Yet, a highly decentralized movement and diversity of political interests within Iowa’s tea party may prove difficult for Republican candidates to make solid waves in Iowa, a key 2012 early contest.

Monday, The Family Leader chief executive and three-time gubernatorial candidate Bob Vander Plaats appeared in Washington, D.C., to speak at a press conference with William Temple, founder of the Tea Party Founding Fathers. Vander Plaats used the opportunity to call for “exceptional leadership” from the candidate who will ultimately face President Barack Obama in 2012.

“I’m telling Iowans and others across the country that America needs a President that will lead on tax reform, on reforming Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, on drastically cutting discretionary spending, and who will refuse to spend more than we take in,” Vander Plaats said Monday in D.C.

Temple is in the process of planning a tea party rally in Kansas City this fall similar to the rally he held in Washington D.C. in 2009. He contacted Vander Plaats to help, which Vander Plaats said he agreed to do.

“I think he knows Iowa is a lead-off state, and wants candidates who [also] realize that to attend this rally and really have the chance to address the core issues of the tea party movement,” Vander Plaats said of Temple.

The movement has already shown political success in 2008 and 2010 elections, said Ryan Rhodes, chairman of the Iowa Tea Party.

“In state [legislative] races, you’re starting to see more people with tea party influences,” he said.

But even with all its given momentum, the movement — both in Iowa and nationally — is hard to classify. There are many different values and interests within the group, which in turn makes it difficult to unify and have a singular voice on issues. Most who consider themselves activists agree they want limited government by repealing health care reform, returning to the basic Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution and implementing fiscally conservative measures.  Several are against Democrat-centric ideas of government spending and creating more government-funded programs.

In an April article, The Des Moines Register quoted tea party activist Steve McCoy, of Indianola, as saying “the tea party’s not a Republican arm … there’s no allegiance to Republicans.” It’s a quote McCoy said he continues to stand by.

“But it’s not just Republicans,” McCoy clarified to The Iowa Independent. “Tea party activists are just upset with the direction the country is going, and with both the Republican and Democrat parties.”

Some tea party groups rally for conservative fiscal policies, while others advocate for home schooling rights, and still others champion for immigration reform. In Vander Plaats case, it’s “pro-family” values — specifically one-man, one-woman marriage and anti-abortion advocacy.

“That’s the blessing and the curse of the movement,” Rhodes said. “It’s fairly decentralized. We’re Republicans, we’re Democrats, we have all kinds of people in the tea party movement.”

Such diversity means there is no one person who speaks on behalf of tea party values, nor is the movement unified, unlike the Republican and Democrat parties.

Though often in the spotlight advocating many shared and individual beliefs held by tea party activists, Vander Plaats said Wednesday, “I am not the voice of the tea party in Iowa. There are a lot of threads to the tea party movement; I want to make sure the family thread is represented, and if I can add to that voice or re-energize the movement here in Iowa, then that’s what I want to do.”

Unlike other political parties, which rely on unity to make a stance and influence public policy, tea party members said loose organization is just as effective.

“We’re not a structured party,” McCoy added. “There’s no organizational structure, and I hope that never happens, because then you won’t have a Tea Party group. We’re people who think for ourselves, and we don’t want a (political) party to tell us what to think.”

Rhodes said his Iowa Tea Party is a loosely organized group. The group does not endorse any candidates, or even represent all activists, though it will lend a helping hand to local groups that ask for help in facilitating advocacy efforts on a specific issue.

A bus tour being launched by Rhodes’s Iowa Tea Party in June will give presidential candidates the chance to debate and will serve as a training tool to the public on caucus procedure.

“Our goal is to give people the tools they need to advocate for their issues and to back the candidate of their own choosing,” Rhodes said.

And candidates need not be only Conservative-leaning, Rhodes added.

“Everyone is welcome,” he said. “If a Democrat wants to come debate — I mean, if Barack Obama wanted to come to Iowa and debate issues with us, I’d be OK with that.”

Even if not a unified party, tea party activists believe the movement’s impact will be noticeable come November 2012.

“The tea party will have a significant voice in 2012,“ Vander Plaats said, adding similar movements have already resulted in drastic power change in other elections, primarily one in 2010, when U.S. Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., was elected to the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s seat. Brown had tea party base support to defeat Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, a Democrat.

