Joe Loserman loses to n00b in Democratic primary.

[bluemonq]

Hey, he could always conveniently have a heart attack...

[power puff girl]

if loserman loses the election, i've heard that bush will throw him a bone and make him secretary of defense.

[Chad]

^haha, is there any question about whose side he is on?

[haplesshobo]

Honest question:

Other than his support for the Iraq War, what did Liberman do to be the target for such vitriol by the Left? Just six years ago, he was widely hailed as the democratic VP nominee. And, he's won his elections in CT with over 60% of the vote. From what I remember, he's voted along 90% with his party and usually gets a 100% rating from NARLA. Even in the primary, it was still a close loss where he still got 48% of the vote and would likely do better than Lamont in the general election.

I don't agree with the Iraq War, but a lot of other democrats went along with it like John Kerry and Hillary Clinton. Where's the hatred toward all those democrats? I guess you could argue that those democrats never really supported the war but did it for political reasons, unlike Leiberman who honestly does seem to support it. But, in some ways, that that's even worse- voting and supporting a war that you really disagreed with just for political cover.

[Faithless]

Originally Posted by power puff girl

oh, i think he will get democratic voters, espeically jewish democratic voters. the only question is how many? if the race is close enough, he can hand the election over just like what happened in 2000 with nader. of course, we won't let the republicans steal another election this time.

He won't get enough dem vote to do any damage.

[haplesshobo]

New polls show that Leiberman still wins the election:

http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/08/...e.ap/index.htm

Poll: Lamont gaining but still trails Lieberman
Senator enjoys double-digit lead over anti-war candidate

Thursday, August 17, 2006

HARTFORD, Connecticut (AP) -- Ned Lamont, whose anti-war campaign rattled the political landscape by toppling Sen. Joe Lieberman last week in Connecticut's Democratic primary, is gaining support in November's three-way Senate race, according to a poll released Thursday.

But the Quinnipiac University poll shows that Lamont still has an uphill battle against Lieberman, the 2000 nominee for vice president who is now running an independent campaign.

Lieberman leads Lamont among registered voters 49 percent to 38 percent. Republican Alan Schlesinger gets support from 4 percent.

That's an improvement for Lamont, who trailed Lieberman 51 percent to 27 percent in a three-way race in a July 20 Quinnipiac poll. That survey of registered voters showed Schlesinger with 9 percent.

Thursday's poll quizzed both registered voters and voters likely to cast ballots in the general election. The July 20 poll only questioned registered voters.

Among likely voters in Thursday's poll, Lieberman was supported by 53 percent, compared to Lamont's 41 percent and Schlesinger's 4 percent.

Lieberman's advantage comes from broad support among unaffiliated and Republican voters. Fifty-three percent of likely voters said he deserves to be re-elected, and nearly half doubted that Lamont has enough experience to be senator.
Broad support from Republicans

"Senator Lieberman's support among Republicans is nothing short of amazing. It more than offsets what he has lost among Democrats," poll director Douglas Schwartz said. "As long as Lieberman maintains this kind of support among Republicans, while holding a significant number of Democratic votes, the veteran senator will be hard to beat."

When pollsters asked whether Lieberman should drop out of the race because he lost the Democratic primary, 58 percent of all those surveyed said no, but among Democrats, 56 percent said he should.

A messages seeking comment was left with the Lieberman campaign. Schlesinger said that the poll's timing does not reflect his true level of support.

"This was taken immediately after the Democratic primary and therefore there was a tidal wave of publicity for Lamont and Lieberman," Schlesinger said Thursday. "When people get to see me in debate and see the message I have for moderate and conservative voters, these numbers will change dramatically."

A spokeswoman for the Lamont campaign said the poll suggests that the message is getting out to more than just Democrats.

"We have never run our campaign by polls even when we're ahead, but we're encouraged by the movement and the opportunity we see here," Liz Dupont-Diehl, the campaign spokeswoman said. "Ned will continue to bring his message of change to all Connecticut voters. We have found that it resonates with independents and moderates."

Lieberman, a nationally known centrist who has been criticized by many Democrats for supporting the war in Iraq and a perceived closeness to President Bush, lost the August 8 Democratic primary by 10,000 votes. Political pundits say the primary was evidence of voters' frustration with the war and predict it could have national political ramifications.

Top state and national Democrats, including Sens. John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Chris Dodd, Hillary Clinton and Frank Lautenberg, abandoned Lieberman after the primary and are endorsing Lamont. Former Sen. John Edwards, the 2004 candidate for vice president, was to campaign for Lamont on Thursday.

