GoldbergBlog

I’ve Been Thinking - Election 2008, Part I

As this long election season winds down, I’ve been having various thoughts about the political climate and how this will all shake out.  These will be brief thoughts that are too long for a Twitter post but won’t be in depth blog entries.  But on these posts I do encourage comments so feel free to do so below or through Facebook.

The Double-Edged Sword of Joe Lieberman

There’s a drawback to the Dems getting close to the filibuster-proof majority.  The closer they are to sixty votes, the more they need Joe Lieberman.  This is a guy that should be a pariah of the Democratic caucus but because he’s an independent, he’s been crucial these past two years in keeping the balance of power 51-49 (which has clearly been a meaningless majority since the Dems have let major pieces of Republican legislation sail on through while getting little accomplished other than an energy bill that was jam-packed with pork).  However, the 60-vote majority does mean something and even in the “best case” scenario where the Democrats need to pick up nine seats, this rests on the assumption of keeping Joe Lieberman.  If they only pick up two or three seats this election, then screw him because there’s no way they’ll get six Republicans to jump on board to a piece of legislation unless it’s something like stem-cell research which would pass easily anyway (and the only reason it hasn’t passed yet is because Bush has vetoed it, one of the few cases where the Christian right has made their presence known in a substantive piece of legislation as opposed to just being an easily manipulated block of voters that Republicans have exploited).

So while I’ll swallow my pride and accept him as a necessary evil of a filibuster-proof majority, I hope that either the Dems will pick up even more seats in 2010 or that Holy Joe gets his ass kicked to the curb in 2012.

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