It’s Monday afternoon in New Haven, Connecticut — about 16 hours before polls open in tomorrow’s Democratic Senate primary. I’m looking at my bus-window reflection to see the damage my neck has sustained from my afternoon in the sun holding a Joe Lieberman sign at a busy intersection. I’m red as a tomato. So are the other students on the bus. We all have more cups of coffee in our bodies than hours of sleep.

“Yeah,” I reply. “The ratio of thumbs up to middle fingers was higher today.”

Not high enough, it turned out.

For every 48 Connecticut Democrats who gave Joe the thumbs up at the voting booth the next day, 52 gave him the finger and voted for challenger Ned Lamont, making the eighteen-year incumbent only the fourth senator in 25 years to lose a primary.

It was a cruel blow for the man Democrats had cheered as their 2000 VP candidate, a man who had mostly proven himself a model Democrat. Indeed, Joe had stood on the right side (i.e. left side) of virtually every social and economic issue important to Democrats.

Yet, in one of America’s bluest states, he found himself on the wrong side of a fault line that has divided the Democratic Party since 9/11, and especially since the Iraq War: how to handle the West’s clash with the Jihadist wing of Islam.

On one side are the national-security Democrats — ideological heirs of FDR and JFK — who saw the 9/11 attacks as acts of war that merited a tough response and a long-range plan to empower Islam’s moderates and isolate its extremists. This group comprises most of the party establishment, outfits like the Democratic Leadership Council, magazines like The New Republic, and senators like Lieberman, Evan Bayh, Joe Biden and, lately, Hilary Clinton. (More on her later.)

On the other side are the mea-culpa Democrats — ideological heirs of George McGovern and Jimmy Carter — who believe that the 9/11 attacks, while unjustified, were merely a response to an arrogant American foreign policy and that the wisest course of action for the U.S. would be to immediately withdraw from Iraq, quit threatening Iran and Syria, outsource foreign-policy decisions to the UN and stop supporting those f-ing Israelis. This crowd includes most of Hollywood, “netroots” websites like MoveOn.org and the Daily Kos, magazines like The Nation, and figures like Lamont, Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan and — when he hasn’t taken his meds — Howard Dean.

Dean’s meteoric rise during the ’04 presidential primary was indicative of just how much power this wing of the party had amassed. While original frontrunners Lieberman, Kerry, Edwards and Gephardt — all initially war supporters — were dividing their support mostly among the national-security wing, Dean was raising millions over the Internet from the mea-culpa wing.

Though Dean (or Lamont) wasn’t as radical as his detractors claimed, many of his most enthusiastic supporters — the “Deaniacs” — were. Though there were plenty of convincing national-security arguments not to invade Iraq, these militant pacifists rarely invoked them, instead flooding anti-war rallies holding signs with slogans like “War Is NOT the Answer,” “No Blood for Oil,” and “I Love Iraq — Bomb Texas!”

The “Deaniacs” aren’t your average Democrats, of course, but that’s not what Karl Rove wants voters to think. And he doesn’t have to do much when people are holding “War is NOT the Answer” signs in one hand and signs for Dean, Lamont or any Democrat in the other. (On a personal note, seeing these “Democrats” embarrassed this once-proud Democrat into becoming an independent.)

With the party faithful’s growing hatred of Bush in 2004, Democratic politicians from the national-security wing suddenly found themselves on the defensive for endorsing many of his wartime policies.

By mimicking Dean, John Kerry managed to secure the nomination.

He faced the general election, however, with a dilemma. He could: a) energize the mea-culpa Democrats with antiwar rhetoric and risk alienating national-security Democrats and undecided Independents or b) woo the center with tough national-security talk and risk the mea-culpa Democrats staying home on Election Day or voting for Ralph Nader.

John Kerry tried to do both simultaneously and ended up sounding a lot like, well, John Kerry.

How will Hilary Clinton, the Democrats’ ’08 frontrunner, manage that same dilemma? Until now, she has opted to moderate her liberal image with the general public, voting for the war (like a majority of Senate Democrats) and (unlike most of them) not recanting that vote. She is clearly getting nervous, though, that the mea-culpa Democrats will rally around an antiwar candidate in the primary, hence her decision — along with most other high-profile Democrats — to back Lamont after Lieberman announced that he would stay in the race as an independent.

With the party establishment firmly behind Lamont, Lieberman looked like a lame duck — for about 36 hours.

Then came news that 24 Muslim extremists had been arrested by British authorities in the final stages of a plot to blow up ten America-bound planes.

Now he has a double-digit lead in the polls, garnering the support of 60 percent of independents, 75 percent of Republicans and still 35 percent of his fellow Democrats.

The lesson? Notwithstanding their Iraq blues, most Americans — unlike, say, Spaniards — want a testicular foreign policy. It’s what allowed a dope like Bush to win re-election even though polls showed that Kerry was trusted more on every other issue.

And it’s why Lieberman will likely cruise to a fourth term.

But that battle won’t be over until November. And this civil war in the Democratic Party will continue for years.

I know which side I’m on. How about you?

Ben Birnbaum is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be reached at bhb9@cornell.edu. Infomaniacs Anonymous appears Tuesdays.