But an appearance by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday hinted at one way Democratic leaders might find redemption with their base: By stopping the next war before it starts.

Asked by host George Stephanopoulos whether she agrees with a recent Senate decree that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, a branch of the Iranian military, is a terrorist organization, Mrs. Pelosi replied that, “Whatever Iran’s impact is on our troops in Iraq should be dealt with in Iraq.”

Asked by Mr. Stephanopoulos to elaborate, she said: “It means deal with them militarily in the country that you’re engaged in. There’s never been a declaration by a Congress before in our history, before the Senate acted, that declared a piece of a country’s army to be a terrorist organization.”

Her answer was significant because many of the same forces that drummed up support for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 have now turned their attention to Iran. They swear their endgame is not another war, but they speak of the Iranian “threat” in the same tone in which they once warned about Iraq.

If the U.S. doesn’t soon confront Iran, Joe Lieberman said recently, “they'll take that as a sign of weakness on our part and we will pay for it in Iraq and throughout the region and ultimately right here at home.”

Mr. Lieberman is one of the co-authors of the Senate amendment Mrs. Pelosi was asked about. The Kyl-Lieberman amendment, a non-binding statement of “the sense of the Senate,” urges President Bush to designate the IRG a terrorist organization. It passed on a 76-22 vote, with support from numerous Democrats including Hillary Clinton.

Even though it is non-binding, the measure’s opponents have voiced concern that it will be used by Iran hawks either to gin up fear of Iran among the general public or, worse, by the Bush administration to justify a unilateral attack on Iran without further Congressional approval. On “This Week,” Mrs. Pelosi vowed not to pursue in the House any legislation similar to similar to Kyl-Lieberman.

“It could be brought up (by someone else), but I’m not bringing it up,” she said. “It’s a Sense of the House. What is the point? This has never happened before, that a Congress should determine that one piece of somebody’s military is that. And if it is a threat to our troops in Iraq, and [Iran is] in Iraq, we should deal with them in Iraq.”

Asked about comments by Barack Obama—who was absent from the Senate when Kyl-Lieberman was voted on but who is now taking Mrs. Clinton to task for her vote—that the measure was “reckless” and opens the door to military action, Mrs. Pelosi stressed that Congress will be heard before any new wars are launched.

The amendment itself gives Mr. Bush no authority, she said, “because it’s a non-binding, in-one-house resolution. Creating an atmosphere of suspicion against Iran? Perhaps it could contribute to that. But of itself, it has no authority.”

“We don’t believe that any authorities that the President has would give him the ability to go in without an act of Congress,” she said. “Any President, if our country is attacked has very strong powers to go after that country. But short of that, he must go to the Congress.”

Mrs. Pelosi and her House Democrats have not been willing to try to cut off funds to end the war, and virtually all their attempts to affect the situation in Iraq by other methods has been thwarted by the White House and by its loyal Republican supporters in the House and Senate. But as maddening as this has been to anti-war Democratic voters, they’d be wise to consider how the Iran debate might now be playing out if the Republicans still led the House.

Not so long ago, the then-Democratic senator seemed to represent the most mature and worldly strand of his party, especially on foreign policy. Now, his drift to the right seems to accelerate with every passing week and his public pronouncements become ever more bizarre.

The latest example came in an article on the editorial page of Monday’s Wall Street Journal. Of all the multitude of challenges facing the United States, Mr. Lieberman zeroed in on a peculiar target: Damascus International Airport.

The airport, Mr. Lieberman asserted, was “the central hub of al Qaeda travel in the Middle East.” Each month, 60 to 80 suicide bombers were traveling through Syria, he claimed.

He proposed two remedies: that Congress should send “a clear and unambiguous message” to the Syrian government that this “is completely unacceptable and it must stop”; and that “responsible air carriers should be asked to stop flights into Damascus International.”

Such moves, he contended, would help shut “the supply line” to al Qaeda in Iraq.

