Sen. Joe Lieberman will hold on to the chairmanship of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee.  Lieberman was an ardent supporter of Sen. John McCain, a close personal friend, during the 2008 presidential campaign, and made some very negative statements about Sen. Barack Obama.  The vote was 42-13.

My thought: It’s smart politics to keep Lieberman where he is, as bitter of a pill to swallow as it may be.  If the Democrats win the contested Senate seats in Alaska, Georgia and Minnesota, they’ll have 58 seats in their favor.  If you include Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, also an Independent, and Mr. Lieberman, that’s a 60 seat majority, and filibuster proof.

But liberals in the blogosphere are going to go nuts. They’ve already tried to run Mr. Lieberman out once before by actively supporting Ned Lamont in the 2006 Connecticut Senate race (the very active liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas Zuniga a/k/a Daily Kos appeared in a Lamont ad). Mr. Lamont beat Mr. Lieberman in the primary, but Mr. Lieberman ran as an Independent in the general election and won. Do they have reason to be furious? Sure. Mr. Lieberman’s self-righteous admonishment of President Bill Clinton on the Senate floor started it all.  Then he proved to be a miserable VP candidate and fundamentally weak during the recount battle in Florida.  After the 2000 election, he spoke unkindly about Gore’s policy positions during the campaign. What followed was a move to the far right on the war in Iraq before launching his own bid for the Democratic Party’s nomination in 2004 (Mr. Gore endorsed Howard Dean). He then bucked the Democratic Party entirely to back Mr. McCain. During the 2008 campaign, not only was Lieberman was rumored to be on McCain’s short list for VP, he also courted groups like Christians for a United Isreal, whose founder, John Hagee, later endorsed Mr. McCain. That endorsement was rejected on the grounds that Hagee’s comments were, well, hateful and bigoted.

UPDATE:   Speaking in favor of Lieberman: John Kerry, Dick Durbin and Ben Cardin.

Speaking against Lieberman: Pat Leahy, Bernie Sanders.

The Times reports that Sarah Palin’s book deal could reach $7 million by the time agents and publishers finish their bidding. I’m not the least bit surprised. Palin emerged out of obscurity, and vaulted onto the national stage. She may have been unprepared, and she may have performed poorly, but she attracted a lot of attention to a floundering and inept campaign. Her book might be worth a read if she were to offer up details of how she ended up on the GOP ticket, and what the daily experiences on the campaign trail were actually like. My guess: it’s a conservative political manifesto launching her closer to a 2012 bid for the White House. Interesting details? Probably not. But a guy can dream, can’t he?

David Kinkade of The Arkansas Project contributes this piece on the Arkansas GOP to the newly formed website CapSearch, which is a research firm aimed at providing companies with information about bills and goings on at the Arkansas legislature (how happy are they about annual sessions?). You can catch their Insiders’ Blog on the Arkansas blog roll to your right.

Kinkade says that modest gains in Arkansas by the GOP is progress that counts for a lot.

It seems that everyone is piling on the Republican Party as of late. On Sunday, Newt Gingrich was asked whether Sarah Palin was the future of the GOP. He replied that she was in a group of 20 or 30 others. It’s pretty devastating that someone of Gingrich’s caliber would identify his party’s VP nominee - and, arguably, rising star - as one of thirty key party influencers. Doesn’t that tell us something about the troubled state of the Republican Party?

But beyond this, there is troubling news over at The National Review.

As I noted here earlier this year, Christopher Buckley, son of the magazine’s founder, William F. Buckley, endorsed Barack Obama for president, and was quickly shown the door. Today, The New York Times reports that David Frum, a prominent conservative writer, is leaving to launch a Web venture. Over at The Corner, the National Review’s influential blog, you can read comments by a few of the magazine’s contributors.

Yes, like all people, magazine writers move around. But Frum isn’t just any magazine writer, and NR isn’t just any magazine. Or maybe it is now that Mr. Buckley is gone. It’s hard to imagine Mr. Buckley fawning over Palin the way many of the editors and writers there did (one of Frum’s concerns was with the backlash he received after writing negatively about her), but we’ll never know.

