Well, in a way, I did. I'm in Washington for the American Library Association annual conference, or cattle stampede. 27,000 librarians, crowding into all the hotels and restaurants. I was lunching by myself on 6th St. The restaurant was both crowded and noisy, and the tables are so close together they're almost touching. When they seated me I discovered I was across from Senator Lieberman at the next table, this close.
He was chatting up a younger woman with stringy dark brown hair. She may have been a political reporter covering the Presidential campaigns, because that's what some of the conversation was about. Oh, don't look shocked. Of course I listened. I didn't have anything else to do, and besides, he was talking loudly because (as I said) the restaurant was noisy.
What was the theme of his discourse? Do you have to guess? It was Poor Joe Lieberman, of course.
'Everybody is supposedly all tired of "partisan",' he whined. 'Politics is too partisan,' they say (he went on), so it's great when Bloomberg drops his party affiliation and everyone's all interested in that. But then when Joe Lieberman (yes, he talks about himself in the third person, like Denny Crane) does a fund-raiser for Susan Collins, then I'm a turncoat, and I get all this hate mail.'
He went on for a bit in that vein, but I'm sure you've had a sufficient sample.
The most interesting part of the conversation that I overheard was the pains he took to try to persuade his lunch partner that Bloomberg's hour-long meeting with David Boren doesn't mean anything, and that Boren couldn't be taken seriously as a possible third-party running mate on a national ticket.
It made a person sitting nearby wonder just who Joe Lieberman does see as a credible running mate on a national ticket with Bloomberg. I wonder if I can guess?