Remember this, from two years ago today?

We beat Joe Lieberman two years ago today and in the process changed how we talked about the Iraq War and the entire narrative for the 2006 elections. More than anything, Ned Lamont's win over Joe Lieberman on August 8, 2006 proved the value of primaries.

It isolated and marginalized Joe Lieberman. Sure, he snowed the people of Connecticut into voting for him one last time by telling them he'd seen the light, that he was ready to get us out of Iraq. And you can bet that the people of Connecticut won't be making the same mistake again. But we succeeded in driving him from the party, and in the process, showed what a committed progressive grassroots and netroots community could do to shape an election.

It's also the promise of what we will do in 2010. But in the meantime, here's a little reminder of what was.

In a past diary I could not bring myself to write the name of the "Independent Democrat" from Connecticut. Re-reading that entry I was struck by the decision. Then Sunday morning, I saw Joe on Meet the Press ("Me Dee Pressed" after the show sometimes, Sunday no exception) and I had a similar reaction. I found myself shaking my head whenever Joe spoke, cursing at the TV, surprised at the depth of my contempt for the man. How can a man who knows not the meaning of loyalty--one of your basic components of character--lecture us on his judgement of McCain's character? How could've Gore been sooo wrong?

It wouldn't surprise me if I learned tomorrow that he "threw" the VP debate to Cheney back in 2000. You laugh, but he did smile whenever Cheney scored a point, remember, that same smile I saw this past Sunday whenever he tried selling us another four years of misery.

What's wrong with this man?

I've seen quite a few comments and diaries and blog entries and columns and talking heads say that Hillary Clinton deserves to be the Democratic Vice Presidential nominee because 8 million people voted for her in the primary.  I've seen the same argument made, though much less frequently, about John Edwards and his third place finish.

Well, I'm hear to tell you as an Edwards delegate candidate who endorsed Hillary after Edwards dropped out, bullshit.

When I put my name on the ballot to be a delegate for John Edwards it was so he could be President, making the big decisions and leading our country to a new era of progressivism.  It was not so he could be the Vice President, live in the Naval Observatory and attend a lot of funerals.

Research 2000 for Daily Kos. 6/30-7/2. Likely voters. MoE 4% (3/31-4/2 results)

Independents disapprove of George Bush 14/86, so that has a clear effect on Lieberman's approval ratings. He is even less popular with Democrats while more Independents now disapprove of his performance than approve. While Lieberman's approval ratings continue to fall, the matchups with Lamont were largely unaffected compared to a couple of months ago.

Other findings from the poll -- Obama crushes McCain 57-35 in Connecticut, and Lieberman would actually hurt McCain on the ticket in the state. Let's hope McCain picks him.

My biggest fear is that Lieberman retires in 2012. I want him defeated at the ballot box. And until then, this poll, along with yesterday's Q-poll, should go a long way toward dispelling the notion that Lieberman is popular. His loving embrace of Bush and McCain, along with his rabid warmongering, have definitely killed his support at home.

Full crosstabs can be found below the fold.

We agree with Jon Henke that "there will always be a place for the amateur blogger who can get good information and write with a unique voice."  And we believe that once people get a taste of activist, netroots democracy it will be difficult - if not impossible - to convince them to return to mass media passivity.  For candidates, the challenge will be to harness the power of the netroots or lose to those candidates who do.  Either way, as the Washington Post concluded following the Yearlykos Kos convention in early August 2007, "Like it or not, the [netroots] appear to be here to stay".

So conclude Lowell Feld and Nate Wilcox in their new book (published June 30) Netroots Rising: How a Citizen Army of Bloggers and Online Activists Is Changing American Politics  I will tell you now that I think anyone interested in understanding the netroots would be well advised to read this book.

In November 2006, Tim Tagaris wrote a post mortem about what went wrong with the Ned Lamont campaign. From that post:

Barack Obama

Quite possibly the biggest disappointment ... period.

