For the umpteenth time, FUCK YOU! Joe Lieberman

[bolverk 29405]

I'd forgotten all about this low-down, no-good, droopy dog dickhead.

Joe Lieberman Weighs the Trump Risk
The No Labels co-chair says a third-party ticket won’t help Trump in 2024. Democrats are dubious.

Joe Lieberman wants to make one thing clear. “The last thing I’d ever want to be part of,” the former Connecticut senator and onetime vice-presidential nominee told me by phone last week, “is bringing Donald Trump back to the Oval Office.”

Democrats have their doubts. Lieberman and his former party have been warring for years, ever since he won a fourth Senate term, in 2006, as an independent after Connecticut Democrats dumped him in a primary. Suddenly liberated, Lieberman endorsed the Republican John McCain over Barack Obama in 2008 and proceeded to tank the Democrats’ dreams of enacting a public health-insurance program through the Affordable Care Act.

He’s now a co-chair of No Labels, the centrist group that, to the growing alarm of Democrats, is preparing to field a third-party presidential ticket in 2024. The organization’s leaders say they’re trying to save voters from a binary rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden that most Americans have told pollsters they don’t want. But Democrats and more than a few Republicans fear that such a plan might ensure exactly what Lieberman insists he would hate to see: Trump’s return to the White House. Both No Labels’ own polling and independent surveys have shown that a “moderate, independent” candidate could capture as much as 20 percent of the popular vote and would pull more of that support from Biden than from Trump. If the 2024 election is as close as 2020’s—and pretty much every political prognosticator believes it will be—that could be decisive.

No Labels has already lost one of its co-founders, William Galston, over its push for a third-party ticket; Galston resigned in protest this spring over the possibility that the bid could tip the election to Trump. Democratic members of the No Labels–backed Problem Solvers Caucus in the House have disavowed the effort for the same reason. The moderate Democratic group Third Way is adamantly opposed to the idea, and a new bipartisan group is forming to stop it.

For now, Lieberman is undeterred. “I think people in both parties, particularly the Democrats, are greatly overreacting,” Lieberman told me. “They really would do better to try to build up support for their own ticket and adopt a platform that’s more to the center.”

cont'd

Spoiler

Founded by the Democratic fundraiser Nancy Jacobson, No Labels launched in 2010 with an initial focus on promoting centrist policies and breaking partisan gridlock in Congress during the Obama presidency. It formed the Problem Solvers Caucus in 2017 and has touted some of the major bipartisan bills that have passed with Biden’s support, including the 2021 infrastructure law. It is now putting significant money behind an idea—a so-called unity ticket featuring one Democrat and one Republican—that has come up repeatedly over the past two decades but never actually materialized. Leaders of No Labels have said they won’t decide whether to nominate a ticket until the spring, when they would assess the major-party nominees and see what polling shows about the effect a third-party bid might have. So far they’ve refused to discuss who their actual candidates might be.

Citing a large poll the group commissioned in December, No Labels has argued that a third-party ticket could win enough states—including some that are deeply red and deeply blue—to capture the Electoral College. Lieberman acknowledged that that remains a tall order. He said No Labels wanted a potential unity ticket to play “a constructive role” even if it didn’t win, drawing both parties back toward the ideological middle. They are hoping, for example, that one of the two parties will embrace the “Common Sense” policy agenda it released yesterday. It’s not clear, however, that this would make Biden or Trump any more palatable to voters.

The group’s lodestar is the late Ross Perot, who captured 19 percent of the vote in 1992 and was the last third-party candidate to draw significant popular support. Lieberman credits Perot’s bid for prompting President Bill Clinton to embrace policies that led to a balanced federal budget; many Republicans believe the Texas businessman cost George H. W. Bush a second term. More recent third-party candidates such as Jill Stein in 2016 have garnered much less support but played more obvious spoiler roles, delivering Republican presidential victories. And Lieberman, who was Al Gore’s running mate in 2000, is well aware of the impact that Ralph Nader had in that election, when he took crucial votes away from the Democratic ticket in Florida.

“When I look at the data next year, I’m going to be very cautious about interpreting it,” Lieberman said. “If it appears that, notwithstanding our goals, we may create a real risk of inadvertently helping to reelect Donald Trump, I will be strongly opposed to running a third-party ticket. And I think I’m reflecting a majority of people in No Labels, including the leadership.”

For all of Lieberman’s talk about caution, however, the group is aggressively laying the groundwork for what it calls a national “insurance policy” against a Biden-Trump rematch. No Labels is pursuing a $70 million effort to secure ballot access in every state and has already made progress in a few important battlegrounds. Today, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman will headline the formal launch of the group’s “Common Sense” agenda in New Hampshire. Manchin has not ruled out running for president on a No Labels ticket, although he insisted to CNN that his high-profile visit to the early-primary state was no indication that he’s warming to the idea.

Lieberman is clear about his distaste for Trump, but he’s hazier on the question of why—or even whether—Biden has fallen short. He’s said repeatedly that if the choice came down to Biden or Trump, he’d vote for the Democrat, and he speaks affectionately of a man he first met nearly 40 years ago and with whom he served for 20 years in the Senate. Yet he’s still hunting for a better option. I asked him whether he supported a third-party ticket because Biden had done a bad job or because voters think he’s done a bad job. “I think it’s both,” Lieberman replied. “He’s an honorable person, but he’s been pulled off his normal track too often” by pressure from the left. That’s a frequent talking point from Republicans and a complaint Manchin has made from time to time.