Some Senate Republicans, meanwhile, are throwing their support behind Lieberman instead of Schlesinger, who has been dogged by revelations of that he was sued by two New Jersey casinos for gambling debts, and that he gambled at a Connecticut casino under a false name in the 1990s while a state legislator. Schlesinger has rejected Gov. M. Jodi Rell's urging that drop out of the race and let the party select a replacement.

Thursday's poll showed Lieberman with 75 percent of the Republican vote, compared to 13 percent for Lamont and 10 percent for Schlesinger. Among unaffiliated voters, Lieberman garners 58 percent, compared to 36 percent for Lamont and 3 percent for Schlesinger. Among Democrats, Lamont leads Lieberman with 63 percent. Lieberman gets 35 percent of Democratic voters.

"Ned Lamont's Democratic primary win was based on a very small percentage of voters statewide," Schwartz said. "He must expand beyond this base if he is going to beat Lieberman."
Rell leading in gubernatorial race

Meanwhile, the same poll shows Rell, a Republican, with a large lead over her Democratic opponent in the gubernatorial race.

The poll shows Rell leading New Haven Mayor John DeStefano by a 64 to 32 percent margin among likely voters. Among registered voters, Rell leads 60 to 28 percent. That's compared to the July 20 Quinnipiac poll when Rell led DeStefano by a 62 to 25 percent margin.

Rell garners 44 percent of the Democratic voters, 88 percent of the Republican voters and 69 percent of the unaffiliated voters.

"While observers bemoan the polarization of American politics, Connecticut voters are taking a bipartisan path, with most Republicans backing a Democratic senator and a large number of Democrats backing a Republican governor," Schwartz said.

The telephone poll was conducted between August 10-14. Quinnipiac surveyed 1,319 registered voters and has a sampling error margin of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. Among the 1,083 likely voters, the margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

[Golden Monkey]

Yep, Lieberman is most likely going to win. The Demo primary involved a small number of possible voters.

But how lame are the Republicans in Connecticut. Their guy might get 5% of the vote?

[Shuriken]

Originally Posted by haplesshobo

Honest question:

Other than his support for the Iraq War, what did Liberman do to be the target for such vitriol by the Left?

That's a good question, and it deserves a thoughtful answer. However, I would disagree with your downplaying of the Iraq War. Given the misleading way that it was sold to the American public (weapons of mass destruction, major ties to al-Qaeda, welcomed as liberators, Iraqi oil would pay for it), I think that the Iraq War is the central issue in Election 2006.

Anyway, here is one answer:

LIEBERMAN'S REAL PROBLEM

by Harold Meyerson

The Washington Post, Wednesday, July 12, 2006; Page A15


I am about to become a traitor to my class. Among my estimable colleagues in the Washington commentariat, the idea that Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman is facing a serious challenge from a fellow Democrat over Lieberman's support for the Iraq war seems to evoke incredulity and exasperation. On the op-ed pages of leading newspapers, we read that Lieberman is "the most kind-hearted and well-intentioned of men" (that's from the New York Times's David Brooks), a judgment that cannot credibly be disputed — though if ever a road to hell was paved with good intentions, it would start with the anti-Saddam Hussein interventionism of pro-democracy advocates and end in downtown Baghdad today.

My colleagues also finger those crazy lefty bloggers as the culprits behind the drive to purge Lieberman from Democratic ranks. (The New Republic's Jonathan Chait recently wrote that in the Los Angeles Times.) They see a self-destructive urge for party purification sweeping over Democratic liberals, to the detriment of Democratic prospects.

Lieberman himself certainly does. My Post colleague Ruth Marcus recently spent some time on the campaign trail with Lieberman and reported on a talk he gave in Danbury. "Are the extremes going to dominate?" Lieberman asked. "Do you have to be 100 percent in agreement with an elected official or it's not good enough?"

Well. I don't blog; I columnize. But count me with the bloggers on this one. No great mystery enshrouds the challenge to Lieberman, nor is the campaign of his challenger, Ned Lamont, a jihad of crazed nit-pickers. Lieberman has simply and rightly been caught up in the fundamental dynamics of Politics 2006, in which Democrats are doing their damnedest to unseat all the president's enablers in this year's elections. As well, Lieberman's broader politics are at odds with those of his fellow Northeastern Democrats. He is not being opposed because he doesn't reflect the views of his Democratic constituents 100 percent of the time. He is being opposed because he leads causes many of them find repugnant.