Given Mr. Lieberman’s belief—and it is a more than justifiable one—in the nefariousness of the Syrian regime, he failed to explain why an expression of displeasure from Congress would bring Damascus into line.

The notion that, in the current fraught climate, American diplomats should prioritize an effort to influence foreign airlines is eccentric at best.

There is a more fundamental problem, however. Mr. Lieberman, who once talked often about the importance of winning hearts and minds in the Middle East, seems to have forgotten such sentiments, replacing them with undiluted muscularity.

He hypothesizes that the key challenge for the U.S. is to choke off the supply of foreign fighters entering Iraq. In fact, an infinitely bigger, more important challenge is finding a way to counteract their desire to do so. Asking British Airways and Air France to tinker with their schedules will make no difference on that question.

Perhaps this latest blast from Mr. Lieberman, odd though it was, should not have come as much of a surprise. In recent months, even as the U.S. armed forces have been stretched taut, the Connecticut senator has been enthusiastic about opening new fronts and exacerbating existing antagonisms.

In June, he announced on Face the Nation that the U.S. should consider a military strike on Iran. “We’ve got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians” he told Bob Schieffer, including “a strike over the border.”

The idea that such a strike could be made without further fuelling the conflagration in the region seems closer to outright delusion than mere wishful thinking.

Mr. Lieberman’s most enduring critics would charge that he has often suffered from this delusional tendency. Certainly, he has a record of following up trips to Baghdad with remarkably cheery pronouncements. Back in November 2005, Mr. Lieberman returned from one such trip to report “real progress there.” The savagery of the conflict remained undimmed in the months that followed.

This week’s Wall Street Journal article duly commenced with the observation that “the United States is at last making significant progress against al Qaeda in Iraq.” Added to all that, Mr. Lieberman has shown an increasing tendency to impute dubious motives to Senate colleagues who oppose his view of the war, whilst mixing in odd company himself.

Earlier this year, he incited Republican senator Chuck Hagel to the point of apoplexy during an appearance on Meet the Press.

“I want to do everything I can to win in Iraq,” Mr. Lieberman said. “And I think that’s what my oath of office requires me to do.”

Mr. Hagel, fuming, shot back that neither he nor any other member of Congress was “advocating defeat” and added, “That’s ridiculous, and I’m offended that any responsible member of Congress or anyone else would even suggest such a thing.”

But even as Mr. Lieberman has found fault with the likes of Mr. Hagel, he pronounced himself “honored” to address the downright weird Christians United for Israel conference in Washington last month. The group’s founder and national chairman, John Hagee, believes Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for immorality in New Orleans and favors a preemptive strike upon Iran.

Mr. Lieberman told Mr. Hagee’s followers to continue to do “God’s work” and said he prayed for their success.

It is hardly necessary to be a member of the anti-war lobby to be alarmed by Mr. Lieberman’s trajectory. I supported the war at its outset, am ambivalent about the notion of U.S. withdrawal, and wrote a column in this newspaper defending Mr. Lieberman against some of the accusations thrown at him by supporters of Ned Lamont last year.

Sometimes I still find it possible to see the contours of the man whom I once found admirable.

But, much more often, I see Mr. Lieberman morphing from a realist into a dreamer and from a genuine independent into a lapdog of the White House.

Last year, in his home state newspaper the Hartford Courant, Mr. Lieberman quoted one of his heroes, John F. Kennedy:

“Too often we seek the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”

These days, as a knee-jerk hawkishness cines to dominate his every public utterance, the sentiment could just as easily be cast back at Mr. Lieberman himself.

The junior Senator from Connecticut, who was elected as an independent last year after losing the faith of his home state’s Democratic Party, continues to flaunt his tie-breaking status, all but calling his former partisan colleagues terrorist coddlers and daring them to do something – anything – about it.

