Lieberman's Democratic Party is (thankfully) long gone

Lieberman, about a week ago:

Well, I say that the Democratic Party changed. The Democratic Party today was not the party it was in 2000. It’s not the Bill Clinton-Al Gore party, which was strong internationalists, strong on defense, pro-trade, pro-reform in our domestic government. It’s been effectively taken over by a small group on the left of the party that is protectionist, isolationist and basically will —and very, very hyperpartisan. So it pains me.

Ross Douthat responded at the time:

[G]iven how the landscape looks right now, Lieberman sounds an awful lot like the Rockefeller Republicans of yore, who would complain about how a "small group of extremists" in the conservative movement were hijacking their party and dooming it to defeat, even as those same extremists were leading the GOP to national successes that the Jacob Javitses and Christine Todd Whitmans and Lowell Weickers could only dream about.

It may have been a "small group on the left" that helped push the party in the right direction, but it was the huge American majorities in 2006 that endorsed our efforts and helped us take control of the House and Senate. We are now poised for similar gains in 2008 not because of Lieberman's loser dead-end politics, but because the Democratic Party has convincingly moved beyond them.

Smart Democrats are learning that the public loves unambiguous progressivism. The dumb ones, like Lieberman, are holding on to discredited ideologies, watching the world pass them by while using stupid surrogates like Dan Gerstein to try and spin away their growing irrelevance. So we got idiocies like this one from Gerstein back in early February:

The signs of change are unmistakable. Over the last year, the Kossacks themselves seemed to be waning -- the number of monthly page views on the site is down dramatically.

When the reality was this:

Or stupidities like this one, trying to equate Joe Lieberman's 2006 Senate race to Barack Obama's race today:

Mr. Lieberman called for a new politics of unity and purpose; Mr. Lamont mostly called for Messrs. Bush's and Lieberman's heads.

The hope candidate soundly beat the Kos candidate -- Kos actually taped a commercial for Lamont -- by 10 points. More importantly, Mr. Lieberman won independents (the biggest voting bloc in the state) by 19 points, which is all the more remarkable because they opposed the war by a margin of 65%-29%.

When the reality was that 1) Lieberman would go on to endorse not Obama, but Republican John McCain, making a fool of Gerstein's efforts to equate the two politicians, and 2) Connecticut independents have long abandoned Lieberman and his misleading campaign, the one where he avoided his pro-war record, instead declaring in a television commercial, "I want to help end the war in Iraq." Those voters are no longer fooled:

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)

Now it's clear that Gerstein continues to feed Lieberman lines like this particularly hilarious one:

Lieberman said his critique against the "small group on the left" was directed at the online advocacy group MoveOn.org and liberal bloggers like Daily Kos, not any colleagues.

Unfortunately for them both, the cold, hard numbers don't lie. That "small group on the left" they're talking about is really a majority of their own constituents -- and it's also a number that continues to grow over time.