Al Gore's eldest daughter vehemently defended the 2000 Democratic nominee yesterday from presidential candidate Joe Lieberman's allegations that Gore blindsided him with his surprise endorsement of rival candidate Howard Dean. ...
Yesterday Karenna Gore Schiff told me her dad "really wanted to make calls not only to Dean's opponents, but also to his own longtime friends and supporters. But the news leaked before he had a chance to do that."
"I was with him that night as he was trying to get Lieberman on the phone the whole night. He was calling literally every few minutes. He definitely called many times, and he was told that there was a Lieberman event and the senator wasn't with a staff person, and he couldn't get him on the phone."
Schiff, 30, added: "My father behaved incredibly honorably in his own process, in his own thinking and on his own terms. [I'm sure this is supposed to mean something in her puny mind] The timing of the leak was, of course, the only thing that was a disappointment. He would have liked very much to have talked not only to Senator Lieberman, but to everyone else."
A top Lieberman aide angrily disputed Schiff's account, noting that news reports said Gore informed Dean last Friday.
"If Gore called Dean to tell him that he was endorsing him, that means he just as easily could have called Lieberman and extended him the courtesy of letting him know what his decision was," the Lieberman aide told me. "The bottom line is this: Gore could have called anytime after Friday but did not. Basically, Gore and Dean made a political calculation to maximize the surprise of this announcement, and it is disingenuous for anyone to now suggest otherwise."
Contrary to speculation that Schiff, wife of New York physician Drew Schiff, was "a guiding hand" in her dad's decision, she insisted: "I was shocked when my father initially said he was going to endorse somebody. He made up his mind pretty much on his own, and, it's safe to say, very recently."
She added: "I think it was a bold move. Any time you make a bold move, you ruffle some people's feathers. But if you've paid attention to my father's speeches for the last year, particularly his foreign-policy speeches, the natural choice for him was Dean." NY Daily News
That pretty much says it all.