Coakley had been believed to be favored to win the seat in heavily-Democratic Massachusetts.

“(Brown) spoke to tea party issues out there, and people rallied behind him,” Vander Plaats said. “Who would have thought he would take Ted Kennedy’s seat?”

Similar action could happen in Iowa, as former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich and other potential presidential candidates sweep through the state in the coming months. As tea party activism grows from dissatisfaction of the two-party system, candidates will need to reach out, tea party members said.

“Candidates will need to address the tea party’s issues, especially where they stand on ‘Obamacare,’ (and) the role of government,” Vander Plaats said. “When people get a candidate who does that, and think the person can go against Barack Obama, they’ll rally behind that person. We welcome all voices. It’s a vetting process.”

And a diversity of tea party groups and diversity even within the pool of GOP prospects could mean trouble for establishment Conservative presidential hopefuls.

“It’s going to depend on who puts their name out there, but if the Republicans put up another John McCain, I think a lot of people will have a problem with that,” Rhodes added. “

Vander Plaats did not give a name when asked who he would support for President.

“I like different traits in many of them,” he said. “I will be examining their core values carefully.”

“I do think they’re angry,” Boehner said of voters on “Fox and Friends” this morning. “They’re angry about the economy and jobs. They don’t trust either party.”

Boehner went on to claim that Republicans have offered clear alternatives to the Democrats’ stimulus bill, health care reform and “all of their nonsense.” (Remember, for example, this little gem outlining the GOP’s plans for health reform.) Still, his concession that Americans are across-the-board angry is indication that Republican leaders, for all their gloating over the last week, are also worried that the voters in Massachusetts, Virginia and New Jersey were revolting, not merely against Democrats, but against incumbency.

Also, if the Republicans are to make real gains, they’ll have to come up with a better message than that uttered by Rep. Adam Putnam (R-Fla.) last week.

“The American people have fallen out of love with the current direction, but they haven’t fallen in love with Republicans,” Putnam told The Washington Post. ”Last year was about picking up ourselves and dusting ourselves off. Now we need a direction and vision.”

Which begs the question: If you don’t already have direction or vision, what are you doing on Capitol Hill?

I had a call and a text message from two significant donors of mine, who I never hear from other than when I’m calling them for money, say: ‘Wow, this is huge. Keep up the good work. Let me know how we can help.

This pales before the effect that Brown’s win is having on congressional Democrats’ plans for their agenda. One dog that hasn’t barked: No vulnerable Democrats have bailed out of re-election this week.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) at a rally for health reform in October (Jay Mallin/ZUMA Press)

It was meant to be a populist legislative victory that would usher Democrats straight through the 2010 midterm elections: a sweeping health care reform bill offering affordable coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans, while preventing insurance companies from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions.

Then came Massachusetts.

[Congress1] In the wake of Republican Scott Brown’s stunning Senate victory in the Bay State Tuesday, Republicans are already spinning the outcome as a damning referendum on the Democrats’ partisan health reform proposal. The validity of the claim is debatable, as many political experts say the voters’ anger is more likely a response to the nation’s still-struggling economy. Still, with polls indicating that health reform has become more liability than asset, Democrats are scrambling for ways to put health care in the rearview mirror and make room for more tangible election-year items: taking on Wall Street and tackling the unemployment crisis.

Democrats can’t abandon their health reform bill, many experts say, but nor can they rely on it alone for success in November.

“There’s no question that this has got to make the Democrats queasy about health care reform,” Henry E. Brady, dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, said of the Massachusetts contest. “But the reason they’re getting clobbered on the health care bill is the economy. That’s what they’re going to live and die on.”

“There’s a much larger discontent that’s demoralized the average Democratic voter in Massachusetts, and that’s the state of the economy,” agreed Michael L. Mezey, a political science professor at DePaul University. “They want to get health care behind them, and the administration is going to pivot to more populist themes.”

David Epstein, an expert on congressional politics at Columbia University, compared the health reform bill to another consequential, but controversial, Democratic initiative: the sweeping deficit-reduction legislation passed by the Clinton administration in 1993. That law eventually helped the country achieve billions of dollars in budget surpluses, but because it took a few years to realize the gains, the accomplishment offered Democrats few immediate political advantages. Indeed, the Republicans swept to power just a year later.

