Let me be the first to say:

Don’t let the door hit you on the butt on the way out, loser.

Altitude Drop For Lieberman the Hawk
by Steve Kornacki
Early last week, a distressing, if not entirely unsurprising, Newsweek poll found that fully 40 percent of American adults continue to believe that Iraq was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks.

It must, then, have been this exasperating chunk of the electorate that Joe Lieberman had in mind when he declared Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that Democrats are doomed in the 2008 presidential race unless they re-embrace the Iraq War.

“I think that’s the best tradition of our party, and if we don’t recapture it … the Democratic candidate is going to have a hard time winning that election next year,” Mr. Lieberman said, likening his own hawkish Iraq posture to Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, and Henry “Scoop” Jackson – all of them much too deceased to protest such a questionable comparison.

Ouch!!!!!

…

Given the Senate’s partisan balance – 49 Republicans, 49 Democrats (one still recuperating from a December cerebral hemorrhage), and two tie-breaking independents who caucus with the Democrats – Democrats are still technically at Mr. Lieberman’s mercy, their fragile control of the chamber dependent on his continued willingness to live up to his campaign pledge to side with his old party for organizational purposes.

But it’s now apparent that they need nothing more than that from him. Republicans have labored to portray Mr. Lieberman’s defeat in last year’s Senate primary as evidence that the Democratic Party has been over-run by weak-willed McGoverniks, a contention that Mr. Lieberman, in making reference to Democrats’ past vulnerabilities on foreign policy and national security issues, sought to reinforce on Sunday.

That game, however, has ceased to work. In years past – 2004 and 2002, say – a public association with Mr. Lieberman was helpful to Democrats, a reassurance to a more hawkish electorate that they were as “tough” as the G.O.P. But in 2007, embracing Mr. Lieberman’s intransigence is a decided political liability – evidenced most startlingly by a recent poll that found that even 58 percent of Republicans in Iowa want a troop withdrawal in the next six months. When, as he did on Sunday, Mr. Lieberman uses a national television interview to dust off old attacks on the Democratic Party’s foreign policy credentials while at the same time actually declaring that “the surge is working,” it only benefits his former party’s standing with the war-wary public. There are few, if any Democrats, quaking at his threat to endorse a Republican in ’08.

…

Those politicians are on the run to catch up with the public before November 2008. Mr. Lieberman should probably consider himself lucky that his seat was up last year – and not next year.