Below The Beltway

As ridiculous as the idea sounds, the Lieberman for Veep buzz, which I wrote about last week (see here, here, and here) is continuing.

Today, Bill Kristol makes the case in his Monday New York Times column:

Obama and Biden will try to frame the presidential race as a normal Democratic-Republican choice. If they can do that, they should win. That would be far more difficult against a McCain-Lieberman ticket. The charge that McCain would merely mean a third Bush term would also tend to fall flat. And an unorthodox “country first” Lieberman selection would reinforce what has been attractive about McCain, and what has allowed him to run ahead of — though not yet enough ahead of — the generic Republican ballot.

A Lieberman pick should help with ticket splitters. But can such a ticket hold the support of pro-lifers, conservatives and Republicans? If you’re conscientiously pro-life, you will have reservations about a pro-abortion-rights V.P. If you’re a proud conservative, Lieberman hasn’t been one. If you’re a loyal Republican, you’d much prefer someone from within the ranks.

But if you’re pro-life, conservative and/or Republican, you certainly don’t want Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid running the country. If a McCain-Lieberman ticket is the best way to thwart that prospect, you could probably learn to live with it — even perhaps to like it.

And Hillary supporters could protest Obama’s glass ceiling by voting for John McCain and the Democratic Party’s 2000 vice presidential nominee.

Kristol is correct on some points. The Vice-President has no role in policy-making, the selection of appointess, or judicial selection, so the fact that a Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidate disagree on an issue, even one that is important to some voters as abortion, doesn’t necessarily mean anything.

However, I don’t think that Republicans, especially conservative Republicans who have been distrustful of McCain from the beginning, would be as accepting of the idea of someone like Lieberman who, until two years ago, was nominally a Democrat and who continues to caucus with the Democrats in the Senate, as their parties’ Vice-Presidential nominee. For one thing, even if Lieberman did renounce “any further ambition to run for the presidency” as Kristol put it, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything; as Vice-President, he could, at a moments notice, become President at which point he would be free to do whatever he wanted, including un-doing what his predecessor had done. For that reason alone, the idea of putting Lieberman on the ticket while at the same time maintaining party unity is just fundamentally absurd.

Marc Ambinder wonders if this Kristol column is “an official float”, meaning that it’s coming indirectly from the McCain campaign as a way to test the waters for a possible Lieberman pick and also wonders:

Just asking: would a floor fight at the convention be disastrous?  Might it reinforce, in a way, McCain’s anti-Republican Republicanism.

Well, that depends on whether the number of votes that McCain would gain by picking Lieberman would be more than those he would lose and, on that subject, a recent Zogby poll is instructive:

The evidence is clear, picking Lieberman would be an electoral disaster for McCain.