While on his book tour, he was in NYC one day, had a scheduled day off, and appeared in Massachusetts the following day.  Yet he couldn't make time to stop in the state between the two on his day off.  We made it explicitly clear he was the single senator we wanted in the state above all others.

He declined.

Eventually, we asked Senator Obama to send out an email for the campaign to his Connecticut list.  We created a culture in which emails became news (much like we did with the blogs in the primary).  They made it entirely clear that he would basically not even mention Joe Lieberman's name in the email, let alone take him to task for his unfortunate position on the war in Iraq.  This was disappointing, but I wasn't going to be spiteful.  They sent the email, and as I hoped, the press came calling.  Our Press Secretary, Eddie Vale, was asked how many people the email went to.  He looked on the back-end of the website and saw the number of click-throughs to the landing page I created.  He answered "about 5,000."  Within minutes of the Associated Press piece going on the wire, I received several phone calls from Obama staff.  They were none to pleased about the 5,000 number.  Essentially, Obama could be seen as helping, but not helping THAT much.  His staff apparently made it clear that the email only went out to 225 people in Connecticut.  That's it.  The next day we were subject to a correction in the papers and ridicule from Lieberman's campaign and corners of the right-wing blogosphere.

It's also important to note that Obama's email came only after a tremendous amount of pressure built up from portions of various online communities who "threatened" in behind-the-scenes conversations and open discussions online that support for Lamont would be viewed as a part of a "presidential checklist."

Everyone should also know that Robert Gibbs, part of the group that ran the infamous Dean/Osama ad during Iowa 2004, is now Barack Obama's Communications Director.

So why were there 5,000 clickthroughs? Because Atrios got a copy of the email and linked to the landing page, inflating the number of people who saw that page. Obama was pressured into "helping" Ned Lamont, but that help took the form of an email sent to a piddling 225 people. Such help...

Keep that in mind as you read this:

It's well known that Obama's 2006 endorsement was important. But it's not widely understood just how urgently the Lieberman people begged for Obama's help at a critical moment in Lieberman's career -- and in that light, just how much of a back-stabbing Lieberman's attacks on Obama now represent.
In response to the Lieberman camp's pleas for help, Obama subsequently endorsed him at a dinner of Connecticut Democrats later that month.

"I am absolutely certain Connecticut is going to have the good sense to send Joe Lieberman back to the U.S. Senate so he can continue to serve on our behalf," Obama said at the time.

"It was a favor as huge as we could have gotten -- it was like a drowning man getting thrown a life preserver," the Lieberman official continued. "Just when Ned was trying to establish himself as a credible alternative on the war, Barack Obama came in and said, `Hey, I disagree with him on the war, but you should send him back to the Senate.'"

So Obama gave Lieberman his priceless endorsement, undercutting Ned Lamont. Then, in the general election, rather than get behind Lamont as the Democratic nominee, he undercut him by refusing anything more than a pitiful email to a pitiful 200+ recipients. In other words, Obama ran interference for Lieberman.

Now, Obama reaps what he sowed, with Joe Lieberman transformed into one of John McCain's top attack dogs.

Supporting Joe Lieberman and undermining Ned Lamont was likely Obama's worst decision the past two years. And while a heaping spoonfull of "I told you so" is in order, I'd be satisfied with a full-fledged ouster of Lieberman from the Democratic caucus. Senate Democrats (and Barack Obama) cannot allow a betrayal of this magnitude remain unpunished.

Update: The past two years, Lieberman has used his chairmanship at Homeland Security to cover Bush's myriad f'ups from port security to Katrina. How much does anyone want to bet that if Senate Dems inexplicably let him keep his committee in 2009, he doesn't use it to conspire with Republicans and undermine Obama's presidency? Bet on it.

Given we were right about Lieberman before, do Senate Democrats really want to bet that we won't be right about this?

Article originally published here on OpEdNEws.com

This 2008 presidential race has not just been about who would become the Democratic presidential candidate. It has also been all about the future leadership and control of the democratic party.  

