The Enviro-Twins Versus Big Oil
The Differences Are Like Night and Day
by Tamara Baker
Tuesday, August 8, 2000 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (AmpolNS) -- Hear that sound? That gritty, grinding noise?
That's the sound of hundreds of well-paid GOP strategists gritting their teeth.
No sooner do they finish up with their lovely Philadelphia attempt to pretend that Tom DeLay and Jesse Helms don't exist, than they get blind-sided by Al Gore's pick of Joe Lieberman.
The beauty is that they and their press buddies have spent so much time promoting Lieberman, who openly criticized Bill Clinton over his affair with Monica Lewinsky, as Elijah-come-back-to-Earth, that they now cannot go back and do a 180 without looking extremely stupid.
They can't even try to paint Lieberman as a conservative, because no real conservative has fought for the environment, or ever supported a woman's right to choose (including the right to have access to the controversial late-term procedure the right-wingers have wrongly called 'partial-birth abortion'), or opposed letting Bush and Cheney's donor friends drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or supported the National Endowment for the Arts. Joe Lieberman has done all these things. The GOP can't even claim that he supports partial privatization of Social Security anymore; as Ron Fournier reported in an August 7, 2000 AP piece, Lieberman has come to oppose even partial privatization.
His selection has already done for the Dem ticket what picking the real paleocon Dick Cheney did NOT do for the Republican slate: Give it a big, fat boost.
As the August 7 overnight USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup poll of registered voters (in other words, people who will actually VOTE in the November elections) shows, Bush's much-touted seventeen-point convention bounce has been obliterated down to a statistically insignificant two-point margin, all within the 24 hours since Lieberman's selection, rumored for days, was made official.
And this is BEFORE the Dems start their convention.
This will be good.
For one thing, the Democrats aren't going to be hiding the true stalwarts of THEIR party away, as the Republicans did with Tom DeLay, Bob Barr, and Jesse Helms. Nope, the Democrats will proudly display their movers and shakers, from Jesse Jackson (who extravagantly praised Gore's pick of Lieberman today) to Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, even down to former Republicans like Minnesota's state auditor, Judi Dutcher. Unlike the GOP event, which featured non-white, non-male faces merely as hired props, the non-whites and non-males you'll see in Los Angeles will be active Democratic party members, holders of the reins of power.
And there at the head of the Democratic ticket, as a contrast to the all-WASP, all-Big-Oil GOP pairing, we'll have the Enviro-Twins, Al Gore and Joe Lieberman, men of values and compassion and liberality.
And of course, with Joe Lieberman being the first Jew ever to be nominated by a major party for the Vice-Presidency, running against a man, George W. Bush, whose parents broke up his first big romance because the girl was Jewish.
The differences between the two tickets are like night and day.
This will be GOOD.