As early as December 2001 Lieberman signed a letter to President Bush asking him to make Saddam Hussein's Iraq our next stop in the war against terrorism. As recently as last month, he opposed two Democratic resolutions to scale back our involvement in the war. And just last week Lieberman characterized the progress of the war as "a lot better" than it was a year ago, adding, "They're on the way to building a free and independent Iraq."

So, why the surprise if Connecticut voters, listening to Lieberman and looking at his record, conclude that they cannot trust his judgment on the single most important issue of the day? That's not mandating purity; it's opting for a senator who pays more attention to the war on the ground than to the war in his head.

Indeed, across Connecticut and neighboring states, Republican legislators whose support for the war has been less avid than Lieberman's are in trouble this year precisely because they've allowed Bush (even if only by virtue of their support for Republican control of Congress) to press on with the war. Connecticut's three Republican House members are scrambling for their political lives for fundamentally the same reasons that Lieberman is. In neighboring Rhode Island, Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee — the most anti-Bush, antiwar Republican in the Senate — may well be defeated because to be a Bush-era Republican of any stripe in the Northeast these days is a formula for political oblivion.

Of all Northeastern senators, moreover, Chafee is the one whose political profile most closely matches Lieberman's. Over the past three years, Chafee has run up a 65 percent voting record on the scorecard of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). Lieberman's score is 75 percent. The six other Democrats from the nearest states — Jack Reed from Rhode Island, Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton from New York, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry from Massachusetts, Patrick Leahy from Vermont — averaged 97 percent during those three years. Lieberman's ADA rating of 80 percent last year tied Florida's Bill Nelson for the second-lowest among Senate Democrats.

The issue here isn't that Lieberman is not 100 percent. It's that his positions — not just on foreign policy but on trade, Social Security and other key issues — are often out of sync with those of Democrats in his part of the country. To expect his region's voters to dump the area's moderate Republicans but back Lieberman is to expect that they will adopt a double standard in this year's elections.

Lieberman's ultimate problem isn't fanatical bloggers, any more than Lyndon Johnson's was crazy, antiwar Democrats. His problem is that Bush, and the war that both he and Bush have championed, is speeding the ongoing realignment of the Northeast. His problem, dear colleagues, is Connecticut.

[hooligan]

I support a strong anti-war stance, he obviously hasn't been listening to this party.

[yoMAMA]

Originally Posted by hooligan

I support a strong anti-war stance, he obviously hasn't been listening to this party.

I may still win the general election, though (which I hope not).

[hooligan]

Originally Posted by yoMAMA

I may still win the general election, though (which I hope not).

Dawg, you've got my vote!

[yoMAMA]

Originally Posted by hooligan

Dawg, you've got my vote!

LOL

oops.

[Shuriken]

Here’s another:

A PRIMARY LESON FOR LIEBERMAN

by E.J. Dionne Jr.

The Washington Post, Tuesday, August 1, 2006; Page A17


Consider the uncanny similarity between Sen. Joe Lieberman's campaign for re-election in Connecticut last weekend and a certain political weekend in New York 26 years ago.

In Connecticut, four Senate Democrats pleaded with the party's rank and file to support Lieberman in the state's Aug. 8 primary against liberal challenger Ned Lamont. One of them, Sen. Ken Salazar of Colorado, was unabashed in describing Lieberman as "a hero of mine and someone who has inspired me."

On Sept. 6, 1980, a group of nine Republican senators descended on New York state to help Sen. Jacob Javits, the liberal Republican running in a primary against a conservative named Alfonse D'Amato. Among them was Sen. Alan K. Simpson of Wyoming, who called Javits "an example to us, our counselor, our father confessor."

The comparison is flattering to Lieberman, given Javits's stature in the Senate, but it's not reassuring. D'Amato defeated Javits in that primary and went on to serve 18 years in the Senate.

Ideologically based primary challenges to important incumbents almost always signal major changes in the political winds. That's as true of Lamont's strong campaign against Lieberman as it was of D'Amato's victory, following as it did the primary defeats of two other liberal Republican senators — Clifford Case of New Jersey in 1978 and Thomas Kuchel of California 10 years earlier — at the hands of conservatives.

The upstarts who beat Case and Kuchel later lost the fall elections. But their cleansing of progressives from Republican ranks was part of a long conservative march that culminated in Ronald Reagan's 1980 victory and the hold that conservatives now have on the elected branches of the federal government.

The opposition to Lieberman is motivated by an effort to reverse the trend to the right. It's true that Lamont's campaign has been energized by widespread opposition to the Iraq war and the fact that Lieberman has been one of the most loyal Democratic defenders of President Bush's Middle East policies.

