was often the public face of No Labels, particularly after the group’s decision to sponsor a presidential ticket alienated many early supporters of its more quotidian efforts to encourage bipartisan “problem-solving” in Congress.
Some will view Lieberman as a victim of partisan polarization, and others as an anachronistic member of a pro-corporate, pro-war bipartisan elite who made polarization necessary. Personally, I will remember him as a politician who followed — sometimes courageously, sometimes foolishly — a path that made him blind to the singular extremism that one party has exhibited throughout the 21st century, a development he tried to ignore to his eventual marginalization. But for all his flaws, I have no doubt Joe Lieberman remained until his last breath committed to the task he often cited via the Hebrew term tikkun olam: repairing a broken world.
“Quinnipiac Poll: Kerry, Bush tied Among FL RV’s
John Kerry and George Bush are tied at 44 percent of Florida RV’s, according to a new Quinnipiac University Poll conducted 10/22-26 .The Poll also found that, among the 16 percent of Flordians who have alread voted, Kerry leads by 56-39 percent. ”
So does that mean that 5% of the people who voted are still undecided or is nader picking up those votes?
What can we discern if anything from the 16%? Are they coming from Democratic areas? Jebbie was making excuses recently on MTP about hurricane damage in Republican areas, with those affected having higher priorities than voting for Bush.
At this point, when a poll is posted, can you give a comparison to the most RECENT poll, from the same jurisdiction and pollster, so that TRENDS can be assessed. Then it would always be good to summarize what other polls are saying (eg the other two most recent Fla polls are also close, and trending from their previous polls in the same direction, w numbers.) It would take up just a little extra space but would make it much more easier to make sense amidst a blizzard of individual data bits.
The Broward County thing shows how completely easy it still is to steal elections. Note that the POSTAL SERVICE might be involved, which is national. “Oh but that’s forbidden!” Well, remember what the word “Law” means to Tory types like Bush. To them, obedience to (their) power is the holy writ of what THEY call ‘natural law’. Honest elections are mere dust in the balance by comparison. Only by an approach to modern methods of discovery that jettisons the catch-22s that applied in Florida 2000 can there be any chance of an honest election –(or fighting terrorism, but I’ll get into that after the election).
The means of stealing elections are so myriad, that only by aggressively pursuing what is underground, and not relying on the means of laundering these issues that exist within the system that exists for the PURPOSE of stealing/railroading elections and then laundering it, can people hope to have honest presidential and Congressional elections
Great news. Just a point of clarification regarding the sentence, “among the 16 percent of Flordians who have alread voted, Kerry leads by 56-39 percent.”
Does this mean,
a) 16% of all eligible voters in FL have already voted through early voting, and among those that have already voted, Kerry leads 56-39
OR
b) Among all voters who have voted through early voting, 16% of early voters have been polled and within that 16% sample of early voters, Kerry leads 56-39
Do you see the confusion? I can’t tell whether the 56-39 figure is representative of 100% of the early vote, and the early vote constitutes 16% of those eligible to vote on Nov. 2; or whether the 56-39 figure is representative of 16% of all early voters, and we don’t know what the ratio of people voting early represents among all people eligible to vte on Nov. 2.
I wrote a state-by-state synopsis called “The Gore States Today” at Daily Kos and thought I’d share it here, too:
http://dailykos.com/story/2004/10/28/132557/30
(Just copy and paste the URL into your browser if clicking on it doesn’t take you to the page.)
I wonder if that includes the missing 58,000 absentee ballots? 🙂
I agree, i am no expert but here is how i feel about it, in 2000 Bush had 49.2 % of the vote, he has less support now he is at about 47%-48%. People who are going to vote for him already know, everyone else who hasn’t made up their mind hasn’t made up their mind for a reason, becasue they don’t like something about Bush. Also, people regester to vote for a reason, even if only half of the new regestered voters vote, that will put kerry over the top, people don’t fight to keep the status-quo, the fight for change, and i think on election day, kerry will win by a comfortable margin, 30 votes in the true battle ground states.
No wonder there are reports this morning of Repub goons waiting outside early polling places in Florida, telling old ladies there are no elevators or air conditioning and that the wait is 6 hours long.
Can’t we DO something about those guys?