Obama's win means a major change in the leadership of the Democratic party, policy, direction and people.   I've interviewed Ed Rendell, Joe Trippi, Ned Lamont, Markos "dailykos" Moulitsas, Patrick Murphy (D-PA), Katrina vanden Heuvel, Christy "firedoglake" Hardin Smith, and more to see the future of the Democratic party.

The conventional wisdom is that Clinton is posturing to try to get the VP nomination, and will hold the party hostage until she does. She's sending them message, "give me what I want, or I'll make you lose in November, and I'll run in 2012!"

Some folks have dubbed this the Tonya Harding option, and it scares a lot of Democrats... because she's exactly the kind of power-obsessed psycho to try it.

But, what if in 2012 she was no longer a Senator? What if, like Lieberman, she lost the primary battle for her Senate seat in early 2012? What would her odds for election be in November 2012?

Perhaps its time for Obama supporters to plan a preemptive strike... making the Tonya Harding option no longer viable. So much so, that if she so much as tries it, she will be immediately hurting the one she loves the most: herself.

Starting at 5pm eastern, I host Sunday's FireDogLake Book Salon with David Sirota, author of The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington.

David Sirota's book opens at YearlyKos at the Riviera in Las Vegas and ends with his visit to Chicago for YK2.0.  In between, he provides lots of remarkable observations about Americans' rage against wealthy, privileged Insiders and their access to the levers of power and control.  I literally learned something new on every single page.

As you'll recall, the Lieberman campaign hosted their website on a cheapy hosting account, probably paying in the tens of dollars per month for the service. When their website crashed due to heavy usage on Primary Day, they accused the Lamont campaign or his supporters of "hacking" his website.

We knew immediately why his site had gone down -- his shitty hosting account -- but Joe Lieberman, in full sanctimony, demanded an investigation into the website failure, forcing tax payers to fund civil and criminal investigations into the mater.

We already know that the US Attorney knew before the November elections that the charges were bogus, yet refused to reveal the information. We also know that Connecticut Attorney General Dick Blumenthal claims the Feds didn't update him on their investigation, hence he was unable to let the public know about Lieberman's bogus politically-charged accusations.

However, the reality is that the Feds DID tell Lieberman and Blumenthal about the results.

Thomas Carson, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney, said in a statement that the office updated the Lieberman campaign and Blumenthal on the investigation in late October 2006.

"In accordance with our usual practice . . . the Lieberman campaign, as the alleged victim, and the office of attorney general, which had been conducting a contemporaneous investigation . . . were provided with limited information," Carson said. "The investigation was administratively closed several weeks later."

Tom Swan, Lamont's former campaign manager, said Carson's response is alarming.

"They acknowledge letting the Lieberman campaign know and never letting anybody from the Lamont (campaign) know," Swan said.

The US Attorney's office knew that Lieberman's charges were bull before the November election, as did Dick Blumenthal, as did Joe Lieberman. Yet none decided to update the public on charges that had a clear political import in the then-current debate.

The US Attorneys were (are?) puppets of the Rove political machine. Their silence is obvious, and Lieberman has repaid that favor to George Bush many times over since his reelection. Dick Blumenthal was obviously carrying water for Lieberman.

And Lieberman? For someone who claims to be so religious, he sure is a dishonest, lying hack.

Update: For their part, Blumenthal's office still denies they had concluded there was no wrongdoing before the election. But they did receive information from the US Attorney's office before the election. What exactly was that information?

Update II: Blumenthal emails me:

As you know from your legal background, a prosecutor is limited as to what he can say about a case that produces no criminal charges, especially when it's a state official talking about a federal investigation.

I can say that my office's discussions with the U.S. Attorney's Office prior to the election did not include any conclusions. The U.S. Attorney's Office did not inform my office of its conclusions until after the election.  

As I said in my statement, we were not informed of the FBI email or its contents or even its existence. Nor was any member of my staff given such information. This statement is not contradicted by anything said by the U.S. Attorney's Office. To have made any premature public predictions before our investigation ended in December 2006 would have been irresponsible and improper.