It’s a bullying, childish game he’s playing. If Mr. Lieberman were to walk away from the Democrats completely and to caucus with Senate Republicans, he would hand the G.O.P. its magical 50th vote, which, along with Vice-President Cheney’s vote, would strip Democrats of the narrow majority they won in the chamber last November. And so he chooses to torment the Democrats, siding with them for organizational purposes only to amplify – at every pivotal turn in the four-plus-year evolution of the Iraq War – the White House’s most shrill and demagogic attacks on the party’s foreign policy credibility.

He was at it again this week.

“There is a very strong group within the party,” Mr. Lieberman said of the Democrats in an interview with The Hill, “ that I think doesn’t take the threat of Islamist terrorism seriously enough.”

He went on to suggest that Democratic efforts to force and end to the war are a function of partisanship, with Democrats simply deciding that “anything President Bush is for, they’ll be against, and that’s wrong.”

“I’m surprised and disappointed that the split has followed partisan lines so much,” he told the paper.

Never mind that Mr. Lieberman has been every bit the partisan that he accuses Democrats of being on the Iraq question: There hasn’t been a single consequential vote on which he’s strayed from the G.O.P. line.

This rhetorical disingenuousness is, of course, nothing new for “Holy Joe,” who routinely tries to pass off his hawkish war posture– which is at odds with the overwhelming majority of the American public – as the voice of bipartisan consensus-building. He champions the surge, reads from the White House’s script, and threatens to support next year’s Republican presidential nominee. And if his Democratic Senate colleagues have any thought of calling him out in public, well, there’s always the threat he reiterated to The Hill this week.

“I wouldn’t foreclose it as a possibility,” he said when asked if he might switch parties and become a Republican, “but I hope that I don’t reach that point.”

But what Harry Reid and Company might not realize is that, for all of Mr. Lieberman’s threats, Senate Democrats actually have the upper hand in the relationship with Mr. Lieberman. If they were to lay down the law with Mr. Lieberman, he might not run to the G.O.P. as quickly as he wants Democrats to believe he would. And even if he did, it would be a relatively minor and very short-term setback for Democrats – but one with long-lasting implications for Mr. Lieberman.

Mr. Lieberman’s association with the Democrats, for all his griping, is actually quite beneficial to him.

For one thing, it gives him a gavel – the chairmanship of the Homeland Security committee. Sure, he could keep that if he jumped ship, and in fact, he might do himself one better – who knows what prestigious gavel Republicans might tempt him with? But it would be fool’s gold, because the question heading into next year’s elections seems to be how many additional Senate seats Democrats will pick up – not which party will control the chamber.

Four Republican incumbents are already prime Democratic targets, with several other seats (Ted Stevens’, for instance, and a probable opening in Virginia) in Democrats’ crosshairs as well. So Mr. Lieberman could swing the Senate to the G.O.P. and grab his committee prize, but he’d have to give it up in January 2009, and if the Democratic wave is big enough in ’08, the G.O.P. could be shut out of power for years. Indeed, if he values his chairman’s gavel, Mr. Lieberman might want to consider tempering his castigations of Democrats.

And beyond the issue of power within the Senate, Mr. Lieberman’s lapsed Democrat status contributes mightily to Mr. Lieberman’s ability to sell himself to the country as an anguished moderate – and not someone whose foreign policy views have moved him far out of the mainstream and into a narrow neocon pocket. Right now, Mr. Lieberman is a novelty act – the Democrat who vilifies his own kind. He’s like Zell Miller at the 2004 G.O.P. convention. But would old Zell’s speech have raised so much as an eyebrow if he’d had an “R” next to his name?

Except for about 18 months in 2001 and 2002, Democrats in the Senate were a frustrated minority for a dozen years until last year’s elections, when they picked up six seats to claim their 51-49 majority. Their desire to preserve that hard-won status is understandable, and that has meant biting their tongues when Holy Joe opens his mouth.