But Lieberman's troubles are, even more, about a new aggressiveness in the Democratic Party called forth by disgust with the Bush presidency — an energy comparable to the vigor that a loathing for liberalism brought to the Republican right in the 1970s and '80s.

Like the earlier generation of conservatives, today's Democratic activists are impatient with accommodating the powers that be. They demand that Democrats stop trying to chase a "center" that has veered ever rightward since 1980. Instead, they want to haul that center back to more progressive terrain. That's why so much of the political energy in Connecticut seems to be with Lamont.

Lieberman's core problem was not even his support for the Iraq war. It was his eagerness to challenge the legitimacy of fellow Democrats who have called attention to the administration's mistakes. Lieberman, confident of Democratic support, seemed to crave the affection of Republicans most of all.

The statement that did more than anything to power this primary challenge was a comment Lieberman made in December.

"It's time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be the commander in chief for three more critical years," Lieberman said, "and that in matters of war, we undermine presidential credibility at our nation's peril." The implication that there is something wrong with criticizing George W. Bush is unacceptable to most Democrats, who believe that Bush himself has done the most to undermine his own credibility.

And so, just as political logic pointed to the earlier downfalls of Javits, Case and Kuchel, so does political logic suggest a gloomy outlook for Lieberman.

Elections, however, are about more than logic and historical trends. If Lieberman survives this primary, it will be thanks to voters who would gladly have cast a protest ballot against him but never really wanted him to lose. Such voters — and, yes, I identify with them — are frustrated with Lieberman's accommodationism but like and respect him and hope he might learn something from Lamont's challenge.

A Lieberman loss next week could also create distracting problems for Democrats. Lieberman has said he would run as an independent if he lost the primary. This would divert national attention from the Democrats' central goal of making this fall's elections a referendum on Bush and the Republican Congress.

As for this primary, the lesson already is clear: A Democratic Party that has been on defense since the 1980s desperately wants to go on offense. Lamont understands that. If Lieberman is to survive this round, he needs to make clear between now and next Tuesday that he's gotten the message.

[hooligan]

Progressive Republicans, imagine that, also the purging of said Republicans doesn't surprise me one big.

[Shuriken]

I thought I'd post another perspective on Lieberman's loss of the Democratic primary in Connecticut:

LIEBERMAN'S DEFEAT: MORE THAN WAR

by Tom Teepen

Cox News Service, Friday, August 11, 2006


Right-wing blogs, Internet sites and talk-radio are all atwitter about Sen. Joe Lieberman's defeat in the Connecticut primary, mainly about the issue of the Iraq war. Here's proof, they crow, that the Democratic Party has been taken over by lefty activists who (1) hate Bush, (2) blame America first and (3) are looking for someone from al-Qaida to surrender to.

It is a powerful, damning analysis that suffers only from being wrong.

The internal Democratic case against Lieberman has less to do with his support of the war and his, until recently, only mild concern about the Bush administration's manhandling of it than with the manner of that support.

As other Democrats grew increasingly disillusioned by the administration's pre-war manipulation of intelligence, its cavalier miscalculations about the scope and complexity of likely post-combat challenges and its nakedly partisan misuse of the war to defame political opponents, Lieberman increasing took up Rovian rhetoric to denigrate his fellow Democrats.

At points, Lieberman came close to echoing the conservative activists' charge that dissent from the administration line was tantamount to treason.

He seemed almost to equate Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean to Saddam Hussein when Dean said — rightly, as it has panned out — that the capture of Hussein, per se, was unlikely to make Americans safer. Lieberman said that if he lost the primary, the message would be: "In the Democratic Party, there is no room for strong-on-security Dems" — an off-handed slander of most Democrats.

Lieberman, in other words, was hoist on his own canard.

But as much as the Connecticut primary was about war issues — winner Ned Lamont ran mainly on those, unwisely calling for a date-certain U.S. withdrawal — they were not the only issues. Although Lieberman's stances were typically moderate to liberal, he struck some poses that cost him with primary voters, his support, for instance, of the appalling effort by Congress to break legislatively into the sad Terri Schiavo case, where it had no business. And many in the state had felt for some time that Lieberman had lost the local touch.

At bottom, Lieberman's defeat was more solidly a confirmation of the late Tip O'Neill's dictum that "all politics is local" than the opening step in the Democratic long march to neo-Maoism that the right so wishes to believe is afoot.

Where's the supposed trend? Other Democratic incumbents who also had supported Bush in the war went unchallenged in their primaries. And in Georgia, arguably the party's most leftward member of Congress, Rep. Cynthia McKinney, a darling of left conspiratorialists and an apologist for Palestinian militants, was upended by a garden variety Democrat, a former county commissioner.