Interesting that the case magically gets closed just after the election when we had figured out the problem with Lieberman's website in about 45 minutes. It's still patently clear to me that Blumenthal's office and the US Attorney's office both dragged their feet until after the election. Why would they do that?

We know why the US Attorney in Connecticut would want to protect Joe Lieberman by refusing to release the details of their investigation into the alleged "hacking" of Lieberman's site the day of the Democratic primary. The last thing Karl Rove and Monica Goodling wanted was Lieberman embarrassed days before the general election by pointing out the rank incompetence of his campaign and lack of integrity in owning up to his b.s. accusations.

But what about Connecticut's Democratic Attorney General? Why would he carry water for Lieberman and protect the senator? Who knows. But what we do know now is that Blumenthal lied to blogger CT Bob about the case at the time.

[T]he [FBI] email was sent out on October 25th, 2006, about a week before the general election. The only reason it finally saw the light of day was because of an FOI request, otherwise it may have never been revealed.

The reason I felt queasy was because I remembered an interview I did with Blumenthal four days later (October 29th) but still before the election, at a fund raiser for Dave Mooney in Stratford. This is when news of the FBI's findings may have still made a difference.

In the interview, Blumenthal said there were no definite conclusions to the investigation and that it was ongoing.

Here's that interview:

Lieberman's spokesman Dan Gerstein, on his campaign being busted for lying about their website crash in the 2006 primary:

A spokesman for Mr. Lieberman, Dan Gerstein, said in a statement that the campaign had acted on the assessment of its Web site administrator, who believed the site had been attacked. And while he accepted the F.B.I.’s findings, he did not offer any regrets.

"We consider the matter closed," Mr. Gerstein said.

Legally, the matter was closed BEFORE the 2006 general election, in October of that year, and they didn't see fit to admit to the public that they had smeared the Ned Lamont campaign and bloggers like us. That would require integrity the likes not seen around Joe Lieberman since ... well, perhaps ever.

This wasn't rocket science. The Lieberman campaign was incompetent in its web dealings, as was painfully obvious the very day his site went down. Yet that didn't stop Gerstein and Lieberman from blaming their incompetence on others:

Visitors who tried to access Lieberman's site at the time received a message calling on Lamont to "make an unqualified statement denouncing this kind of dirty campaign trick and to demand whoever is responsible to cease and desist immediately."

And it didn't stop the traditional media from trumpeting those lies and smears, none of which bothered to ask their tech teams (or outside tech sources) to take a look and see if the Lieberman charges held any water.

It also didn't stop Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and US Attorney Kevin O'Connor from refusing to release details of Lieberman's bogus charges and his campaign's rank incompetence a week before the election, lest it hurt their friend's re-election chances. I'm sure Karl Rove and Monica Goodling were mighty pleased with O'Connor's work.

In short, a U.S. Senator demanded public funds be spent investigating a patently bogus and politically motivated charge, yet the public was refused access to the results of that investigation until well past the time where the voters could've properly assessed the situation in that election.

No one said Bush's and Rove's politicization of the Justice Department didn't pay dividends.

But still, Gerstein thinks "the matter is closed".

Legally, it is, but politically, it's not. It's just one more data point for a state that is increasingly disenchanted with Lieberman and suffering from buyer's remorse.

Research 2000 for Daily Kos. 3/31-4/2. Regular voters. MoE 4% (9/10-12/2007 results)

If you could vote again for U.S. Senate, would you vote for Ned Lamont, the Democrat, Alan Schlesinger, the Republican, or Joe Lieberman, an Independent?

All

Lamont (D)      51 (48)  
Lieberman (I)   37 (40)
Schlesinger (R)  7  (9)

Democrats

Lamont (D)      74 (72)  
Lieberman (I)   19 (25)
Schlesinger (R)  2  (3)

Republicans

Lamont (D)       4  (7)  
Lieberman (I)   74 (69)
Schlesinger (R) 19 (24)

Independents

Lamont (D)      53 (49)  
Lieberman (I)   36 (38)
Schlesinger (R)  6  (9)

For someone who pretends to be so pious, Lieberman and his lackeys exhibit a shocking lack of integrity. Sure, Connecticut Republicans love it since they are allergic to good government, but he's unsurprisingly lost his state's Democrats and independents.