But what are they really getting for all their grief? Unlike the House, where a simple majority can make all the difference in the world, the Senate is the domain of individual privileges and prerogatives and super-majority votes. The simple act of forcing a vote on any consequential Iraq legislation requires 60 votes – so the difference between 51 and 50 almost doesn’t matter. When it comes to Iraq, the only power the Democrats’ narrow majority affords them is the right to force votes on whether there should be votes. Sure, it’s nice to get Republicans on the record, but is the overall outcome of any of this different than it would be if the G.O.P. held a one-seat majority?

Waving goodbye to Mr. Lieberman might neutralize him once and for all, transforming him finally into just another stay-the-course voice on the G.O.P. side. With the House still in Democratic hands, there would still be pressure on Republican senators to break with the White House on Iraq – and consequences for them at the ballot box next year if they don’t. That’s not radically different from right now, when the only hope of a congressionally-instigated end to the war rests in the hands of Republicans willing to break ranks.

No matter what, Democrats will be the majority party in the U.S. Senate come January 2009, one that won’t be at the mercy of Joe Lieberman. So why not get a head start now?

[Ed. note: This morning, we inadvertently posted an old column by Steve Kornacki in this space. Sorry for the confusion.]

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.

Given the Senate’s partisan balance – 49 Republicans, 49 Democrats (one still recuperating from a December cerebral hemorrhage), and two tie-breaking independents who caucus with the Democrats – Democrats are still technically at Mr. Lieberman’s mercy, their fragile control of the chamber dependent on his continued willingness to live up to his campaign pledge to side with his old party for organizational purposes.

But it’s now apparent that they need nothing more than that from him. Republicans have labored to portray Mr. Lieberman’s defeat in last year’s Senate primary as evidence that the Democratic Party has been over-run by weak-willed McGoverniks, a contention that Mr. Lieberman, in making reference to Democrats’ past vulnerabilities on foreign policy and national security issues, sought to reinforce on Sunday.

That game, however, has ceased to work. In years past – 2004 and 2002, say – a public association with Mr. Lieberman was helpful to Democrats, a reassurance to a more hawkish electorate that they were as “tough” as the G.O.P. But in 2007, embracing Mr. Lieberman’s intransigence is a decided political liability – evidenced most startlingly by a recent poll that found that even 58 percent of Republicans in Iowa want a troop withdrawal in the next six months. When, as he did on Sunday, Mr. Lieberman uses a national television interview to dust off old attacks on the Democratic Party’s foreign policy credentials while at the same time actually declaring that “the surge is working,” it only benefits his former party’s standing with the war-wary public. There are few, if any Democrats, quaking at his threat to endorse a Republican in ’08.

Similarly, his prospective defection to the Senate G.O.P. seems less likely now – again because of Iraq. One after another, the Senate’s moderate Republicans are now making a break from the Iraq policy championed by the Bush administration and Mr. Lieberman. By September, it seems more and more likely, the President will either take the hint and reduce troop levels or watch as those fed up Republicans side with the Democrats to impose a withdrawal timetable. Indeed, Mr. Lieberman’s interview was preceded with a clip of Senator Richard Lugar’s time-to-junk-the surge floor speech last week. If Mr. Lieberman were to flip to the Senate G.O.P. now, he’d probably still be surrounded by colleagues intent on ending the war.

There was actually a moment, in the aftermath of the 2006 elections, in which his triumph was the rare exception to a profoundly anti-war national tide, when a remarkable redemption story actually seemed possible for Mr. Lieberman, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 2000. However foolishly, it was believed back then that President Bush would respond to the election results – and the report of the Iraq Study Group report – with a rethinking and scale-back of the war, which might have significantly deflated the issue’s primacy in the ’08 race. Had Mr. Bush done so, Mr. McCain may well have sustained his front-runnerhood on the G.O.P. side – raising the possibility that as the nominee he’d offer his Number Two slot to his friend Mr. Lieberman, capitalizing on the cross-party appeal of someone known primarily for his political independence.

