The Joe to which we were almost bound

Clear your mind a moment and join me in a short thought experiment.

Imagine that the Supreme court had not installed GWB back in 2000, and that we're finishing up with Al's 2nd term.

Our de-facto candidate would be Holy Joe Lieberman.

What kind of Joe would this be? Recall (though I may be mistaken on the timing) that Joe's evil side did not fully mature until sometime around 2004-2005, and were he entrenched as VP, we might not have caught that glimpse of color from the inside of his coat. Leave aside for a moment that 2 terms of Gore would have resulted in a dramatically different America, and that much of the pressure that has built behind the democratic and populist movements likely would be absent in that less-desperate and more open society, and consider who Joe would have been for us as an incumbent VP trying to lead us into 4 more years of Democratic leadership.


Would we be screwn?

:shrug:

Nothing to prove it, but the pick, bizarre as it seems from this perspective, was political (I forget why it was thought he was good), and Al would have gotten to know the guy better in the first four years

Trying to picture the US we would have had we and Al not been screwn is an impossibility. It's like parallel universes.

How often does an incumbent Pres. cast off his VP? Historically it doesn't seem like a common occurrence.

Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, Lincoln, Grant, McKinley, Roosevelt did

only others with the opportunity are

Washington, Monroe, Ike, Reagan, Clinton and shrub

Nixon is a special case since Agnew resigned.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States

"Rocky" served as VP from 1974-1977, but was asked off the 1976 ticket with Ford and was replaced by Bob Dole

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Rockefeller

Picking JoeMo showed that Al was (a) petty and ungrateful toward Clinton, and (b) not a good judge of character or ability.

We need and can do better.