It's just a matter of waiting out the clock until 2012.

Tonight has been all about appreciating and enjoying the "small" things in life. As I composed my Countdown musings, I was sitting on my bed munching on pizza from a local pizza place that I grew up with, downing my "elixor of life" (Diet Coke), and playing with whichever of my kitties decided to jump up and join me. After a craptacular day of panicky students and disorganized professors, I really needed this! Thank you all so much for your roll in what is quickly becoming the best part of my day!

Remember THIS?

As Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman fights for his political life, his campaign on Tuesday accused his opponent's backers of hacking into the senator's campaign Web site and shutting it down just in time for Connecticut's primary Election Day.

...and THIS?

I have the definitive answer as to why Lieberman's site went down.

They are paying $15/month for hosting at a place called MyHostCamp, with a bandwidth limit of 10GB. MyHostCamp is currently down, along with all their clients.

...and THIS?

Straretz noted that if Lieberman "hacking" charges prove false, the FBI and federal prosecutors could pursue charges against those who reported them. "If it was fabricated and you could prove intent, there's Title 18, Section 1001, which is providing false statements to an FBI agent. That can be prosecuted at the discretion of the U.S. Attorney's Office."

Given Lieberman's high-profile efforts on behalf of John McCain, I wondered how his constituents were taking it. So I had independent pollster Research 2000 reprise a poll I commissioned last year testing a rematch between Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman. I found last year that buyer's remorse had set in. It's even worse this year.

Research 2000 for Daily Kos. 3/31-4/2. Regular voters. MoE 4% (9/10-12/2007 results)

Lieberman has shored up his support with Republicans, who clearly see him as one of their own. He has predictably lost ground among Democrats. But interestingly, he also lost the same amount of ground (six points) with independents.

Clearly, his whole "independent" schtick isn't playing well with real independent voters. I'll have more on this poll later today. The crosstabs are below the fold. Crosstabs for last year's poll can be found here. Unfortunately, there's no approve/disapprove numbers from last time since I forgot to ask for that data (I think it was my first poll ever commissioned).

Today Connecticut named its add-on superdelegate. They chose Don Williams

Under the arcane Democratic rules, Connecticut had 11 superdelegates -- people whose status was determined by their political offices or positions in the Democratic Party -- plus an add-on to be chosen by the other delegates this week. That was Williams.

Williams is technically unpledged, as are all superdelegates, but he is a leader of the Obama campaign in Connecticut.

Watching the train wreck in motion now I'm beginning to believe its time for a new party.  Before biting my head off think about a few things.

Remember the Ned Lamont/Joe Lieberman primary of 2006?  How the leadership of the Democratic Party failed to step in for Ned Lamont and the fiasco that has resulted. Having to kiss the ass of self centered jerk who placed his own interests above that of the party.

The Democratic Leadership that has failed to stand up to Bush time and time again on the Iraq war.

I could go on and on but the point of this diary is this.  These are our same leaders that we now expect to step in and solve the Hillary Clinton issue facing us.  She has been allowed to go on even though numerically she cannot win.  She is being allowed to attack Obama in some of the most disgusting ways, i.e. by pratically endorsing McCain over Obama, by inserting race (thanks Bill), etc. If anyone thinks someone will step in and tell her to get out then I have some land to sell you.

This is our party?  Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton?  Two people who have consistently placed themselves over us the voter.

Maybe it's time to form a new party.  

I just received this invitation for an Obama fundraiser and it reads (in part):

Mark Califano
Cheryl and Cleve Christophe
Annie and Ned Lamont

&
Gail Worthington

Cordially invite you to join them in welcoming
Tony Lake

Obama for America
SENIOR FOREIGN POLICY ADVISOR