But Mr. Bush dug his heels in and Mr. McCain and Mr. Lieberman cheered him on, and now both of them are identified almost exclusively with the unpopular war (with a little immigration thrown in for Mr. McCain). Now, as he drops to single digits in Republican polls, it seems ludicrous to imagine Mr. McCain as the ’08 G.O.P. nominee, and inconceivable that he’d round out his ticket with someone so intimately attached to such an unpopular war. Not very long ago, both men had enviable reputations as courageous political mavericks; in a few short months, they have become bullheaded apologists for a policy that has fallen into deep disfavor with the public.

In discussing the melting Congressional support for the war, Mr. Lieberman said on Sunday that “You might say that in Iraq we’ve got the enemy on the run, but for some reason in Washington a lot of politicians are on the run to order a retreat by our troops even as they are beginning to succeed.”

Those politicians are on the run to catch up with the public before November 2008. Mr. Lieberman should probably consider himself lucky that his seat was up last year – and not next year.

Mr. Lieberman appeared on Face the Nation on Sunday, apparently with the primary purpose of rattling a saber in Iran’s direction.

“If there’s any hope of the Iranians living according to the international rule of law … we can’t just talk to them. If they don’t play by the rules, we’ve got to use our force and, to me, that would include military action,” he told Bob Schieffer.

The concept of taking military action against a nation of Iran’s size and capabilities, while the U.S. remains bogged down next-door in Iraq, seems impractical, if not crazy.

Mr. Lieberman, however, has always been an optimist where military force is concerned—witness, for example, his consistently sunny assessments of the situation in Iraq.

The Senator asserted that “we have good evidence” that Iran has a camp at which people are trained to attack U.S. forces in Iraq. A single “strike” could sort the problem out, he suggested, adding that “I think you could probably do a lot of it from the air.”

Sunday’s performance was not the first time that Mr. Lieberman has made hawkish noises about Iran.

“While we are naturally focused on Iraq, a larger war is emerging,” he wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in December. “On one side are extremists and terrorists led and sponsored by Iran, on the other moderates and democrats supported by the United States.”

Mr. Lieberman also suggested that Al Qaeda and the Iranian government were pursuing a joint strategy in Iraq—an assertion that many observers viewed with considerable skepticism, given that Shiite Iran seems to have a greater vested interest in backing forces from its own strand of Islam than in supporting the Sunni militants of Al Qaeda.

And back in April 2006, Mr. Lieberman gave an interview to The Jerusalem Post in which he held out the possibility of U.S. strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities.

Mr. Lieberman’s hard-line approach may be rooted in justifiable concerns about Iran’s intentions. But the solution he suggested on Sunday is a recipe for disaster. It incorporates the same ingredients of hubris, wishful thinking and over-simplification that have cost the U.S. so dear in Iraq.

During his Jerusalem Post interview of 14 months ago, Mr. Lieberman at least mentioned the need “to encourage the reformist and opposition elements in Iran.” What would become of this idea, were the U.S. to bomb Iran?

To imagine that the Iranian people would react to an American attack with anything other than anger and a reflexive patriotism—both of which would likely benefit President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—flies in the face of all evidence.

American “encouragement” of Iranian reformists is a delicate issue at the best of times. This reporter, visiting Tehran last month, was struck by the degree to which even the harshest critics of Mr. Ahmadinejad were equally strident in their determination that the U.S. should keep its nose out of Iranian affairs.

And public opinion aside, the logistics of Mr. Lieberman’s plan are dubious. His notion of a single air strike to resolve the problem of alleged Iranian training of insurgents seems fanciful. Even if the accusation is true, presumably the Iranians could simply set up another facility elsewhere.

Perhaps the Connecticut Senator believes a one-shot approach would intimidate the Iranians out of further misbehavior.

But would Tehran be easily cowed, given its awareness of the U.S.’ plummeting stock in the region and the strain imposed on the American military by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? It seems at least an even bet that the Iranian response would be to strike back hard.

