Joseph Lieberman + 24

Can it really be 24 years since Joseph Lieberman was Al Gore's vice presidential running mate in the 2000 election that elevated the word chad beyond the name of one half of the British singing duo of Chad and Jeremy and the first name of a soon-to-be Hall of Fame thoroughbred racing trainer, Chad Brown?

The turmoil of the 2000 seems so long ago that maybe it didn't happen. Trump's loss in 2020 and that turmoil overshadows it. There are people in their 30s who do not remember the machinations of the 2000 election because they were too young to know what was going on.

My wife and I were in Toronto, Canada. We voted by absentee ballot. We dovetailed the Toronto visit with seeing our younger daughter at Geneseo college in Geneseo, New York. She had just started her freshman year. Then we went on to Toronto.

News of the contested election of course reached us in Toronto. Hearing about all the fuss and crazy claims of Nazis voting in Florida, the state whose results were challenged, I was glad not to be in the office hearing everyone's cock-eyed conspiracy theories. It's 2024, and they've only been replaced by the 2020 election conspiracy theories.

I liked what the journalist Jerry Nachman—who has since passed away—who said that all the media from the Northeast was descending on Florida because they had relatives in the state and were eager to see them on the employers' dime.

And who knew Chicago's former mayor, Richard Daly, had a 50-year-old son who was leading the charge in Florida for a recount. The 2000 presidential election might be in the rear view mirror, but in today's WSJ there is a story that a poorly designed Florida paper ballot cost Gore the election.

Perhaps. Whoever thought that a version of how we played battleships as kids by drawing figurative ship on graph paper, turning the paper over, and challenging our friends to "sink" the ships by guessing where they might be on the reverse side by stabbing at the paper with a pencil. Voting then in Florida was an adult game of battleships. And for the want of a state the election was lost. But it wasn't Florida that cost him the election.

If Al Gore had managed to take his home state of Tennessee and its 14 electoral votes, Florida would have been a sideshow, and we wouldn't have been treated to someone trying to determine intended votes by staring at poorly punched paper. That photo is as famous as the sailor kissing the nurse in Times Square at the end of WW II.

Frankly, I never understood why they needed to try and discern the intention of a vote that was poorly cast leaving a "hanging chad." Why consider it a valid vote? DQ it. But no, Joe Lieberman was too close to getting to the White House for that to happen.

The Democrats wanted a continuation of the Clinton presidency badly. But most vice presidents don't go on to win the presidency when they run on top of their own ticket. I distinctly remembering when Al and Joe and their wives went together to see the then current movie Men of Honor, the biopic starring Cuba Gooding about the disabled Navy diver Carl Beshears who went on to the top rank of Master Diver. The newspapers couldn't get enough of dovetailing the appearance of the four with the title of the movie.

The NYT obit by Robert McFadden empties out his advance vault by one. Someday it will be empty, but the octogenarians, nonagenarians and centenarians keep passing away, and Mr. McFadden is ready to see the off.

The best pun I ever heard about a "hanging chad." is one made by a British racing broadcaster, Nick Luck. Chad Brown is a highly successful, soon-to-be Hall of Fame thoroughbred horse trainer, whose charges win top flight races, generally on the turf, here and abroad. Nick Luck is a racing broadcaster from England who comments on many of the foreign race telecasts.

After one afternoon of racing in 2018 with Chad Brown having a remarkable day of saddling the 1-2-3 place finishers in the Beverly D stakes race from Arlington Park in Illinois (now gone) for three different owners, Nick Luck just had to close the telecast with..."on a day that Chad left them all hanging..."

Reading McFadden's obit about Joe you get the sense a good man missed being president. Enough obscurity is guaranteed when you're the actual vice president, but when you lose on as the vice presidential candidate on a ticket, the dustbin of political history awaits you.

Mr McFadden write how Joe worked both sides of the aisle, and was one of the first to take President Clinton to the woodshed in a speech after Bill's affair with Monica Lewinsky spilled out into the open. It was a harsh rebuke for Clinton's behavior, and one that Bill later told Joe that every word in the speech was true. He deserved it.

So, where do political candidates and former four-term Senators from Connecticut go when they start to fade away? Alan Dershowitz tells us in a just published op-ed piece in the WSJ  that he and Joe were working on a piece about Democrats and Israeli support and the coming election.

Well, you go to work for a law firm and live in the Bronx. But not just any part of the Bronx, but in Riverdale, a bucolic corner of the Bronx the belies its 104... zip code. People in Riverdale will never tell you they live in the Bronx. They will always tell you they live in Riverdale. When the phone company was producing phone books they used to produce a separate one for Riverdale residents.

The year 2000. Y2K. I almost see 2000 as a dividing line in my life: B.C. and A.D. Can anyone remember what was the big issue on the presidential mind was just before 9/11? Stem cell research.

President George Bush addressed the nation for 11 minutes on TV on August 9 about stem cell research just before the events of 9/11 forever changed the world. You won't hear about stem cell research in the same way ever again.

2000 and after, when all that's happened seems so clear in my mind. Getting out of Tower One of the World Trade Center from the 27th floor; the execution of my two colleagues at work on September 16, 2001 by our vice president at Empire BlueCross BlueShield from our temporary quarters after the towers fell.

Good things. My daughters graduating college; marrying, having children. My leaving Empire after 36 years and getting the best job I ever had for 7 years at a consulting firm; retiring at 62.

Can the year 2000 + really be 24 years ago?

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