Tonight's debate between Senator Joe Lieberman and challenger Ned Lamont shows the older senator cool in the tactics of television debate. There are moments where Lamont clearly is, well, not a politician, in handing himself on the podium. There are wobbles, holds, and moments where he has to think, rather than simply regurgiate.

But that scraping noise you here in the background is the claws on power of Joe Lieberman scraping as he falls ever farther down the well. He insulted his opponent, and spilled out excuses for a record in power, and acted in that kind of arrogant and domineering way that someone too mixed up in power for too long does when forced to show itself.

Perhaps Lamont was not as polished as he could have been, but he has held up a mirror to the face of power.

The back drop of this debate is Lieberman's declaration that he will run regardless of the outcome of the primary. It is the breaking into the open of a war between establishment insiders and the base of the party. This war is beyond ideology, it features progressive darlings such as Boxer going out for Lieberman, not merely pro forma supporting him. It featured a month long weasel word fest from Senator Chuck Schumer about whether the DSCC would back Lieberman if he ran as an independent.

The opening statements set the tone - with Ned Lamont making an open appeal to primary voters who are involved in their communities, with Lieberman taking an almost snide tone in his declaration of why he needs to be sent back to Washington. America hates people who have become Washingtonized, and this moment was one reason. People vote for representatives so that the world close to home can be taken care of. They want people in Washington who haven't forgotten that life is about roads, schools, hospitals and jobs - not about some personal quest for aggrandizement.

Lieberman rode a wave of anger at another Senator into power, with some of the most brutal and stinging negative adds run to that time. Lieberman is still at home in the small screen world of small screen politics. He filled the podium easily, he seemed like he was in his living room almost chatting with, and chatting up, the moderator.

Lamont on the other hand, his thin face bringing back to mind every preacher, every Jimmy Stewart movie. It is something potent and powerful in American politics, where "angry" is bad, because it signified people who can't make it. But "outrage" is good, because it signifies people who have made it who will suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous inbreed power no longer, but have, by taking arms against a sea of troubles, decided to end them.

It is a thin face that was last seen thundering across the political landscape during the tax revolts of the late 1970's, and found its final form with a gaunt one time actor spitting out: "Government isn't the answer, government is the problem." Lamont's straight forward gutting of the fog of Lieberman's excuses about the war and the rush to it had the same quality. Lamont is here, in his own terms, to get the war off of people's backs.

Wars in Democracies are often like this - entered into with an easy sense of superiority at a nation of consent and consensus - and ended in the same way, with a sense of frustration that arms and men cannot make republics. This is why American wars have often been very short, or very long.

Lieberman, a child of the Reagan generation, with its easy arrogance of power, thinking that all that was needed to run the world was a certain sharpness, has failed to understand that whole eras of American government have been made, or broken, on the backs of a single throw of the dice.

It was Jackson's easy little war against the Cherokee that opened up the rest of the deep south. It was Tyler's belated commitment to a war in Texas that opened up the chance for Polk to take the Presidency, and then Taylor to take it back for the Whigs. The run of victories created an easy arrogance of power around a southern officer class, which then proceded to commit to a "War between the States" even as prominent Republicans in the Union wanted an external war to unify the nation.

The liberal coalition won a string of the largest wars in history - World War I and World War II, plus creating and effectively winning the Cold War, though fewer people knew it at the time than history has made evident. However this easy arrogance of victory of mobilization and brain power became lost in the quagmire.

The reactionary era, which began inauspiciously with Nixon's slender victory in 1969 came because a large section of Americans decided they wanted a reactionary republic to work, and gave it chance after chance. The gave it credit for winning the cold war, for surviving the demographic crime wave. Thus a crop of leaders, secure in the belief that all that was really needed was to hit the right angle and ride out the temporary ride out the ups and downs.

This arrogance was writ large on Lieberman, a man whose career came by tacking back and forth. Taking left symbolically on issues such as global warming, but then right when it came to needling the progressive ideas of his own party. It was bipartisanship in the same sense the brokeback marriages are bisexual. This process has won him defenders among his fellow Senate Democrats - from conservative Ken Salazar, to progressive Barbara Boxer. He's often there on the little vote, that senators go back to their constituents with, small bones to make up for the vast sell outs of the past 30 years.

The difference in demeanor of the Senator from Connecticut has been remarked - he was deferential and low key with Cheney, but nasty and brutal with Lamont. The conclusion - Lieberman is really a member of "that other Republican Party", and finds little real difference with Cheney, but must slag anyone who attempts to be a Democrat in his sight and hearing. Lieberman is like Treasury Secretary Paulsen, a moderate Republican concerned a bit, but not too much, about the costs of our present way of doing business.

But this is a year where the god of small things is no longer watching over incumbents, because the small things have been going wrong for Americans. And in such times, they don't blame their own small decisions, but the large looming clouds. Two hang over Lieberman in specific: one is the war, and the other is his absence of leadership. He is, in almost all respects, an anti-leader. The iconic hero of people who want government to do nothing efficiently, and who feel that being unattached to "either extreme" is the mark of a great statesman.

This logic has buffered his career, and he ran back to it tonight in attempting to needle Lamont as being stupid. But it made no headway, because Lieberman's judgment has been wrong - and his commitment to an extremist war, and his unwillingness to dig down and fight an extremist judiciary, have led him to a place where his party core does not support him. This is coupled with the economic reality that the metropolitan economy, resurgent, even if grungy and not resplendent, under Clinton, has turned hard and slow. The very smart people who, in Lamont's words "play by the rules and make good decisions" are not seeing rewards in general, beyond a booming hedge fund market in a small corner of the state. The Republican squeeze on blue states, both in terms of inflation policy and pork policy, has made for an angry electorate that does not like Mr. George Walker Bush.

Thus the person who is committing political suicide is Lieberman, and he is dragging down with him a party establishment willing to spend millions to protect itself, rather than go on the attack against the Republicans. The whole reason for nominating right leaning Democrats in Pennsylvania and Virginia, is that they would save money for harder fights elsewhere. But Lieberman is spending the money that might be needed to send Claire to the Senate, or perhaps to stage an upset in Montana.

This dynamic, where the Democratic Party is willing to do its all to protect the policies of George Walker Bush, regardless of the wishes of the electorate, is the ur source of the Lieberman sneer, and the ur reason that those who get to know Ned, seem to like him. After all, if Lamont were still polling at 10% of the primary electorate, the spectacle of Lieberman looking into the camera and telling a multi-millionaire businessman that he is stupid, would not have happened at all.

Thus the image that we are likely to take away is the face of an earnest morality, a revolt against the slickness that Lieberman has come to represent, and a revolt against being bribed with small things, in order to bear the large penalties heaped upon us. Because Connecticut has a strong old yankee moral streak in its politics, and the long face of Ned Lamont stares back into its puritan origins, and by doing so, shaken of the label of angry, and replaced it with another.

Ned Lamont thumped the bible of American faith in doing well by doing good, and told Americans that the way out of the hell of Iraq, was to return to the gospel of hard work, and away from the get rich quick world of George Walker Bush and the Reagan Repetition.