A changing war factor?
THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY'S rejection of Senator Joseph Lieberman's renomination bid in Connecticut marks the first time in modern politics that a US senator has been punished at the polls because of his or her vote in favor of war.
For US senators -- from the War of 1812 to the present -- voting to send the nation to war has never been a risky enterprise. That might explain why senators, and their House counterparts, have rarely been reluctant to authorize military conflicts. Since 1812, in the 13 times the Senate has voted to declare war or authorize the use of the military in a foreign conflict, its members have cast 905 votes in favor of war and only 128 votes against. Seventy of those ``no" votes were cast after 1990, meaning that since the first declaration of war through the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964, only 8 percent of the votes cast in the US Senate were in opposition to military conflict.
It is not uncommon for the opponents of war to suffer at the polls. Two of the six senators who opposed America's entry into the First World War, Asle Gronna of North Dakota and James Vardaman of Mississippi, were later defeated. Senators Ernest Gruening of Alaska and Wayne Morse of Oregon, the only two members of Congress opposed to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, were defeated, as were several subsequent opponents of the Vietnam War. As law professor Geoffrey R. Stone demonstrates in his book ``Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime," it has not been uncommon during US history for the opponents of war to be pilloried or even jailed for their dissent. ``Time and again, Americans have allowed fear and fury to get the better of them," Stone writes. ``Time and again, Americans have suppressed dissent, imprisoned and deported dissenters, and then-later-regretted their actions."
But supporters of war in Congress, no matter how misguided, have not paid a price at the polls. War, journalist Chris Hedges has observed, ``is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble." That is one explanation for such historical lopsided support for war in Congress and why its champions have not been punished by the voters. Eventually, however, wars launched in the rush of what Hedges calls ``collective euphoria" can lose their moral imperative. Wars that drag on eventually become unpopular, as the casualties mount and the costs escalate.
But wars, while they might jeopardize the popularity of the presidents who start them (see Lyndon B. Johnson and George W. Bush), have not historically threatened their supporters in Congress. In more than 20 years of researching the US Senate, I have not encountered a senator whose support for war became a significant issue in his or her reelection campaign. At least not until Lieberman ran headlong into what appears to be a Connecticut electorate disillusioned by events in Iraq.
Lieberman's misfortune may have been compounded by the fact that public disillusionment with the current war has increased at a faster rate than during the Vietnam or Korean wars, meaning that his vote was still fresh on the minds of voters who believe the war was a mistake. What happened to Lieberman has never happened before to a senator and because it is something completely new in American politics, it may not happen again. Or, it could mark the first tremor in a seismic shift in American politics.
But now that Lieberman has paid a severe price for his unpopular war vote, the 77 senators who voted for the Iraq War can no longer assuage themselves with the once comforting thought that a fate like Lieberman's is an impossible prospect.
Robert Mann is Manship chair in mass communication at the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University and author of ``A Grand Delusion: America's Descent into Vietnam." 
