[Zhang Fei]

Article: By now, the Lieberman crowd was beaten, even with 65 percent of the vote.

This entire article is spin. Lieberman won with a 30% margin. And he's beaten? Puh-leeze. I'm not a Lieberman fan, but it sounds like the writer is a Republican liberal (of the Christine Whitman persuasion) prematurely cheering on Lieberman's political demise.

[HostileTerritory]

No, the perception given by the article is accurate. For a sitting senator, these nominations are a formality. Party officials are the LAST people to throw an incumbent overboard, because they have the most to gain from propping up the machine and the most to lose from pissing off an incumbent who looks to stay on. Lamont wasn't supposed to get his 15%. The Lieberman machine in the big cities had to twist a lot of arms to get this result.