Running mates find strength through differences

By PHILIP GAILEY

© St. Petersburg Times, published August 13, 2000

One of the first things a vice presidential candidate has to do is undergo a political make-over. He is required to put aside his own principles and come into harmony with the one who chose him. He is expected to backpedal, retract, deny, trim, soften and explain his differences with the man at the top of the ticket. It can be an awkward -- sometimes demeaning -- political exercise that diminishes a running mate's credibility, which may be one of the reasons voters ultimately cast their ballots for a president, not a vice president.

As the price of being Ronald Reagan's vice president, George Bush had to eat the words "voodoo economics," his swipe at Reagan's economic plan during the 1980 Republican presidential primary campaign, which Bush lost to the Gipper. Another condition was that Bush had to endorse without reservation the GOP platform, which included a ban on abortion with no exceptions. Until that sell-out moment, Bush had been a pro-choice Republican.

This year, Dick Cheney, the No. 2 on the Republican ticket, had to "tweak" his congressional voting record and say that he no longer would vote against Head Start, a pre-school program George W. Bush, the Republican presidential nominee, wants to expand. And now, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, is trying to smooth over his differences with Al Gore, who himself has undergone more than one political make-over in this campaign.

His duty to Gore has required Lieberman to compromise one of the very qualities that made his selection a political hit -- his reputation as a senator who is capable of putting principle ahead of politics. To the dismay of key Democratic constituencies, he refused to be a captive of party dogma and interest-group agendas. That was before Gore asked him to join the Democratic ticket, an invitation Lieberman, the first Jew to break this barrier, hailed as "a miracle."

As it turns out, one miracle leads to another. Within hours of accepting Gore's call, Lieberman miraculously began to transform himself from a centrist Democrat into one more acceptable to the party's liberal wing. He went to work trying to blur his differences with Gore on school vouchers, tort reform, affirmative action, private Social Security accounts, parental notification in the case of minors seeking an abortion and other issues.

As recently as two years ago, Lieberman was advocating the partial privatization of Social Security, a Bush prescription Gore has denounced as a "risky" plan. "Individual control of part of the Social Security retirement funds has to happen," Lieberman said then. A few days before Gore announced his choice of the Connecticut senator as his running mate, Lieberman's office explained that he was only "intrigued" by the idea and has since changed his mind. "Ultimately, I turned away from privatization because the promises and the numbers supporting them don't add up," Lieberman wrote in an unpublished op-ed piece his staff put out at the request of the Gore campaign.

In 1998, Lieberman was part of the Democratic majority that voted against a Republican plan to use the budget surplus to establish personal retirement accounts as a supplement to Social Security. Ironically, today that is a Gore proposal Lieberman will be expected to defend.

Lieberman also has begun trimming his position on school vouchers, saying he only favored a limited pilot program for students in failing inner-city schools. Now he thinks charter schools may be a better choice and is boasting of his 100 percent rating in the last Congress by the NAACP, which opposes vouchers.

The only position he has not be asked to retreat from was his denunciation of President Clinton's sexual trysts with Monica Lewinksy as "immoral," which appears to be the main reason Gore recruited the senator as his anti-Clinton. As the first congressional Democrat to unequivocally condemn Clinton's misconduct, Lieberman is supposed to provide Gore with moral and political separation from the man the vice president described at the height of the impeachment battle on Capitol Hill as "one of our greatest presidents."

In the process of neutering his running mate, Gore risks squandering the greatest strength Lieberman brings to the ticket -- his moral authority and reputation for independent thinking.

Introducing Lieberman to a hand-picked, hometown crowd in Carthage, Tenn., last week, Gore tried to turn his political differences with his running mate into an asset.

"I'm not afraid to have a vice president who disagrees with me on some issues," Gore said. "I think that's fine. Our administration will be opposed to private school vouchers. I'm against them . . . But I'll tell you this. I think it is a strength and not a weakness, an asset and not a liability, to be able to have a different point of view in the room at the time decisions are being made."

Gore made it clear that when they differ, his position will prevail.

Lieberman said his differences with Gore were "very, very few" and added, "I think it's the mark of the strength of the leadership of this man that he didn't choose somebody who agrees with him on every single issue."

There's something to that. But if their disagreements are to be a strength of their administration, Lieberman needs to enter office with some of his differences intact.

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