But I cannot be unfair to the magazine. After all, I’m hardly a regular reader. I pay attention to Frum and Jonah Goldberg and Rich Lowry and Charles Krauthammer because they’re smart guys even if we disagree consistently (as an aside, Krauthammer wrote this piercing editorial about John Edwards, and I agreed with every word of it.) Peggy Noonan and David Brooks don’t write for NR, but I rarely miss a word (they were both critics of Mrs. Palin; Mr. Brooks described her as “cancer to the Republican Party.”)

In late October, E.J. Dionne, writing in The New Republic, observed, “The cause of Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Robert Nisbet and William F. Buckley Jr. is now in the hands of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity–and Sarah Palin. Reason has been overwhelmed by propaganda, ideas by slogans, learned manifestoes by direct-mail hit pieces.”

Like everywhere else in life, it’s easy to pile on the defeated in politics. Aside from the score-keeping, one thing the GOP has always been good at is idea generation. After all, that’s the primary reason Buckley founded NR, and it served as adequate justification for rarely turning a profit.

Which brings me to a larger question. In the Times‘ article Mr. Frum notes, “I am really and truly frightened by the collapse of support for the Republican Party by the young and the educated.” I’ve been pondering this for past few weeks. Exit polling demonstrates that young people and the well-educated voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Obama. For the first time in eight years, the Democratic Party proved to be the party of ideas.

President George W. Bush will leave office with the lowest approval rating in history, and the comparisons to Herbert Hoover are becoming more accurate as this troubled economy sinks further towards a depression. Barring a Clinton-esque transition gaffe(s), president-elect Obama will enter The White House with approval ratings nearing seventy percent, and substantial majorities in both houses of Congress.

If Mr. Dionne is right, and the GOP think tank is being led by propoganda mongers Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Mrs. Palin, I am saddened. That may sound strange coming from me (after all, it’s about winning, isn’t it?), but let’s be honest. With our economic future in jeopardy; two concurrent wars being fought thousands of miles away; and an energy crisis like nothing we’ve ever seen, it’s time to populate the marketplace with ideas.

But the GOP is polarized. Former presidential candidates are taking swipes at each other, and no one, not even NR, seems to know which way is up. As good as it has proven to be for Democrats in the short-term, how will Americans fare in the long term?

Many may be wondering why journalists and talking heads are already talking about the 2010 races.  I can’t really tell you, except that for people plagued with political fever know that when one election cycle ends, another begins.  With that in mind I note that my pal on the right David Kinkade also picked up The Washington Post’s Chis Cillizza’s recent 10 Senate races in watch in 2010.  Mysteriously, Cillizza left off the race in Arkansas which could potentially pit incumbent Sen. Blanche Lincoln against former gov. and Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee.  Yes, The Think Tank is aware that Huckabee is building a media empire and is on his way to earning buckets full of coin.  But that’s not going to stop the RNC from trying to get Huckabee to make a race of it (especially if Huckabee campaign manager Chip Saltzman gets the top job there.)  And with eyes on 2012, is Huckabee better poised to make a run for president from inside or outside the Senate?  As Jay Barth notes, “You know, does it make sense for him to get some foreign policy experience in the Senate? On the other hand, he may be risking a loss in that race which would really doom anything in 2012.”

Arkansas governor Mike Beebe presented his budget to the legislature and members of the media yesterday.  It includes a 1-cent reduction in the grocery tax,  a “rainy day fund” that would set aside from the $300 million budget surplus that could be used to fund certain programs such as Medicaid programs and prisons.  Overall reaction to the budget appears to be very positive.

The Huffington Post has confirmed that Sen. Hillary Clinton and president-elect Barack Obama met in Chicago to discuss her role in the administration. Previously, AP reported that Obama was considering Clinton for Secretary of State. Notes Politico, “Clinton would be most attractive if Obama concludes that he will have to focus his early days in office on the domestic economy, and will have to essentially outsource heavy-duty foreign travel to his secretary of state.”

A very politcally savvy move on Obama’s part if it does happen.

UPDATE: The Huffington Post is reporting that Clinton has been offered the job. She has requested time to consider it.

UPDATE II: Politico bloggers Ben Smith and Mike Allen debate the pros and cons of Clinton as Secretaty of State.

I’ll leave it to Max Brantley of The Arkansas Times and Rep. Dan Greenberg, a frequent contributor to The Arkansas Project, to battle it out over the virtues of ethics reform in Arkansas.  My contribution to the ethics discussion: this article from The New York Times about president-elect Barack Obama’s transition team barring lobbyists from helping to pay the costs of his transition and from working in areas in which they have lobbied in the past year.  “If someone has lobbied during the past 12 months, they’re prohibited from working in the fields of policy on which they lobbied and will have to cease all lobbying activities during their work on the transition,” said John Podesta, co-chairman of Obama’s transition team.

