Just when we were rid of Joe Lieberman, Bob Kerrey announces he is running for the Senate. Feel the magic. For those of you who are too young to remember much about him, think Evan Bayh except even more irritating. My only wish would be that he would join the Republican Party where he could be the pain in the ass gadfly in their ointment for a change.
“I think he would do very well with young people, and it would very exciting to see him reintroduce himself to a new generation of Nebraskans,” said Bob Shrum, a retired Democratic consultant now teaching at New York University. “He is the anti-politician and in this age of conformity and often drabness, his life story will appeal to young people.”
But given his age and experience, Kerrey will have a freedom many candidates don’t enjoy and thinks he can bring a message that focuses of two issues that have greatly worsened since he left the Senate in 2001—the growing federal debt and the level of income inequality in the nation.
I don’t know what that means, but he’s been a deficit scold for decades, so I’d imagine he’s come up with some completely unworkable idea that will place him as a GOP swing vote and also before the microphones as frequently as possible to posture and preen about his moral superiority. That’s pretty much what he does. I’m honestly not sure it wouldn’t be better to just have a hardcore Nebraska Republican in there so that Democrats won’t bother to bow and scrape under the misapprehension that he will vote their way.
Here’s who we’ll be dealing with:
CHICAGO – Sen. Bob Kerrey smells an odor coming from the Republican and Democratic stands on entitlements.
“It’s one of the cruelest things we do, when we say, Republicans or Democrats, `Oh, we can wait and reform Social Security later,’ ” the Nebraska Democrat said.
Mr. Kerrey says that without reform, entitlements will claim 100 percent of the Treasury in 2012.
“This is not caused by liberals, not caused by conservatives, but by a simple demographic fact,” Mr. Kerrey warned at a meeting of the Democratic Leadership Council.
“We [will have] converted the federal government into an ATM machine.”