Mr. Lieberman seems to be falling into an old trap: the belief that superior military firepower can smoothly wipe out shadowy threats while carrying no adverse political consequences. The shortcomings of such an approach have been shown in the grisliest way to the U.S. in Iraq and to its ally Israel during last year’s disastrous incursion into Lebanon.

None of this is to deny that Iran is a threat to the U.S., to Israel and to the Middle East as a whole. The question is how that threat should be counteracted.

On Monday, the Democratic leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, told ThinkProgress.org, “I believe our efforts should be diplomatic in nature …. I know Joe means well, but I don’t agree with him.”

The previous day on Meet the Press, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said, “I think we should be talking to Iran, we should be talking to Syria. Not to solve a particular problem or crisis … but just to have dialogue with people who are involved in this region in so many ways.”

Dialogue and diplomacy do not make for especially magnetic rallying calls. But they are a much more sensible idea than the dangerous chimera of a short sharp shock to Iran proposed by Mr. Lieberman.

One is how exceedingly unlikely it is that Mr. Lieberman will actually pull the trigger on a party switch, even if he did use an interview last week—yet again—to leave the door slightly ajar. Connecticut’s junior Senator has a well-established habit of flirting with boldness before pulling back—like when he toyed with marching to the White House to demand Bill Clinton’s resignation in 1998, only to settle for delivering a verbal wrist-slap on the Senate floor.

The other is that by simply entertaining the notion of a Lieberman defection, the Senator’s colleagues play directly into his hand, allowing him to demand—and receive—just about anything he likes from the Democratic leadership.

In other words, Mr. Lieberman—who is generally loyal to the Democratic party line, except on the issue of Iraq—has every reason to play it coy, and no incentive now to reiterate his pronouncements of last summer, when he swore up and down that upon being re-elected to the Senate as an independent, he’d return to the Democratic fold.

The Republicans, still searching for some political momentum after their drubbing last November, are understandably anxious to court the one-time Democratic Vice Presidential nominee, whose break with the Democratic mainstream on Middle Eastern policy is growing more pronounced by the day. They’ve certainly laid out the welcome mat: Nearly every Republican official in the country—with the glaring exception of war foe Chuck Hagel—has spent the last year very publicly stroking Mr. Lieberman’s ego.

And, certainly, the precedent is there for a prospective switch by Mr. Lieberman. The last time the Senate’s partisan balance was this close—Democrats now outnumber Republicans, 51-49—was six years ago, when the 2000 elections left the chamber split evenly between the parties, with Vice President Dick Cheney breaking the tie in the G.O.P.’s favor.

It was then, in the spring of 2001, that James Jeffords, a liberal Republican from Vermont, gave in to Democratic entreaties and left the G.O.P., flipping control of the Senate and delivering to the new Bush administration what was thought to be a devastating jolt.

But the Jeffords switch also serves to illustrate why the Republicans should be very careful what they wish for. Rather than serving as a harbinger of an electoral revolt against the Bush G.O.P. in 2002, the defection may actually have boosted the party’s fortunes in those midterm elections.

By giving Democrats control of the Senate for half of 2001 and all of 2002, Mr. Jeffords essentially stripped them of their best political weapon: their status as a powerless minority. Maddening as it was for them, the Democrats’ minority position served to unify their disparate elements in opposition to the majority party’s agenda.

Before Mr. Jeffords’ defection, with the G.O.P. in charge of the White House and the Congress, the Democrats’ prospects for 2002 seemed rosy. But control of the Senate put the Democrats on the spot and exposed the kinds of ugly fissures that simple, cohesive opposition would have glossed over. When the ballots were tallied that year, the Republicans had defied history by gaining two seats—and control of the chamber.

So far this year, the Republican minority in the Senate has been possessed of a unity of purpose that they lacked in the waning days of their majority. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, for instance, managed to corral almost every Republican—including some opponents of the war—behind a procedural effort to derail a vote on a resolution opposing President Bush’s troop-level increase in Iraq.

