Lieberman has always been a childish, spoilt asshole of course, as apt to work against his own party as to support the liberal causes supposedly near to his heart, but ever since his defeat in the 2006 Democratic primaries and subsequent re-election as an independent — fully supported by the Democratic leadership btw — he has gone on a permanent sulk. Lieberman has rewarded the loyalty of the Democrats by becoming a Republican in all but name. Robert Farley examines how this could happen but draws the wrong conclusion:
The institutional failure, I think, was that the Democratic Party didn’t fully understand that it needed to put Joe Lieberman’s political career in the dirt in 2006. I think they believed that the choice was essentially between two Democrats, rather than between a Democrat and a guy who was going to be elected by Republicans and was going to loathe the party’s progressive base.
The wrong conclusion, because he blames the party for being naive about the true nature of Lieberman, rather than for making a deliberate choice to support the opponent of the candidate its base put forward. Supporting Lieberman in the 2006 primaries and election wasn’t done out of a misguided sense of personal loyalty on the part of the party’s elite, but out of a desire to squash a rebellious base. Ned Lamont was an outsider, a candidate of the base who ran against the interests of the party’s leadership and they’d rather see an obstructist rightwinger elected than lose control; had Lamont won, we might have seen more of these sort of leftwing challenges.