The AP wire is reporting this morning that Vice President Gore has decided to choose Senator Lieberman of Connecticut as his running mate. This morning's New York Times has Lieberman as one of four contenders for the post, but doesn't report the final selection. The Times also fails to explore any of the interesting problems for Mr. Gore that the Lieberman pick presents. If the press is fair, these problems will create the same weeklong flap that ensued when George W. Bush picked Richard Cheney. Among them:
Mr. Lieberman has been a harsh critic of the administration's Middle East policy with respect to Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. He wrote to President Clinton in 1997: "our government's Mideast policy of evenhandedness, in contradiction to reality, continues. It is wrong. Evenhandedness has not been earned." The same letter, which was signed by Mr. Lieberman and four Republican senators, said Yasser Arafat is "the villain who is unwilling to stop the terror" and called for "no more concessions."
Mr. Lieberman has voted for school vouchers and spoken out in favor of them. In a 1998 press release, he said, "I've always felt that school choice programs such as vouchers are on firm ground constitutionally." He praised a Supreme Court decision to let a Wisconsin voucher program stand, saying, "This is an important step forward for those of us who feel there ought to be some scholarship choices for poor children who are trapped in schools that are not educating them. . . .Our greatest challenge is to break through the gridlock on this issue and build the popular support necessary to make school choice a national priority." Mr. Gore, on the other hand, attacked Bill Bradley during the primaries for supporting voucher experiments. In one primary debate, Mr. Gore said, according to an account in The Washington Post, "I have never been for vouchers. I have always opposed vouchers and always will."
Mr. Lieberman also has ties to Christian conservatives that the Democrats traditionally try to demonize. He is, for instance, the honorary chairman of something called the Center for Jewish and Christian Values, a group whose advisory board includes Ralph Reed, the former Christian Coalition executive director who is now a political consultant working for the campaign of George W. Bush. Also on that advisory board is Gary Bauer, who ran in the Republican primary on a family-values, anti-abortion rights platform. How is the Democratic base going to deal with a vice presidential candidate who works with Ralph Reed and Gary Bauer to, among other things, "protect religious expression in the public schools"?
None of this is to suggest that Mr. Lieberman wasn't Mr. Gore's best pick, or that he wouldn't make a fine vice president. It's just to suggest that some of these issues might have been explored in the pages of the Times over the past few days, while we've known that Mr. Lieberman has been a finalist for the vice presidential nomination, but before Mr. Gore made his final decision.
Socialized Medicine: If you thought the specter of socialized medicine in America had been defeated with the death of Hillary Clinton's health care plan early in the first term of the Clinton administration, think again. Check out the editorial on nursing home care in today's New York Times, which calls on Congress to establish a formula for how many workers should be in each nursing home. The editorial also calls on Congress to require "competitive wages" for nursing aides. Well, call us wild-eyed free market conservatives, but it seems to us that a more reasonable approach would be to mandate certain standards -- clean rooms and beds, adequate nutrition for patients -- and leave it to the nursing homes to meet such standards as efficiently as possible. If some nursing homes are able to meet the standards with fewer staff by making use of better technology and of more effective management practices, then why penalize them and increase health care costs by forcing them to hire employees that they don't need? (There's a case to be made that even the standards for conditions are unnecessary, but, given the vulnerable state that nursing home patients are in, we wouldn't go that far.) The idea that Congress should impose wage controls on the nursing home aide category is so absurd that it hardly merits a response. But let's simply note that the moment wages are set by Congress they are no longer "competitive," and that several labor unions are doing quite well in organizing nursing home aides into collective bargaining units and raising their wages the old-fashioned way, without the help of Congress or the editorial board of the New York Times.