The war is only the catalyst for a reaction waiting to happen. Throw the catalyst on a more inert situation, like any other Democratic Senator’s base, and nothing like this happens. It’s like a marriage. If the marriage is basically strong, it is resilient and people forgive their spouse even major missteps. On the other hand, if the relationship is on the edge from years of growing estrangement and seething frustration (a fair description of the way many Democrats feel about Lieberman), the same misstep leads to bitter recrimination and divorce. (And sometimes, reconciliation. We’ll see next week.)

You also make a mistake, y81, in putting way too much stock in polls. Over the last two decades I have read and commissioned more political polls then I can even remember. I count numerous career pollsters and statisticians among my friends and I can tell you flat out that it is a very crude tool for measuring motivation. Polls provide a snap shot of what is happening at a moment in time, but it takes quite a bit of poring over large amounts of polling data, usually sequenced in time and backed up by focus groups, to tease out why it is happening – and even then you aren’t always right. None of the data released on the race to date comes anywhere near giving us this kind of tool. Very little credible academic experimentation in real world American politics goes on at all, (Donald Green at Yale is the shining exception) so it is a bit futile to hold out for that as your standard. Ultimately, pollsters and strategists go with what their experience-honed instincts tell them. One thing that experience makes very clear to all of them is that voters almost never (or never, depending on who you ask) vote on issues per se. Issues act as building blocks and props in a narrative of values that guides voting decisions (this has been tested, by the way) and in that equation, where you are on bankruptcy law can be as useful a touchstone for defining a candidate as how you talk about the war.

You may be right (I don’t read many mainstream pundits). A quick google, though, shows Business Week commenting “This year’s primary will determine if there’s room for a powerful moderate senator in the conservative-dominated Republican Party”, and I certainly remember the conservative part of the party thinking that was the issue (see NR’s coverage of the race as an example).

Lots of people were unhappy with Specter, for lots of reasons—dating back to his derailing of Bork’s SC nomination. However, it wasn’t until he became the symbol of “opposition to tax cuts” that there was enough coordinated dislike to mount a real primary challenge.

It’s one reason I don’t like the American political scene. In most other democracies, any opposition politician saying that about the government of the day would be attacked by his own party and ridiculed by the media – and rightly so in both cases. Imagine the Tories saying criticism of Blair is “at our peril”, or the ALP saying the same about Howard. The broadsheets would be overflowing with scorn.

Or to summarize: I expect opposition politicians to act like the opposition.

There are indeed prominent progressive bloggers—digby and Atrios among them—who are willing to be verbally critical of other center-right Dems like the Nelsons (though there are also those—like Kos himself—who really do suggest that Lieberman is somehow a unique case).

However, even among those willing to verbally criticize these other Democrats, there was never a serious movement to mount a primary—or general election—challenge to them from the left. Both Nelsons, Tom Carper of Delaware, and Clinton are all up for reelection; each has richly earned a primary challenge from the left. Yet no prominent progressive blogger has promoted such a challenge to any of them, even when there are candidates running against them (as there is, at least, in the case of Clinton).

In short, actions speak louder than words. And the only Democratic incumbent in the Senate who is facing a serious primary challenge from the left (and it ain’t too far to the left, either) is Lieberman. Indeed, the very narrative about Lieberman that you correctly describe as having been written (at least in large part) by the blogosphere—that Lieberman warrants a challenge because he is insufficiently partisan—itself militates against criticism of the Democratic Party per se.

I’m liking the Lamont challenge very much. Maybe it will put the fear of God into some of the other Democratic senators who feel that their sinecure is guaranteed because they’re in a heavily blue state.

I’m with Ben on this. Too many prominent left-of-center bloggers are arguing Lieberman as some kind of special case, and pointing to the very weak intraparty opposition to, say, Hillary Clinton as proof of this. What really grates here is that so many of them seem to be doing this as a way of refuting the ridiculous pearl-clutching from the New Republic crowd (and Brooks and Broder etc etc) about “purges” and “ideological purity.” In other words, they’re allowing the right and the faux center to define the terms of the debate. Again.

More of them need to stop dancing around the issue and say yes, Joe Lieberman is the most glaring symbol of a much broader problem in the Democratic Party, and this could be the beginning of something much bigger than one Senate seat in Connecticut. And you can call that a self-destructive jihad led by bug-eyed zealots (under the nefarious direction of The Dark Overlord Kos)—or you can call it democracy. We already know what David Brooks is going to call it…but then again, is there any conceivable reason why any progressive-minded person should give a shit what David Brooks has to say about anything?

Newspaper reporters certainly have no privileged source of insight in gauging popular moods. I read as many blogs and have as many Connecticut friends as the average reporter. Now if you showed me some results from an academic institution, like the polling institute at Quinnipiac University, indicating that Lieberman was in trouble because of the bankruptcy bill, I would take that seriously, but the idea that I would know more if I read more newspapers is really laughable.

Lieberman has been a vocal and prominent supporter—probably the most vocal and prominent supporter among Democratic senators—of the war and the administration’s conduct of it. That is why he is in trouble, and other Democratic senators, who voted for war but have complained about it and criticized the Bush administration since, are not.

Hillary Clinton is a special case. Everyone has made up his or her mind about her.