Slate has a good piece on what Chicago can expect from president-elect Barack Obama now that he has won the White House. Notably, the Windy City is a finalist for the 2016 Olympics (Madrid, Tokyo and Rio de Janeiro are the others). Can Obama influence the Olympic selection committee? “I have a sense of crisis,” one Japanese committeeman told the AP. Slate notesthat Tony Blair’s influence helped London secure the 2012 games. But there’s more than that.

Home states (and perhaps more specifically in Obama’s case, Chicago) benefit from having their native sons in The White House. Will Chicagoans invade Washington the way Arkansans and Texans did in 1992 and 2000? To steal Sarah Palin’s line: You betcha. And those that don’t will still have incredible access. In addition to Obama himself, Chicago natives Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod are comfortably in Obama’s inner circle. Unless Valerie Jarrett heads to the Senate, she’ll be there too. Former Commerce Sec. Bill Daley (the youngest brother of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley) also appears to be playing a prominent role (he’s on Obama’s transition economic advisory team). Expect to see lots of Chicagoans in jobs throughout the administration; at White House social events; and appointed to prominent goodwill and ambassadorial roles too.

But opportunity isn’t one way. In addition to the influence Obama can exercise on the Olympic committee, Chicago stands to benefit from a greater access to federal funds, which could help improve public transit and other needed urban projects. In fact, Obama has suggested that he will create an Office of Urban Policy within the White House.

Joseph Wood, treasurer of the Arkansas Republican Party and former state Sen. Doyle Webb will seek the chairmanship of the state GOP Arkansas News Bureau reports. Arkansas Republicans will convene in Little Rock on December 13th to elect a new chairman.  Dennis Milligan has stated he will not run for a second term.

John Brummett takes a look at Rahm Emanuel, President-elect Barack Obama’s new chief of staff.

David Kinkade over at The Arkansas Project is inconsolable with the news that Howard Dean is stepping down as chairman of the Democratic National Committee.  Dean, a physician, is rumored to be on a short list for Sec. of Health and Human Services in the new administration.

Barack Obama bested John McCain by 34 points among voters 18-29, the largest in post-war American history according to Tuft’s Tisch College Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.  That margin is nearly four-times the margin of John F. Kennedy in 1960.  The youth vote made up 18 percent of the electorate this year, one point more than in the last three presidential elections.

The Clinton School of Public Service hosted a forum on the youth vote the day before the election.  Have a look.

I’m taking in an early dose of MSNBC. One of the more interesting topics is the future of the GOP at the national level. Ed O’Keefe of The Washington Post and Eleanor Clift of Newsweek are tossing out a series of names that could emerge in the coming months. O’Keefe believes there a void in the Republican Party. Clift suggests that the party would look to Louisiana gov. Bobby Jindal. As for Sarah Palin? Both declared her the “champion of the culture wars.” But she needs to expand her role in the Republican Governors Association or run for the Senate to have a real shot in 2012.

Here in Arkansas we’re beginning to understand why things happened as they did. Despite Barack Obama’s electoral domination, Arkansas trended red by substantial margins. David Kinkade at The Arkansas Project informs us that Arkansas GOP chair Dennis Milligan will not seek re-election. Names rumored to succeed him? One politico writes to The Think Tank to suggest Little Rock businessman John Parke who ran unsuccessfully against David Johnson a few years back.

UPDATE: Norman Ornstein of The Los Angeles Times writes, “Republicans need to be more than just the only other option on the ballot in four years. They must find a message — be it a more refined compassionate conservativism, the folksy populism of Mike Huckabee or even a fiscally conservative/environmentally conservationist fusion — that speaks to the segments of the electorate that are growing. And then they need a leader to deliver it. At this early date after a dramatic election, there is no sign they have either.”

UPDATE II: Rich Lowry, writing in The Washington Post, observes, “As grim as things now seem for the right, there’s no reason to descend into the slough of despond. Just four years ago, Republicans were hailing the advent of a new Republican majority, remember? One of the wisest baseball cliches is: “You’re never as good as you seem when you’re winning and never as bad as you seem when you’re losing.”"