Poll: Lieberman lead slips in New York

ALBANY, N.Y. -- Joseph Lieberman's lead in New York has slipped and former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean has caught up to the U.S. senator from Connecticut in the race for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, a statewide poll reported Thursday.

"The name recognition advantage he had fades over time as the others become more well known," said Lee Miringoff, head of Marist College's Institute for Public Opinion.

The latest Marist poll had Dean favored by 18 percent of New York Democrats in the race for the party's presidential nomination. Lieberman, the party's vice presidential candidate in 2000, was at 16 percent. They were followed by former Gen. Wesley Clark at 14 percent and Rep. Richard Gephardt at 10 percent. The other Democratic contenders were all in single digits.

Just last month, pollsters from the Marist College institute in Poughkeepsie had Lieberman leading the pack at 23 percent with Dean next at 13 percent.

more: http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/ny-bc-ny--democrats-newyork1023oct23,0,7392013.story?coll=ny-ap-regional-wire

All he ever had was name recognition. He's made his bed, and it looks as though the public is ready to let him sleep in it. Oh well, I'm sure the insurance lobby will keep him in his Senate seat for time immemorial.

Day of the Spoiler

by Rick Perlstein
October 22 - 28, 2003

The listbot at meetup.com, the commercial site whose clever software facilitates face-to-face gatherings between Web surfers of like interest, sent me a forlorn little e-mail the other day. "Congratulations on a successful National Lieberman in 2004 Meetup last week! See photos from every city," it read, giving a link. Click lieberman2004.meetup.com/photos yourself, and you'll see the pathos: There ain't no photos.

That's not surprising. In Chicago, where I live, there wasn't any meetup. Not enough supporters RSVP'ed to trigger the software's automated threshold. Meetup.com, in fact, has registered only 332 Joseph Lieberman fans in the entire United States of America, four in Chicago. An undercover reporter from The Village Voice—uh, me—represents one quarter of the total.

It could be considered comic, this abyss at the Lieberman grassroots. It could be, that is, if Lieberman showed any signs of going away. Instead, he's been ramping up: launching a splashy new tax plan; publishing a dowloadable campaign book, Leading With Integrity: A Fresh Start for America, and an accompanying website; kicking off a campaign tour—all just this past week. And that's not funny. Because it's not too early to predict that if the Democrats lose the presidential election next November, Lieberman will be the one to blame. That will certainly be so if he ends up becoming the nominee—in which case the Democratic Party will be left without an activist base. ("I'll vote for Joe Lieberman absentee from whatever country I move to if he wins the nomination," as one friend of mine puts it.) Perversely, it might even be worse for the Democratic Party if he fails.

It works like this. He has already conceded Iowa, but let's suppose Lieberman doesn't do too poorly in the other early states, picking up some delegates here and there, perhaps even winning a primary, say one of the five on February 3, the week after New Hampshire, when his name recognition will help him because no one will have time to campaign in all these states. Thus emboldened, he campaigns harder—by intensifying his pattern of tearing down his opponents as dangerously liberal—and remains committed to staying in for the duration. Then, as his star fades, he'll have only one viable strategy left, a manic, all-or-nothing strategy: trying to convince Democrats that the front-runner must be dumped altogether, using the dark arts of opposition research, trying to dig up something purportedly embarrassing from the front-runner's past that the jubilant Republicans might even have missed if left to their own devices.

Lieberman still loses the nomination. But the successful nominee ends up, in a self- fulfilling prophecy, becoming just what the spoiler-candidate said he was: unelectable—as a man named George Bush effortlessly exploits the opposition research that a member of his own party has dug up. It has happened exactly this way before. Just ask Joe Lieberman's old friend Al Gore.

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