Inside The Tea Party's One Day Love Affair With Joe Lieberman

In the course of a few hours yesterday, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) sent the tea party crowd on the same emotional rollercoaster progressives have been riding with the senator since the start of the health care reform debate this year.

Tea partiers arrived in Washington yesterday morning fired up about Lieberman, the man they thought might fulfill all their "kill the bill" fantasies with his refusal to sign on to the Democratic reform package as long as it contained a public option and other "socialist" programs. But by the afternoon, Lieberman was praising the Democratic bill and one tea partier had literally put an X through the "Stand With Joe" written on the sign he waved.

It was a story of love and loss with Joe Lieberman that would fit right in on any DailyKos diary without changing much. Like progressives have at points during the debate, conservatives for a fleeting moment thought that Lieberman might come around to their side and "save" health care reform.

For the record, tea partiers don't like Lieberman as a general rule. Protestors in D.C. yesterday said he was bad on climate change (he believes it exists) and worse when it comes to being an "insider" (as they say about most politicians, they believe Lieberman has been in Washington too long to have any clue about what's going on in the real world). But Lieberman's role as the 60th vote on health care meant that Lieberman was the one man that could make the tea party dreams come true.

"He's hearing what we are saying," Victor LaBarre, a tea partier from Chester, CT, said at around nine a.m. yesterday morning as he stood across the street from the Capitol. "He's made it clear he stands against the public option."

"He's listening to his what his constituents want," LaBarre said as he headed off to visit his senator's office and tell Lieberman to keep up the good work. "But I'm afraid he'll flinch."

LaBarre took two tea partiers from Georgia along with him to visit Lieberman. Carol Wilson, from Macon, GA, hinted at the troubled waters ahead for the tea partiers relationship with Lieberman.

"Lieberman has a special part in this," she said. "But so did [Sen.] Mary Landrieu [D-LA]." Wilson said she feared that Lieberman would be "bought" like Landrieu had been and would eventually vote for the bill. She said that she was with him that morning, but if he voted for any health care reform package at all she'd go right back to protesting him.

By 1:15 p.m., Wilson's promise had been fulfilled. At the tea party rally held across from the Senate by Americans For Prosperity, leaders of the Tea Party Patriot movement promised to humiliate Lieberman on the Internet after they went to protest his decision to support public option-free health care reform. They were, they say, thrown out of Lieberman's office by staff.

In the back of the crowd was Tom, another tea partier from Connecticut who held the crossed out "Stand With Joe" sign. He said he'd made the change after he heard on the radio driving in that Lieberman had agreed to join the Democrats and vote for reform. Tom said he'd voted for Lieberman in the past but had grown tired of the man who he once thought "was a true Independent, like me."

"That's just Joe taking care of Joe," Tom said of Lieberman's decision to stand with Democratic leaders in the Senate in favor of the reform bill. "He's just up here for himself."