According to Roll Call, Obama is now actively helping Joe Lieberman retain his Homeland Security chairmanship:

With President-elect Obama's fingerprints seemingly everywhere, momentum appears to be building among Senate Democrats to let Sen. Joe Lieberman (ID-Conn.) keep his chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

"The overall atmosphere is toward reconciliation," said one Lieberman supporter, who noted that Obama "has in a large sense set the tone" by calling for Lieberman to remain a member of the Senate Democratic Conference.

However, Democrats still say they are exploring options for penalizing Lieberman in other ways for his disloyalty to the party during the 2008 election cycle. Those options might include stripping him of two plum subcommittee chairmanships, or taking away his membership on either the Armed Services or Environment and Public Works panels.

Lieberman allies, including Sens. Tom Carper (D-Del.), Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), and Ken Salazar (D-Colo.), have been part of a group that is trying to find a way to punish Lieberman for his ardent support of GOP presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), but still allow him to keep his Homeland Security position.

"They're trying to figure out what has to be done to keep him in the caucus without it looking like he has gotten off scot-free," said the Senate Democratic aide.

The issue still appears to be headed toward a vote in the Senate Democratic Conference on Tuesday.

Support for Lieberman appears to have been growing since Obama began making calls to several top Democrats to discuss the Connecticut Senator's status. Since then, several senior Senators began making statements that seemed to indicate a willingness to let Lieberman retain his gavel.

In addition to telling Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) that he would like for Senate Democrats to find a way to keep Lieberman in the Democratic fold, Obama has had similar conversations with other top Democrats – including Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), and Lieberman's home-state colleague, Dodd, sources said.

Obama is close with all four of those Senators, each of whom endorsed him in his quest to win the Democratic Party's presidential nomination this year.

Evan Bayh was on Rachel Maddow last night, making the completely incoherent argument that the Democratic Caucus had the power to control Lieberman and the Homeland Security Committee:

MADDOW: Joe Lieberman didn't investigate the government's response to Katrina or the Blackwater shootings in Iraq or anything like that. Are there going to be real interparty divisions on security issues, or do you see a united front going forward?

BAYH: Well, I would hope we would have a united front. And you know, if the caucus and the committee feels that there are areas worthy of investigation -- and you mentioned two that I think would warrant investigation -- then there should -- one would need to go forward, regardless of what the chairman happen to think. And we have the power to demand that sort of thing.

Really? So if Bayh thinks that Lieberman should've investigated Katrina after having promised to do so (a promise he abandoned immediately after the GOP helped him retain his Senate seat), why didn't they do something before?  They're going to take action and make him do it now? 

I'm supposed to believe this?

This isn't about "getting stuff done" or "putting partisan politics behind us" as Bayh claims -- this is about conservative Senators who are concerned that "the base" can do to them what they did to Lieberman.  It's about Obama making them comfortable that we can't organize against the war, or FISA, or any of their pet projects in a way that could be threatening to them.

I spoke with a source knowledgeable about Reid's reasoning on the Lieberman matter early on in the process, who said that Reid believed taking Lieberman's Homeland Security gavel away from him was more likely to keep him in line with the Democrats -- not less.  Knowing that Lieberman can't get elected in Connecticut in 2012 as a Republican and that the Democrats were ready to crack the whip, it was not unreasonable to make an inference that that Lieberman would stop making so much trouble. 

Any action on the part of the Senate Democrats will be unlikely to change the nature of Lieberman's voting, which will continue to be petty and vindictive no matter what the Democrats do.

But the fact remains that over the past 7-10 days all the lobbying has been done by the pro-Liberman forces.  "We don't have a spokesperson with the courage to speak up and say 'he should not be able to get away with what he's done to our caucus,'" said the source.

It's interesting that they sent Bayh as the messenger on to the Maddow show, despite the fact that someone like Dodd would undoubtedly be more well-received.  After Steve Clemons of the Washington Note published that Bayh was at the top of the VP list, vociferous opposition among the netroots dashed any chance of success.

It's also noteworthy that people now think, much like Obama did when he made a GOTV appearance before the election, that the Maddow show is the way to plead their case before the base.  (They're right, BTW.)

But Bayh's appearance was for Bayh.  His concern -- like that of Salazar and Pryor and other Democrats whose voting records are probably often to the right of Lieberman's -- is for himself.  It isn't about putting partisanship behind us. 

It's about political payback, and it's just as partisan as it can be.

 Call Democratic Senators and tell them -- Just Say No to Joe.

Sign the petition -- Joe Must Go.