Is Holy Joe Lieberman poised to become the Rufus King of modern times?

Maybe I've missed something, but it looks as if we could be witnessing history in the making.

No, I don't mean that unpleasantness in the MIddle East, inconvenient as it unquestionably has become. I'm thinking rather of the rising murmurs that His Holiness Joe Lieberman will run for vice president again, this time on a bi-Parmesan ticket (has the country really gone cheese-mad?) with Straight Talkin' John McCain.

It's a shame that U.S. politics doesn't have a crack record-keeping institution like the Elias Sports Bureau with whom one could easily check these things, but as far as I can tell from the list of losing vice presidential candidates I found, if this happens, Holy Joe would become only the second candidate in our history to lose the vice presidency twice. Unless I've missed somebody, he would in fact be the first since electors began casting separate votes for president and vice president in 1804, under the terms of the newly adopted 12th Amendment, which did away with the messiness of having the new president's chief rival installing as vice president.

So it was that Rufus King of New York (although he was born in Maine, which was then part of Massachusetts) was the Federalist candidate for vice president in both 1804 and 1808, when presidential candidate Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina (right, not to be confused with his cousin Just Plain Charles Pinckney of South Carolina, pictured at right below--looks kind of, er, ethereal, don't you think?-- who was elected governor of the state, or with any of the possibly dozens of other Charles Pinckneys of South Carolina) lost first to President Thomas Jefferson and then to James Madison. For the record, King lost both times to George Clinton.

One curiosity is that Rufus King's perennial vice presidential archrival, George Clinton, died in 1812 before completing his second term, James Madison's first term as president. And then, Elbridge Gerry (the man, you'll recall, who gave his name to the gerrymander), elected in 1812 as Madison's second vice president,also died in office (in 1814)! Seriously, what are the odds?

While King appears to have had nothing to do with either the election or the untimely death of Vice President Gerry, he seems to have figured that no national election was quite complete without him, and in 1816, while serving his second stint in the Senate (where he would continue until 1825), he was the unsuccessful Federalist candidate for president against Secretary of State James Monroe. (He also seems to have run for and lost the governorship of New York in 1816, which must have kept him pretty busy that year. At least he didn't have to spend a lot of money having new business cards printed up.)

It kind of surprised me to find that no one since our Rufus seems to have snagged a second vice presidential nomination after tanking the first. And that's not all the vice presidential history that Holy Joe is poised to make. Again, unless I've missed something here, he would become the first vice presidential candidate to lose with two different presidential candidates--not to mention presidential candidates of two different parties.

Can't you just feel that old Joe-mentum building?