The perception that Biden has veered too far to the left, though, is not what has driven his low approval ratings. Indeed, in many ways Biden is the kind of president for whom moderates like Lieberman have long been clamoring. Yes, he signed two major bills that passed along purely party-line votes (the American Rescue Plan Act in 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act a year later), but he has repeatedly prioritized negotiating with Republicans, most recently over the debt ceiling. Lieberman credited Biden for his bipartisan infrastructure law and the budget deal he struck with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy this spring. “He’s done some significant things,” Lieberman said, also praising the president’s initial handling of the coronavirus pandemic. When I asked him what specifically Biden had veered too far left on, he initially declined to list any issues. Then he pointed to No Labels’ policy plan, noting that it included “commonsense” proposals on guns and immigration.

Although he’s been out of office for more than a decade, Lieberman, at 81, is less than a year older than Biden. He said he believes the president remains up to the job, both physically and cognitively, and he was reluctant to call on him to stand down. But Lieberman gently suggested that might have been the better course. “I’m struck by how intent he is on running again,” he said with a chuckle. “It would have been easier for him not to run, and he could retire with a real sense of pride and just an enormously productive career in public service.”

Lieberman’s response subtly pointed to No Labels’ hope that, come springtime, their decision will be an easy one. Perhaps Biden will change his mind and withdraw, or Trump’s legal woes will finally persuade Republican voters to look elsewhere. At the moment, neither of those scenarios seems likely.

Lieberman and his allies might decide that nominating a third-party ticket won’t help reelect Trump, but that’s not something they can know for sure. I asked Lieberman: If he was so intent on keeping Trump out of office, wasn’t that too big a risk to take? He didn’t have a clear answer. “Yeah,” he replied. “I mean, we’ll see.”

 

[wildcat09 29258]

Joe Lieberman has always been a conservative and should be pelted with rotten produce any time he steps out into public.

[Js1 85112]

No Labels will go No Where.

I'm really not scared of them. 

[Guest]

This all seems so generic...

[hpslugga 4044]

38 minutes ago, Js1 said:

No Labels will go No Where.

I'm really not scared of them. 

The thing is, politics doesn't work the way 3rd party candidates portray it. It is not an issue of "sit on your hands for four years, we will conveniently show up about a year or so before the next election and start bitching about the two major parties, offering mere platitudes as solutions." Enough people can see right through that, which is why the real goal of running 3rd party is to thrust issues into the mainstream of political discourse (see Perot, Ross and Sanders, Bernie). 

But Lieberman? That's just a bridge too far. No Labels is literally "both sides" embodied by a political party...a political party that has no real legislative agenda. All they do is, in their own delusion, proclaim that R's are as far to the right as D's are far to the left, leaving out these poor old centrists that just want to meet everything in the middle for middle's sake. It's a canard that only really accomplishes identifying people who think they're too above-it-all the actually know anything about public policy.

Just check out this loathsome position they declared a few weeks ago: https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4052216-no-labels-pledges-to-end-third-party-push-if-biden-way-ahead-of-trump-in-spring/

Quote

 

"Political organization No Labels committed to end its third-party push if polling shows President Biden “way” ahead of former President Trump next spring.

No Labels, a bipartisan group, has been pursuing an effort to launch a “unity ticket” in the 2024 presidential election that would include a Republican and a Democrat “if the two parties select unreasonably divisive presidential nominees.” Trump and Biden are currently leading the polls among candidates in their respective parties. Democrats are wary of third-party recruitment pushes amid concerns that they could take votes away from Biden in next year’s election.

Ben Chavis, the Democratic co-chair of No Labels, told NBC News Thursday that the group “is not and will not be a spoiler in favor of Donald Trump in 2024.” He also said the group would be prepared to “stand down” by the spring of next year, saying it will make a decision after Super Tuesday and before its convention in April."

 

Yeah that may sound good to the superficial-minded. But that first sentence just as easily could read "political organization No Labels committed to end its third-party push if polling shows Mitt Romney "way" ahead of Bernie Sanders."

This is the actual political spectrum, and not the self-serving ones that hack shock jocks like Dan Bongino cling to:

Purely in terms of policy, the establishment Democrats are located around the "C" in "Conservatism" and the establishment Republicans are around the "T" in "Traditionalism" (the MAGAts split the difference between the two F's). That's not a huge difference and it's fucking asinine to believe in this dog-and-pony show with which No Labels seeks to entertain us by splitting the difference. They want to make the makeup of their party seem all involved, precise, legitimate, fair, even-handed, etc. Well yeah, splitting a frog's hair in half is a delicate procedure...and it's also a pointless one.

In 2016, Bernie's run ultimately failed to secure the nomination, but it did a major service to thrusting socio-economic issues into the discussion. What idea are these fucking clowns going to thrust into the conversation? "Cut rich people's taxes, but don't be mean to blacks?" "Same sex marriage but with fault divorce?"

Based on how they've performed in the last 3 election cycles (2018, 2020, 2022), I seriously doubt the D's are nervous about this. 

[Biff Tannen 45499]

1 hour ago, hpslugga said:

It's a canard that only really accomplishes identifying people who think they're too above-it-all the actually know anything about public policy.

Who on earth (or on this board) could this be describing?

[mchookem 16224]