A heartbeat away

Remember Spiro T. Agnew? He’s the U.S. vice president who called a diligent press unraveling the Watergate scandal “nattering nabobs of negativism” and ''pusillanimous pussyfooters.”

Agnew might have been president of the United States when Richard Nixon resigned except for the fact that he himself had already resigned after being charged in a kickback scheme and pleading “no contest” to income tax evasion.

I submit that we, as U.S. citizens, pay too much attention to the “head of the ticket” and not enough to the “running mate.” Campaign tickets of recent years bear this out.

In Election 2000, I supported Al Gore. Had he been “selected” president by SCOTUS, Joe Lieberman would have been a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Lieberman turned out to be “a horse of a different color” when he fortuitously did a switch from Democrat to Independent in order to lure Republicans to his rescue when fighting to retain his senate seat. He had lost the Connecticut Democratic Primary to Ned Lamont, but was ultimately elected by Republicans. IMHO, that puts him on a character level with Caligula.

The man selected Vice President that year was Dick Cheney, Bush’s 24-karat guarantee against impeachment. Like Agnew with Nixon, Cheney was - and is - the axe man out front defending George W. Bush’s policies. I lost count several years ago of how many lies this man has told. The idea of Dick Cheney in the presidency sends a chill down my spine.

In 2004 I wholeheartedly supported John Kerry for the presidency. Early on, I began to blog of my uneasiness about Kerry’s running mate, John Edwards. Trusting my gut instinct, I found him too smarmy and smooth. This assessment gained credence when Edwards came before the cameras associating his 2008 run for the presidency with his wife Elizabeth’s recurrence of cancer.

At DemWit’s inception I wrote that I wouldn’t spit on Edwards if he were on fire. Harsh, I know, but I was sick of his campaign ad blitz in South Carolina claiming “I’m poor folks like you.” My God, the man was worth $54 million!

My feelings about Edwards turned out to be correct. The man who turned to Hillary Clinton during a presidential debate and smirked, “I don’t like that jacket” turned out to be a slimeball.

Now comes reports that former Edwards aide Andrew Young is seeking a publisher for his new tell-all book. In the book, Young claims Edwards asked him to lie and claim paternity of the girlfriend’s baby. Edwards, Young claims, in asking him to lie, told him he would be “fixed for life.”

A heartbeat away.