That kind of vote-herding will once again become nearly impossible if Mr. Lieberman were to put the Republicans in the majority. G.O.P. Senators would be forced back onto the defensive with an American public even more restless than it was last year, and by a Democratic-led House desperate for a partisan foil.

For the Republicans, Mr. Lieberman’s loyalty is fool’s gold. Yes, winning him over would mean committee chairmanships, better office space and some much-needed respect on the Hill. But in the Senate, the magic number to accomplish anything—as the G.O.P. itself just demonstrated in filibustering the war resolution—is 60, not 51. In that sense, the addition of Mr. Lieberman as the 50th G.O.P. vote (with Mr. Cheney adding the tie-breaking 51st) wouldn’t be as consequential as it’s cracked up to be.

Without Mr. Lieberman, it won’t be a fun 2007 for Republican Senators. But in terms of the next election, they may have him right where they want him.

Two more officials backing Hillary Clinton have financial ties to her campaign.

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They also have a new website.

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NYS GOP Chairman said Vinny Ignizio's win on Staten Island Tuesday was "important first step for the Republican Party down the road back to victory in New York."

Dan Janison says that Mike Bloomberg's bullpen style of governing has not started a trend.

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The National Rifle Association will probably endorse a White House candidate after each party's conventions.

Rock Hackshaw congratulates the winner of the City Council race in Brooklyn whose "political knowledge seemed minimal at best."

More than 280 people have commented on the "find the illegal immigrant" game played by NYU College Republicans.

A Polish-name joke in the New Yorker has drawn criticism.

And above is a classic video of Rudy Giuliani circa 1996, courtesy of City Hall gadfly-cum-reporter Rafael Martinez Alequin.

-- Azi Paybarah

Will Tom DiNapoli join the Spitzer administration?

Click here for salary information.

Crobar, where Hillary Clinton and other people have held fund-raisers in the past, is re-opening.

Chris Dodd may not get much help from fellow CT lawmaker Joe Lieberman.

There may be a deal on judicial selection in New York.

Errol Louis reflects on MLK.

An anonymous commenter broke news on our site that an aide to Councilman Jim Gennaro, Dena Iverson, is leaving to take a job doing press for the new mayor of D.C. (She confirmed it.)

And pictured above are Craig Johnson, Eliot Spitzer, Tom DiNapoli and Tom Suozzi.

-- Azi Paybarah

Former Gov. Mitt Romney is Mormon, which the Washington Monthly and New Republic say ought to disqualify him from the White House. "How Mormon are you?" a reporter once asked Romney. Maybe too Mormon, say the opinion journals. Point taken. John Kennedy needed to demonstrate that he was free of the Pope before he could be president. When Mario Cuomo was readying himself for a run, he went on and on about not cleaving to the Vatican on abortion.

And what about Jews? There's a theory that not only the Supreme Court cost Al Gore the 2000 election, so did Joe Lieberman's Jewishness. Gore couldn't win his home state, Tennessee. I'm sure some of this resistance was anti-Semitism; I heard some anti-Jewish comments about Gore's v.p. choice, Lieberman. But some of it was understandable: Lieberman is a nationalistic Jew; and I wonder "How Jewish" he is—that is to say, how he feels about his children marrying non-Jews, how important Israel would be in his foreign-policy considerations (high!). The first Jew in the White House is likely to be someone more assimilated than Lieberman, somebody intermarried, someone who makes a clear distinction between Israel's interests and ours.

Thirteen Jewish senators. 13 percent, exactly ten times the actual JEwish population percentage, of 1.3 percent. Jews are an elite, no one can deny it, and the cool thing about America, if you believe in it, as I do, is that America doesn't mind that they are elite. America respects subcultures; it understands that Jewish achievement is a reflection of Jewish culture of learning. At a time when Ruth Wisse and Gabriel Schoenfeld and a host of others are wringing their hands about the new antisemitism, the number of Jews in the country's most exclusive club, the Senate, leaps by 30 percent.