“It was a great piece of public policy, but it didn’t help them [Democrats] in the [1994] midterms,” Epstein said. In a similar vein, he added, “just health care is not doing it right now.”

Democrats seem to have gotten the message. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) indicated Tuesday that, after health care, the Democrats will turn their attention quickly to the economy — and keep it there through the year. “Creation of jobs and the policies which will return us to fiscal balance will be our focus,” Hoyer said.

Later, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, issued a statement summarizing the Democrats’ election-year message. It boasted of the “economic progress” under Democratic leadership, but there was no mention of health care reform.

Still, Democrats can’t entirely abandon their top domestic priority at this late stage in the debate. As tough as it might be for some Democrats to explain to constituents their support for the bill, detailing its failure would be even tougher.

“They’re going to look like the gang that can’t shoot straight,” said Mezey. “Not passing it would be a big problem.”

Gary C. Jacobson, a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego, agreed. “Folding at this point,” he said, “might be more dangerous than just plowing on.”

Brown’s victory Tuesday was never supposed to be. Not only is Massachusetts among the most loyally Democratic states in the country, but the contest was staged to fill the seat vacated by the late Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), a lifelong champion of health care reform and an author of one of the early versions of the Democrats’ proposal.

Republicans were quick to claim Brown’s win as an indictment of the Democrats’ health reform bill. “The voters in Massachusetts, like Americans everywhere, have made it abundantly clear where they stand on health care,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in a statement. “They don’t want this bill and want Washington to listen to them.”

The episode has left Democratic leaders struggling to locate populist issues that voters will embrace. Epstein suggested that financial regulatory reform would be such an issue. “It’s good for them both as politics and policy,” Epstein said. “If you’re looking ahead, that’s the issue that will make or break the Democrats in the midterm elections.”

Not that the Democrats don’t already have some legislative trophies to carry with them on the campaign trail. In the last 12 months, President Obama has signed bills to prevent workplace pay discrimination, expand children’s health care coverage and protect consumers from the most abusive traps of credit card companies. And the Democrats’ $787 billion stimulus bill — which has taken its share of lumps from both sides of the aisle — is also widely credited with preventing the economy from sinking much lower.

Still, Democrats could have done much more to excite the populist base that swept them to victories in 2006 and 2008. Party leaders, for example, ignored calls from a host of prominent economists who warned that the $800 billion stimulus was much too small to tackle the Great Recession. More recently, the White House abandoned its earlier support for mortgage bankruptcy reform, paving the way for the bill’s failure in the Senate. And while consumer advocates have applauded the credit card reforms enacted last spring, they were also critical that Democrats, bowing to pressure from the finance industry, delayed the effective date of those changes until this year.

In the wake of Tuesday’s election in Massachusetts, MoveOn.org sent its members an email message indicative of many liberals’ discontent with the Democrats. “Pass real health care reform,” the email said. “Rein in Wall street. Take on the banks and special interests that stand in the way of change.”

Before they can move to the economy, though, Democratic leaders will have to decide how to pass their health reforms with just 59 seats in Senate. Under one scenario, the House could simply take up the Senate-passed bill. Many House Democrats, however, have blasted that proposal from both the right and the left, leaving the success of that option in question. Furthermore, many moderate House Democrats who supported health reform the first time through might get cold feet after witnessing Brown’s victory in Massachusetts. That election, Brady said, “makes it so much easier for people in the House not to vote for it.”

Some experts argue that the Democrats have spent so much time, energy and political capital on health care reform that they won’t be able to ignore it on the campaign trail.

“They’ll have to campaign on it,” said Jacobson. “They’re pretty well committed at this point. If they’re not going to defend what they’ve done then they’re hopeless.”

Furthermore, with unemployment still hovering in double digits, it’ll be difficult for lawmakers to campaign on what is perhaps their most significant accomplishment of the last year: the string of government interventions that prevented the recession from becoming a depression.

“It’s tough to make the case that, ‘Had we not done this, things would be worse,’” Mezey said. “People are going to say, ‘Well, things are still pretty bad now, what are you going to do about it?’”

