Ryan Lizza Continues His Insightful Analysis of Gore and Lieberman

In the three years since Gore and Lieberman campaigned together, a rift both personal and ideological developed between the former running mates

As Lieberman moved back toward the Milquetoast centrism that had characterized his Senate tenure prior to 2000, Gore was continuing the leftward journey he had begun during the campaign. By the time he announced he would not run again in 2004, Gore had come out for a single-payer health care plan and against the war in Iraq. (Lieberman, by contrast, takes the incrementalist approach to health care and has been the most adamant Democratic advocate of the war.) As the campaign progressed, the signals that Gore was moving away from Lieberman and toward Dean only got more obvious. Two of Gore's most prominent speeches were delivered to MoveOn.org, the two-million-member-strong, grassroots Internet group that is overwhelmingly pro-Dean. "It was pretty clear," says one Democrat in Gore's camp. "All you do is just focus on what he said in the MoveOn speeches--just the fact that he did it before MoveOn. He was not going to do that and then go endorse Joe Lieberman."

After the 2000 election was over, the Democratic National Committee was purged of Gore people, such as Joe Andrew, and Bill Clinton's handpicked chairman, Terry McAuliffe, was installed. Then, in 2002, as Gore was mulling another bid for president, much of the reporting about his potential candidacy focused on the fact that the Democratic establishment didn't want him to run.

According to people close to him, Gore has done a lot of thinking since he left Washington about how the infrastructure of the party withered during the Clinton years because so much communication and institutional power was (quite sensibly) concentrated in the White House. (It's no coincidence that Gore spends most of his time these days developing a new TV news network.) Since Clinton left office, two clusters of institutions have filled the Democrats' organizational vacuum: grassroots groups, such as MoveOn.org and the Dean campaign, and inside-the-Beltway shops, such as the new fund-raising groups known as 527s (America Votes, Americans Coming Together) and think tanks (Center for American Progress).

In sum, Gore's endorsement of Dean is a reaction against everything he thinks cost him the election in 2000: the Clintons, the press, and Bush. There is only one candidate who is challenging the Clinton establishment of the party, making an end run around the mainstream media, and sticking it to Bush. And his name isn't Joe Lieberman.