The news is in. Lieberman is out. The Republicans can try to spin it as "the democrats just knocked out a centerist candidate with national name recognition to get a more "liberal" candidate...they'll be sorry." The DLC can look at this and wonder if their machine is broken or if it just needs a little reorienting to face in the same direction as the people, the voters, are now moving. Any further equivocating or reluctance to admit our invasion of Iraq was a misconceived flop will prove costly at the polls. Letters to the president are nice but votes had better follow very soon. I don't know what the opposite of coattails might be, but I will coin "goattails". Mr. Bush and his war will take down a few of the pro-war incumbents this November, let us hope Resident Bush has long enough goattails to let us begin salvaging our nation.
We will never know the net effect of current middle east hostilities on the portion of Jewish voters who were in Joe's core support constituency. The vote was closer than I hoped to see. Would support-Israel-no-matter-what voters have looked at the current mess as having a likely detrimental outcome for Israel? Do voters see the war in Lebanon as a spill-over from our war in Iraq, a consequence of Hezbollah and its Iranian sponsors becoming bold with the demonstration that America can't fight or won't fight effectively in the middle east and has exhausted itself? How do the voters add up all these questions during their one moment of power in that booth with only one lever to push?
NOT REALLY AN UPDATE:I just had to tune in this morning to see if the close outcome reversed itself over night in a Florida-Flip-Flop. Nope, not this time. The candidacy of Joe Lieberman is still seriously dead. Stay tuned for any miraculous improvements in its condition.
REALLY AN UPDATE: We have been analyzing this Lieberman upset for two weeks now and it seems less and less correct for me to have said "we will never know...". Josh Marshall has pretty respectable opinons and the best depth of sources of any blogger I know and he says the Iraq debacle is a recognized disaster for Israel.
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