Hoyer, for his part, had a response. “We’ve been trying to do something about it,” he said in the Capitol Tuesday. “I think we’re making success. … But until the numbers turn around, until the economy is creating jobs, until there is more stability, people are going to be angry. And that, I think, is manifested throughout the country — not just in Massachusetts.”

“Regardless of the size of their minority caucus, Senate Republicans have always had an obligation to join us in governing our nation through these difficult times,” Reid said. “Today’s election doesn’t change that; in fact it is now more important than before for Republicans to work with us rather than against us if we are to find common ground that improves Americans’ lives.”

Translation: “Republicans, please cooperate and help us pass our legislative agenda before the mid-terms.” To which Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is already saying, “Think again!”

There has, of course, been no indication that Senate Republicans are interested in anything at all outside of stalling the legislative process this Congress — to the point that it took weeks of procedural maneuvering last year for Democrats to pass even the most popular and uncontroversial measures (think: unemployment insurance). And that was in a non-election year.

Much of that delay was the fault of Democrats for buying claims that Republicans were ever interested in compromise. Remember that it was Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) who agreed to take the Finance Committee’s health care negotiations into the August recess, as if the Republicans’ idea of give-and-take was ever something other than to demand that Democrats accept a GOP bill. (It wasn’t.) “A president with an activist agenda met a Senate all but incapable of action,” Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson wrote today.

The string of delays meant that Democrats couldn’t focus on the economy to the degree that the Great Recession demanded. Meanwhile, unemployment skyrocketed and foreclosures soared. Health reform might be vital, but the results of the months-long debate haven’t been tangible — a message screamed by the voters in Massachusetts Tuesday.

For Democrats, the troubling thing about Reid’s statement is that it pretends that Republicans will now change their strategy for some reason — as if McConnell wasn’t rooting for Brown yesterday. For Republicans, this is a win-win situation. Not only have they been successful in blocking the Democrats’ legislative wish-list, but they’ve reaped the political rewards of the inaction they’ve caused.

If Reid and the Democrats now think that GOP leadership will suddenly become cooperative in the run-up to the mid-terms, they should prepare for the worst.

Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown casts his ballot in the Massachusetts special election on Tuesday. (ZUMA Press)

BOSTON — The volunteers, journalists, and donors who entered the ballroom of the Park Plaza Hotel on Tuesday were greeted by enthusiasm that didn’t usually belong to Republican campaigns in Massachusetts. The room was packed–no one else allowed in–only an hour after the polls closed. And among the throngs were Jenny Beth Martin and Mark Meckler, leaders of Tea Party Patriots, who’d flown in from Georgia and California to watch the final stretch of Scott Brown’s Republican U.S. Senate bid. Meckler held up a Flip Video camera, panning it across the room to film Brown supporters as they chatted and lined up for food and drinks.

[GOP1] “What you’re seeing here in Massachusetts is a reflection of what’s happening all across the country,” said Meckler. Democrats, after all, had tried to turn the momentum against Brown by attacking his endorsements from Tea Party groups and painting him as a tool of out-of-state right-wingers. In a fundraising appeal, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) had even called Brown a “far-right teabagger Republican.” Laura Clawson of Daily Kos derisively called him “the first teabagger senator.”

“Clearly, they’re paying attention to us,” said Martin. “They’re not ignoring us.”

Riding a wave of voter anger, and taking full advantage of an opponent who never fully engaged with the electorate in this Democratic state, Brown won the special election to fill the remaining term of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.). The result, unthinkable just two weeks earlier, gave Republicans what Brown had campaigned on in the final stretch–the “41st vote” to sustain filibusters of Democratic bills. National Democrats greeted the news with a mixture of infighting–Martha Coakley, the state attorney general who lost to Brown, was blamed for running an “act of political malpractice”–and panic. In Washington, top Democrats worked phones to prevent members of Congress from being spooked out of re-election, while Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) told reporters that the party had squandered its right to push through the health care legislation that occupied his party for most of 2009.

