Ham on Wry

Anyone else have an opinion on Evan Bayh?

August 21, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Every Veep Has His Day
By GAIL COLLINS
VICE PRESIDENTS!!!
We cannot possibly talk enough about them. It’s hard to believe that only a few weeks ago, we thought that Joe Biden was just a garrulous senator-for-life and Evan Bayh was ... an extremely boring person from Indiana.
Tim Kaine — you will be shocked to hear this, but until recently we had never thought about Tim Kaine at all. Now he is at the center of our universe.
If we’d been planning ahead, we’d have demanded a real vice-presidential competition, something the other TV networks could have put up against the Olympics. Can anybody beat Bill Richardson’s Guinness World Record of 13,392 shaken hands over eight hours? Down more boilermakers than Hillary Clinton in a single campaign? Biden and Bayh could have read aloud from their autobiographies while judges counted the number of audience members who stayed alert during “Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics” vs. “From Father to Son: A Private Life in the Public Eye.”
Everybody has so many strengths; it’s hard to choose. How about that Governor Kaine? A Democrat who speaks freely about his faith, that’s what the ticket needs. Of course, Barack Obama is a Democrat who speaks freely about his faith, but Kaine is a Catholic and two faiths are better than speaking freely about one. If John McCain really goes ahead and picks Joe Lieberman, we could have candidates speaking freely about their various faiths around the clock.
As intense as the anticipation over Obama’s choice is, it pales next to the hubbub over whether McCain is going to tap Lieberman, who was Al Gore’s running mate in 2000. This would give Lieberman a unique niche in American history — one politician who was the vice-presidential nominee for both parties. We would speak of it with awe, like that story about the two-headed turtle in Brooklyn.
Talk about bipartisanship! The Republicans could have an anti-choice, anti-union presidential nominee whose biggest domestic priority is cutting waste and reducing the role of government, along with a pro-choice, pro-union running mate who believes in large government programs to solve large American problems. When you have a 71-year-old presidential candidate, it’s particularly important that voters be confident that he’s backed up by an experienced and qualified vice president prepared to step in and do the exact opposite about everything except Iraq.
Lieberman is certainly capable of dumping everything he has ever believed in and assuring the anti-choice, anti-union, anti-government folk that he is on their team. But then the magic fades and all you’ve got is a conservative Republican who likes the environment teamed with a guy who will do anything to move up. If that’s all you’re looking for, you might as well take Mitt Romney.
The Republican rules, which were obviously written by people who had failed to take their bipartisan pills, do not necessarily allow for the nomination of a vice-presidential candidate who is not a registered Republican. Perhaps McCain will plow ahead anyway, and there will be a revolt! Talk about convention excitement — all those Republican senators who don’t want to have to spend Labor Day weekend in St. Paul would sure learn their lesson.
I don’t think we’ve had that kind of crisis since 1836, when Virginia (future home of Gov. Tim Kaine, the son of a welder) refused to cast its electoral votes for Richard Mentor Johnson, Martin Van Buren’s running mate. He got the vice presidency anyway, but it did not seem to agree with him. After observing the degenerating Johnson at dinner, a visitor from England said, optimistically, “there is no telling how he might look if he dressed like other people.”
But we digress. Lieberman used to be a perfectly good senator, but somewhere along the line he began thinking of himself as being above the partisan fray, and it had a terrible effect. When he ran for vice president, he was so busy being pompous that he didn’t notice that Dick Cheney had won the debate. (Of all the negative achievements in Lieberman’s career, it’s hard to top making Cheney the most likable man in the room.) During the Florida vote-counting crisis, he was so deeply unhelpful you could argue that it cost Gore his chance at the White House. I plan to go into this point in more depth in my upcoming book, “How Joe Lieberman Ruined Everything.”
Ever since then, Lieberman’s ideas for legislation have gotten more bipartisan and more dreadful. This, after all, is the man who created the Department of Homeland Security, which refocused the nation’s intelligence-gathering and crisis-response agencies into the important mission of around-the-clock bureaucratic infighting.
But let’s get back to the Democrats. Who will Barack pick? I don’t care. Just as long as it’s somebody in the same party.