ost Americans would be hard-pressed to name as many as 20 US senators.
For those who could, outside of Connecticut, not many would put Connecticut's Joseph Lieberman on their list of the 20 most influential senators. Now Lieberman, whose dour and scowling countenance runs counter to the image of the bright-eyed, microphone-grabbing pol, is Al Gore's running mate.
This is the biggest gamble by a Democrat trailing a Republican since Walter Mondale shuffled the cards, shook up the establishment, and swung for the fences by tapping Geraldine Ferraro. That was a desperate ploy, a what-the-hell-have-we-got-to-lose move as Ronald Reagan cruised to a landslide.
It is hard to view Gore's pick as anything but a panicky reaction to the Republicans' successful convention in Philadelphia, wherein the vice president was portrayed as a lackey of Bill Clinton, the man the Bush-Cheney ticket is really running against. It smacks of Gore's goofy Elian flip-flop. Lieberman, off a Senate floor speech he made two years ago condemning Clinton's dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, ''a staff member half his age,'' became Mr. Rectitudinous that day.
As a moderate Democrat who made morality his business, fussing about V-chips to screen violence from kiddie television and muttering threats about cleaning up lyrics in the increasingly degraded business of pop music, Lieberman has been marketed as ''the anti-Clinton.''
Lieberman is not an out-and-out lightweight like Dan Quayle. But choosing Lieberman over better-known New Englanders like Senator John Kerry, the Silver Starred Vietnam veteran from Massachusetts, or George Mitchell, the former Senate majority leader from Maine, is baffling when you consider that Lieberman's relations with labor unions are no better than cool to lukewarm.
Kerry would have been my choice. Like Mitchell, he's a Roman Catholic, a fact not lost upon a 50 million-member slice of political demographic that comprises crucial swing voting blocs in the handful of states - Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Michigan, Ohio, Illinois - whose electoral votes will decide the election. Jewish voters will be properly delighted. An Orthodox Jew so devout he refuses to work on the Sabbath, Lieberman's nomination is as significant to Jews as JFK's victory was for Catholics 40 years ago.
Being the first of your sect to overcome nativist prejudice is a legitimate political milestone. But some Democrats are aghast, thinking that Gore's gamble, as this will come to be known, will cost the ticket the South, period. Gore already had 70 percent of the Jewish vote, and the bulk of Jewish money, a choice slice of the Democrats' boodle, when the Hollywood, entertainment, and development dough is counted. So now Gore gets maybe 10 percent more of the Jewish vote, which is concentrated in New York (which Gore was going to win anyway) and south Florida (where Gore was going to lose anyway, in my opinion), and he faces getting shut out in the South.
None of us can answer the question: Is America ready for a Jewish vice president? That really means: Is America ready for a Jewish president?
What's clear is the 13 states of the Old Confederacy have become rugged terrain for any national Democrat. Clinton's remarkable skills and Southern drawl helped him knock off some crucial electoral blocs below the Mason-Dixon line. I do not know any politician who thinks a Jewish running mate improves a Democrat's chances anywhere but around Miami's Jewish retirement nooks.
So Gore runs better in Dade County and risks losing Clinton's Arkansas, his own home state of Tennessee, and the heavily Catholic state of Louisiana, which offered some possibilities. Governor George W. Bush has already nailed down his base in the bulk of the South, all the mountain states, and a vast stretch of prairie - Texas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Arizona, Kansas, etc. Looking at the electoral map, Gore has California, New York, Massachusetts, a handful of other reliably Democratic states, and must concentrate on a shrinking ice floe running from the Middle Atlantic states to the Upper Midwest, where Lieberman does little for Roman Catholic union family Reagan Democrat swing voters.
By choosing a little-known senator whose oratical skills and record in the Senate did not make him an important player in a dozen years in Washington, Gore seems to be desperately distancing himself from Clinton, the architect of all that the Democrats have to run on in economic, foreign, and social policy. Gore thus repudiates the best weapons in his party's arsenal. He tosses away his best cards when the other guy, Bush, has more showing on the table in terms of poll numbers.
Bush left Gore some gaping openings post-Philadelphia. For Bush to blithely renounce the ABM Treaty and vow to build a suspect and pricey missile defense scheme despite the objections of every other major power gave Gore the chance to prong the GOP's rookie as dangerously misguided.
But every time Gore has to explain his Lieberman selection is an opportunity lost for lambasting Bush as wobbly and unreliable on foreign policy.
I'm willing to give Lieberman a chance to prove me wrong. But till then, my take is that Gore picked the wrong New Englander for the wrong reason. He felt he needed an ''anti-Clinton'' to beat a burning Bush whose campaign is afire with optimism.
We went through impeachment; the Senate and the people rejected it. For Gore now to put Clinton-bashing at the top of his priorities seems to me not only disloyal but dumb. I hope it works, for the thought of President George Jr. leaves me green around the gills. But as of today, I just don't get it. And maybe neither will Gore's Democratic base.
David Nyhan is a Globe columnist.
