by Steve Kornacki
The New York Observer

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.

And if losing to the Republicans isn-t enough, Mr. Lieberman also made clear that any Democratic nominee who favors “retreat” risks losing his personal endorsement. After offering praise for Republicans John McCain and Rudy Giuliani for showing independence from their party’s base (and conveniently ignoring the abuse Ron Paul has suffered from the G.O.P. establishment for his war opposition), Connecticut’s junior Senator told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos: “It does seem to me now that the leading Democratic candidates for President are competing with each other to see which one can more quickly pull more of our troops out of Iraq, while our troops are there fighting and now succeeding with a lot on the line for the future security of the United States of America.”

In truth, the front-running Democratic candidates, all of whom favor a withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, are doing just fine ignoring Mr. Lieberman’s electoral prescription. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards all generally hold leads over the most likely Republican nominees. Moreover, surveys show that voters lopsidedly prefer a generic, unnamed Democrat to an unnamed Republican for President. With President Bush’s approval ratings in the toilet, thanks almost entirely to Iraq, the next election is the Democrats- to lose.

In all, Mr. Lieberman’s “This Week” appearance lasted about 11 minutes, and if anything became clear in that time it’s that his influence over the national political debate is waning - a decline that not many foresaw last November, when Connecticut’s voters returned him to the Senate, prompting talk that a new power-broker, coveted equally by both parties, had been born.

read more at The New York Observer

Email this Post  | RSS 2.0  |  Trackback  |  Filed under: 2008 Presidential Election, Lieberman