Republicans and conservatives, overjoyed at what many called the “perfect storm” that elected Brown, just danced, sang, and gloated. It was undeniable that Coakley had botched up her campaign. From winning the Democratic primary in December to holding a crucial rally with President Obama on Sunday, she had held only 19 public events. Brown had held 66. She made a series of baffling snafus and gaffes, from leaving the campaign trail right before the election for a Washington, D.C. fundraiser to telling the Boston Globe that she’d rather meet local machine leaders than “stand in the cold” and “shake hands” outside of Fenway Park. Even the campaign’s final press release, a pre-emptive warning of possible election tampering, was mistakenly backdated to January 18. When televisions at the Park Plaza Hotel cut over to her concession speech, Brown supporters alternated between loud boos and delighted victory songs.

“Thank you, Martha!” yelled a 30-year-old Brown volunteer from South Boston named Shaun Green. “Thank you for running the worst campaign ever!”

Todd Feinburg, a conservative radio host who’d tracked Brown’s rise, offered basically the same assessment. “It was the worst campaign anyone’s ever run in the history of mankind, probably.”

A few steps away from the stage where Brown would make his victory speech, a team of conservative activists–some from the state, some not–focused on how they’d brought together their movement to outsmart and outspend one of the country’s most effective Democratic machines. Two months ago, several of them had worked for the insurgent campaign of Doug Hoffman, a first-time candidate who ran on the Conservative Party ticket for a House seat in New York’s 23rd district, forced the Republican Party’s moderate candidate out of the race, and narrowly lost what had been safe GOP territory. Those activists looked at Brown as Hoffman 2.0, a candidate and a campaign that learned the right lessons from that experience and leveraged them into a winning effort.

“They were better funded than Hoffman,” said Eric Odom, the executive director of the American Liberty Alliance. “More importantly, NY-23 lacked any sort of a coherent get-out-the-vote effort. That dominated here. Phone banks, visibilities, giving everybody something to do.” Tea Party activists, said Odom, had flooded into the state. A few feet behind him stood Hannah Giles, the young conservative activist who’d posed as a prostitute for video stings of ACORN, and who had come to the state for (mostly unsuccessful) crowdsourced investigations of possible “voter fraud.”

Brown’s short campaign–he announced for the seat on September 12, 2009, the very day that many Tea Party activists participated in a “taxpayer march on Washington”–masterfully wove together traditional campaign strategy and outreach to old and new conservative media. The arc of his victory demonstrated just how the modern conservative movement can boost a campaign without generating a backlash from voters. His online campaign strategist, Rob Willington, explained to TWI that Brown focused early on outreach to conservative media and built on that with technology that let local and out-of-state activists grab a piece of the campaign.

“I concentrated on specific conservative opinion leaders here in Massachusetts for the first part of the campaign,” said Willington. “Right around Christmas, I started targeting some national political leaders, using certain hashtags, and using video.”

In late December, not far under the radar, the Brown campaign was sold to influential and far-flung activists as a winnable race–a chance to stop complaining and actually break the back of the Obama administration. In a December 30 blog post titled “Fight Everywhere: Scott Brown for Massachusetts,” GOP strategist Patrick Ruffini–who launched RebuildtheParty.com with Willington after the 2008 elections, and who provided some software support for Brown, made what was, at the time, a dreamy-sounding argument that Brown could win. “Any chance we have to take out the Obamacare abomination,” he wrote, “however remote, is a fight worth fighting.”

Organizers for both the Brown and Coakley campaigns now know that the race was fairly close by the time that this outreach occurred. In mid-December the National Republican Senatorial conducted, and kept secret, a poll that showed Brown down by only 13 points. As the candidate out-hustled Coakley, he was made available to conservative opinion-leaders. “He did a wonderful job of going from conservative talk show to conservative talk show, getting his name out there,” said former state treasurer Joe Malone, a Republican, in an interview with local TV station WECN.

There was universal agreement among Brown supporters that the game-changing moment came from a source that Democrats mistrust almost as much as talk radio–pollster Scott Rasmussen. His January 5 poll showing Brown within 9 points of Coakley was immediately derided by Democrats. It didn’t matter.

“In terms of everyone becoming aware of it,” said Todd Feinburg, “that was the moment it broke through.”

