Shock wave from Lieberman race

Given that more Republican incumbents face serious challengers than Democrats do, that's another flashing red light to the GOP, he said.

MoveOn.org, one of the "netroots" organizations that helped raise money and provide on-the-ground people power for Lamont, saw all positives for national Democrats in Tuesday's outcome. "Some will say this is a split in the Democratic Party. No, it's the story of a politician who was way too close to George Bush," says Tom Matzzie, MoveOn's Washington director. "Given the disaster in Iraq, Republican leaders are hardly qualified to comment.... If they want to make this election about Iraq, bring it on. I think voters will hold politicians accountable."

In the centrist wing of the Democratic Party, where Lieberman is most at home, analysts sought to minimize any national message in the senator's loss.

"In the end, it's one race – and an idiosyncratic race in a lot of ways, so it's hard to extract lessons from it," says Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank.

Mr. Marshall says he didn't think Lieberman's position on the war was so much the problem as that he "expressed insufficient disdain and criticism for Bush." He says Lieberman's defeat represents "a setback for people who think the party ought to be unifying around a strategy that can recapture the Congress in this election and put us in striking position for the White House two years hence."

Even before Tuesday, Lieberman's troubles appeared to be affecting the 2008 presidential race – or at least one senator thinking of running for her party's nomination. In a hearing last week, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York – who supported military action against Iraq and has yet to disavow that 2002 vote – was particularly aggressive in criticizing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's handling of the war, and called for his resignation. Senator Clinton has long sought to portray herself as a centrist on defense issues, a position that some party members felt was the safe position for her to take.

Now, says a Democratic consultant speaking on background, Clinton remains the "800-pound gorilla" in the race for the nomination, and "she needs to make a mistake not to get it." He adds: "One mistake she could make is going too far afoul of the liberal activist base of the party, and she's seeing in Connecticut just how strong [that base] is in the nominating process, and how important the war is to those folks."

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