Chances are that the coming congressional elections will see more Democrats emphasizing their disagreements with the rationales for, and conduct of, the Iraq war — as indeed no small number of Republican incumbents have already started to do.

But with the polls showing most Americans increasingly skeptical of the war, any such shift will be more a case of the politicians hustling to catch up with the mainstream than of them scrambling up its left bank.

***

Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Atlanta.

And I couldn't resist posting this. I've never seen the usually temperate E.J. Dionne so pissed off before:

REPUBLICANS RESPOND TO LIEBERMAN LOSS

by E.J. Dionne Jr.


WASHINGTON — Oh my goodness, as Don Rumsfeld might say. Support for the Iraq War hits a record low, and all the president's hit men decide that it's time to smear their opponents as defeatists who give aid and comfort to the enemy.

Of course they didn't mention the poll on Iraq released by CNN on Wednesday. As a basis for their guilt-by-association campaign, they used the fact that Democratic voters in Tuesday's Connecticut primary favored anti-war businessman Ned Lamont over Sen. Joe Lieberman.

The gentlemen who have gotten us into a mess in Iraq prefer not to explain how they'll fix things. They would rather use national security for partisan purposes, and they were all out there on Wednesday, spewing incendiary talking points. Hey, they may not have sent enough troops to win a war, but they sure know how to win mid-term elections.

In a telephone call with journalists, Vice President Cheney came close to suggesting that there is a new political blog out there called "al-Qaeda for Ned." His words have not received nearly the attention they deserve.

Mourning the fact that Democrats would "purge a man like Joe Lieberman" — that word "purge" has a nice Stalinist ring, doesn't it? — our vice president went on to say this:

"The thing that's partly disturbing about it is the fact that, (from) the standpoint of our adversaries, if you will, in this conflict, and the al-Qaeda types, they clearly are betting on the proposition that ultimately they can break the will of the American people in terms of our ability to stay in the fight and complete the task."

The rejection of Lieberman made Cheney wonder if "the dominant view of the Democratic Party" is "the basic, fundamental notion that somehow we can retreat behind our oceans and not be actively engaged in this conflict and be safe here at home."

Wow! I bet the 145,000 free citizens of Connecticut who voted for Lamont will be shocked to learn that they were really sending signals of "retreat" to "al-Qaeda types." Then there was Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the Republican National Committee handpicked by President Bush and Karl Rove.

Speaking in Cleveland, Mehlman couldn't resist starting with a little old-fashioned red baiting. He explained Ronald Reagan's defection from the Democratic Party this way: "He saw the beginning of the end, as a party that had vowed to fight communism became a party that set itself against those who fought communism." Ah, yes, the party of Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale was nothing but a bunch of anti-anti-communists.

From there, it was an easy leap to saying a Democratic Party — cleverly renamed the "Defeat-ocrat Party" by the RNC chairman — "that once stood for strength now stands for retreat and defeat." Translation: Anyone who dares question our botched approach is in favor of surrender.

Finally, from Tony Snow, the White House official who speaks for the president, came this analysis of the Connecticut result: "It's a defining moment for the Democratic Party, whose national leaders now have made it clear that if you disagree with the extreme left in their party they're going to come after you."

This statement is rooted in a lie — or, to be polite, fiction. As Adam Nagourney noted in The New York Times on Thursday: "In fact, the vast majority of Democratic Party leaders supported Mr. Lieberman in the primary and did not endorse Mr. Lamont until after the results were in." On Time.com, Perry Bacon Jr. noted that Lieberman had the support of "almost the entire Democratic establishment."

And if being against the Iraq War makes you "extreme left," then the administration has succeeded in pushing 60 percent of Americans into that camp. That's the proportion opposed to the war in the new CNN poll.

When he announced he was running as an independent, Lieberman issued a ringing condemnation of "petty partisanship and angry vitriol." He denounced those who offered "insults instead of ideas" and said the purpose of politics is "to lift up, not to tear down." True, and there could hardly be any more offensive examples of petty partisanship than the vitriolic screeds issued by Cheney, Mehlman and Snow — coming, as they did, just a day before we learned of a new terrorist plot against us. Unfortunately, Lieberman seemed to borrowing from the White House playbook on Thursday when he used the foiled terror attack to slam Lamont's position on Iraq.

We'll never achieve authentic bipartisanship until a crowd that has clung to power by dividing us into bitter camps gets the rebuke it deserves. Lieberman should reread his civility speech and send it to the White House. They divide us at our peril.