From that point, Brown became a cause for the Tea Party movement and the people who’d backed Doug Hoffman. Where Coakley had been able to avoid national scrutiny, conservative blogs and media turned her stumbles into major stories. After the candidates debated on January 11, conservative medias promoted two storylines–that Coakley had erred in declaring that there were “no terrorists” in Afghanistan, and that Brown had a “Reagan moment” when he referred to the open Senate job as “the People’s seat.” It was a line he’d used in interviews before, to little attention. On video, it got a prominent link from the Drudge Report.

The heat poured on after that. On January 13 Coakley flew to Washington to raise money at a long-scheduled event with the Massachusetts delegation. Weekly Standard reporter John McCormack, who had shaken up the momentum of the NY-23 special election after Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava’s husband called the cops on him, chased Coakley to ask an Afghanistan question and was pushed aside by an aide. McCormack tumbled; the photo of him sprawling on the ground as Coakley, hands in pockets, looked on, made it into the Boston Herald.

Every negative Coakley storyline was amplified and made infamous by the same means. On January 14, the Wall Street Journal–owned, like The Weekly Standard and Fox News, by Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp–ran an op-ed on Coakley’s record as attorney general, putting the spotlight on a gruesome case of sexual abuse involving a curling iron. The story, aired out earlier by the Boston Globe but not yet known to activists, became infamous, as did Coakley’s verbal stumbles. At Brown rallies attended by TWI, there was universal awareness of Coakley’s gaffes and the curling iron case.

Liberals, by contrast, were too late to engage with the race. A reporter/blogger for ThinkProgress who asked Brown uncomfortable questions only arrived on the trail 24 hours before the election, too late for videos of Brown trying to explain, for example, a vote against financial assistance for Red Cross workers assisting in post-9/11 efforts, to have any impact. A video of the viral “curling iron” story backfiring on Brown as a supporter yelled a crude remark about Coakley also appeared too close to the election, after the momentum was sealed.

Brown’s online outreach also brought him a fundraising surge, starting with a January 11 “moneybomb” that raised $1.3 million, that put him far ahead of where either campaign expected him to be. He ended the race with $4 million in campaign funds, the result of $1 million in daily fund-raising. In the days to come, partisans will get a better sense of how much support got from more traditional sources–waves of ads from the Chamber of Commerce, late support from the NRSC and RNC, and early fund-raising aid from Mitt Romney, who introduced Brown at the victory party after remaining mostly absent from the campaign. And any effort to replicate the “perfect storm” in other states will need more candidates like Brown, who on Tuesday night had become a superstar, an object of outright veneration from supporters who couldn’t believe what he pulled off.

“He’s almost like a messiah,” said Deborah Strange, a former Ted Kennedy supporter–although she’d voted for George W. Bush and John McCain–who sat resting her bad knees as Brown gave his victory speech. “He’s given us hope. He’s given us hope.”

“She wasn’t out there!” said an annoyed Laura White, a 78-year-old pilates instructor who supported Coakley in the Democratic primary. “That’s not how the Kennedys ran. I remember seeing JFK campaign in New York in 1960, shaking hands in the rain, not even wearing a raincoat!” She never considered voting for Brown — he reminded her of George W. Bush — but she was disappointed in Coakley.

Lyn Ackerly, who’d backed Coakley’s rival Alan Khazei in the primary (“it was his honesty”), wasn’t entirely happy about her vote. “We need the health care bill to pass,” she said, “but it’s been whittled down so much.” On Coakley’s campaign: “If she loses, it was her fault.”

George Watkins, a prep cook who hadn’t voted in the primary, came out because he was worried about President Obama’s agenda getting blocked if he lost “his help” in the Senate. He, too, was frustrated with Coakley, and decided to vote after polls showed the race closing.

When TWI visited the polling place, there was steady traffic but no line. Turnout was around 25 percent at lunchtime.

“That’s a big hypothetical a long away from now,” he said. “I was elected as an Independent but I remained a registered Democrat, so I’m with the Democratic Caucus.”

Today’s tight Senate contest in Massachusetts, Lieberman added, is indication that Capitol Hill has grown too partisan — and voters are fed up. “The independents are speaking loudly around the country today and they’re telling us, one, to get together here in Washington,” he said. “The second thing really is to do something about the economy and move to the center and worry about things that [independents] are worried about.”

That’s no music to the ears of liberals who were hoping that the pendulum swing away from the Bush administration might arc longer than just a year.