The Democratic primary drags on, and the debate rages within the commentariat as to what Hillary Clinton should do in the face of overwhelming odds against her success. David Brooks showed up on Meet the Press and described just what Clinton’s continued campaign is doing to her party.

"Is this what the Democratic Party really wants? What happened this week? Her approval ratings are now at their seven-year low. This has begun to hurt her, in particular, but it's begun to hurt the entire party. Barack Obama used to lead among independent votes against John McCain. Now, according to some polls, John McCain leads among independent voters."

Brit Hume, on the other hand, pointed out the problems the tough primary has created for Obama in his inevitable race in the general against John McCain during Fox News Sunday’s panel:

"Let me just make this point: Those polls are mainly a reflection of Obama’s continuing strength among Democrats. It was always the case, I think, that the Reverend Wright controversy was going to hurt him much less with Democrats than it would with the broader general electorate, to include Republicans and Independents. And there is polling data that indicates that among Republicans and Independents he has been hurt."

Joe Lieberman, the independent Democrat from Connecticut, explained just how the party has changed over the last decade, and why it will cause problems for the Dems in ’08. "The Democratic Party today was not the party it was in 2000," he explained to George Stephanopoulos on This Week,

"It’s not the Bill Clinton-Al Gore party, which was strong internationalists, strong on defense, pro-trade, pro-reform in our domestic government. It’s been effectively taken over by a small group on the left of the party that is protectionist, isolationist and basically will--and very, very hyperpartisan. So it pains me. I’m a Democrat who came to the party in the era of President John F. Kennedy. It’s a strange turn of the road when I find among the candidates running this year that the one, in my opinion, closest to the Kennedy legacy, the John F. Kennedy legacy, is John S. McCain, a reformer, somebody who understands 'ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country' and remembers the other part of the Kennedy inaugural, which said that we will bear any burden, pay any price to assure the survival and sustenance of liberty. That’s John McCain."

As Michael Scherer says of Lieberman's performance, "nearly two years after being rejected by his lifelong party in the Connecticut primary, it appears that Lieberman has only begun his effort to exact revenge."