Robert Novak retired from his regular column recently because of a brain tumor. But now we find out that he’ll still pen the occasional piece, and the first one came out Wednesday. It’s a shot across the bow of John McCain’s campaign, a stern warning of doom ahead if McCain picks Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman as his running mate.
“Influential McCain backers, plus McCain himself, would pick the pro-choice liberal from Connecticut if they thought they could get away with it,” Novak writes, continuing:
But they can’t get away with it — and this has been made clear to McCain by none other than Joe Lieberman himself.
Lieberman … has close Republican friends. One of them prevailed on Lieberman to tell McCain that a McCain-Lieberman ticket would be a disaster for all concerned, and especially for the GOP. Lieberman’s Republican friend told him that the Republicans would leave Minnesota in a state of disarray with a McCain-Lieberman ticket, alienating social conservatives who now make up the core of Republican voters … The Republican operative who urged Lieberman to dissuade McCain from picking him believes that there is still a very useful role for the maverick Democrat in this campaign: as McCain’s secretary of state.
