Ned Lamont cannot be feeling a lot of pain right now.  Besides succeeding in the difficult task of toppling an incumbent senator (only four incumbents have lost in a primary in the last 25 years), his adversary has gone slightly mad in his bitterness at the defeat and the establishment press and the neocon running dogs in the media have all come out in praise of his opponent, which only underscores just how much a part of a broken establishment Lieberman is.  Oddly, old Joe seems to think that the oppressive weight on our political process comes from the fringes of the two parties, rather than from the bloated, unresponsive center where “consensus” reigns.  Strangely enough, with the bubbling up of anti-incumbency sentiment all over the country yesterday, no one else seemed to think that the problem was the crazy “fringe” of “extremists” but the tepid, pathetic middle that is most closely identified with the administration and its ruinous policies.  The problem is not that Mr. Lieberman worked with President Bush as such, nor simply that he supported the war, but that he demonstrated no grasp of the concept that he should heed the voters rather than the other way around.  He fell victim to anti-incumbency outrage because he was playing the part of the stereotypically outrageous incumbent.  Had any candidate anywhere differed as sharply with his constituents over a major policy question, he could be expected to be rebuked in just the same way.  That the policy question at issue was one of the worst policies undertaken by the U.S. government in my lifetime only made it worse.  It required a campaign that reeked of hubris and indifference to voters to eliminate the considerable advantages that incumbency brings to a politician, and Mr. Lieberman offered plenty of both.  If it is extremist to expect accountable and answerable politicians, I think quite a lot of people would prefer extremism to whatever it is that is being dished up by the incumbents of both parties.