Christopher Dodd, D-Conn.

“I believed I would have won re-election. Obviously, it would have been a tough campaign. But, you know, as I said, so what else is new?”

– Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), in an interview on This Week.

“I think that, if I had run, I would have won. It would have been a tough race, for sure, but I think I would have won.”

– Sen., Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), also speaking on This Week.

Both of them, of course, are full of it. Yes, it’s possible that some way, somehow either of them might have won if they’d toughed it out. But they both would have been prohibitive underdogs and both were facing their grim political realities in their home states that they had never before confronted. To pretend that these realities had nothing to do with their decisions to walk away strains credulity.

Lieberman’s logic is particularly annoying: “Obviously, it would have been a tough campaign. But, you know, as I said, so what else is new?” In other words, I survived a tough one in 2006, so why wouldn’t I be able to do it again? This may sound compelling on the surface, but there are actually significant differences between now and 2006 — and between now and any other point in Lieberman’s political career.

Back in ’06, when he lost the Democratic primary to Ned Lamont only to wage a successful third party effort in the fall, Lieberman had only lost the faith of his own party; his standing was still quite strong with Connecticut’s independent voters. And Republicans, who didn’t initially think Lieberman was vulnerable in his primary, didn’t bother to field a serious candidate. Thus, Lieberman was able to run in the general election as the de facto Republican candidate — every major Republican office-holder in the stat endorsed him — and to supplement that GOP base with strong support from independents. But this is no longer the case. Lieberman is now broadly unpopular not just with Democrats but with independents, too. And Republicans have made it clear that they won’t be caught off-guard this time around. In 2012, there will be a real GOP candidate for the Senate in Connecticut. Thus, Lieberman was out of options.

Hutchison wasn’t in much better shape in Texas, where a poll earlier this fall found that nearly two in three Republicans were ready to vote against her in a ’12 primary. Her standing with her party eroded during her disastrous primary challenge to Gov. Rick Perry last year. Perry ran hard to the right and pilloried Hutchison for her support of TARP. She made things worse for herself by going back on a pledge to resign her Senate seat during the race. Her odds of winning a Republican primary in 2012 were slim.

Of course, Lieberman and Hutchison are hardly the first retiring senators to deny the obvious. Politicians who decline to seek reelection — or who back out after flirting with campaigns for higher office — have been playing this same game for years.

I still remember interviewing Robert Torricelli a few years after he left the Senate. The Torch, in case you’ve forgotten, who was “severely admonished” by his Senate colleagues for taking expensive gifts from a campaign donor (who also claimed to have plied Torricelli with cash). With polls showing Torricelli falling more than 10 points behind his Republican opponent, panicked Democrats pressured him to quit his 2002 reelection race, and just five weeks before Election Day, he finally did. (The ploy worked: Frank Lautenberg, who gave up a miserable two-year retirement from the Senate, replaced him and easily won in November.) But when I asked Torricelli about this episode in December 2004, he played dumb and insisted that he’d been on his way to winning a second-term when he’d dropped out.  I was just tired of the media’s unfair treatment of him, he claimed.

I understand the human impulse that leads politicians to say things like this. But what I wonder is whether anyone ever actually believes them when they say it. Do Lieberman and Hutchison feel that by going on the record now with claims that they could have easily won history, some journalist or historian of the future will be fooled? Or are they actually fooling most people right now, and it’s only a small group of political observers and insiders who actually grasp the severity of their political problems? Or are they just too proud to admit that they are no longer as popular as they once were?

When Dodd stood down last year, he noted that “there’s nothing more pathetic, in my view, than a politician who announces they’re only leaving public life to spend more time with their family.” He has a point, but I’d say the politician who pretends he or she wasn’t scared of losing is even more pathetic.

But the New York Times magazine sure has a funny way of looking at the race. The premise of Matt Bai’s exhaustive piece in Sunday’s issue is that McMahon is succeeding in part because of the decline of powerful party institutions. There is, obviously, something to this, in the sense that party machines everywhere aren’t what they used to be.

But Bai suggests that the unwillingness of state Democratic leaders to coax the scandalized Sen. Chris Dodd into seeking another term this year is a sign of that decline, and that in the day of John Bailey, the long-departed state party boss, there would have been a full-court press to get :

Specifically, [Democratic pol Paul] Timpanelli was talking about how state Democrats failed to rally behind Dodd earlier this year — how they seemingly did not know how to offer an endangered incumbent, a man who served for 30 years in the Senate and became a giant of state politics, any incentive to seek re-election.

“John Bailey would have offered him the world, and he would have given the world,” Timpanelli told me. When I mentioned this to Dodd, he agreed. “The party apparatus didn’t seem to be there or know how to handle this,” he said, speaking of the erosion in his standing.

This is just way off the mark. It’s actually no surprise at all that Democrats didn’t beg Dodd to run this year: His poll numbers were poisonous and he was a sure loser whose presence on the fall ballot would have threatened down-ballot Democratic candidates (the ones whose success is essential to the functioning of whatever is left of the machine). Just like New Jersey’s Democratic machine wanted then-Sen. Robert Torricelli off of its line in 2002, Connecticut Democrats had every reason to hope and pray that Dodd would back out — and to rejoice when he did.

More remarkable, though, is that Bai doesn’t seem to realize that Bailey actually faced a nearly identical scenario when he ran the state party 40 years ago. Back then, the embattled and scandalized incumbent was also named Dodd — Thomas Dodd, the father of Chris, who had just been censured by the Senate for using campaign funds for personal expenses. Heading into the ’70 campaign, Thomas Dodd represented the same electoral liability to his party that Chris Dodd did entering this year’s race. And did Bailey offer Dodd the world to run? Of course not. He worked to stop him, ultimately prompting Dodd to leave the party rather than face a humiliating defeat at the state convention or in the primary. Instead, Dodd waged a futile third party effort, one that is most notable for draining just enough votes from Joseph Duffey, his replacement as the Democratic nominee, to elect a Republican congressman named Lowell Weicker.

If anything, today’s Democratic leaders handled the situation better than Bailey did because they took  pains not to antagonize Chris Dodd. And even though Blumenthal is in danger of losing, he’s still a far stronger candidate than Dodd would have been: long-term incumbent senators with the toxic poll numbers that Dodd enjoyed just don’t win reelection, particularly in years like 2010. To the extent it eased Dodd out of the race, then, the Democratic machine actually made McMahon’s campaign more difficult, not less so.

Moreover, her rise is hardly unprecedented. It was 20 years ago that Weicker won the governorship as an independent, his victory keyed by defections from traditional Democratic voters. In that race, the Democratic nominee, then-Rep. Bruce Morrison, finished with just 20 percent of the vote, despite strong establishment support. Given that experience, it’s hardly shocking that in an anti-Democratic climate like this year’s, a fantastically wealthy businesswoman could spend her way into contention while running on the Republican line.

Bai’s piece also seems to treat McMahon as a poor cultural fit with the state’s “patrician” Republicans. But again, the GOP embraced a decidedly blue-collar, non-country club candidate 20 years ago in John Rowland, who lost the ’90 race to Weicker by two points (and then won the seat four years later, though with a smaller share of the vote). Rowland was a product of Waterbury, a hard luck city with a deep culturally conservative streak — hardly a fit with the Fair field County bluebloods.

The real story of McMahon’s surge is pretty easy to understand: She’s spending a ton of money, she caught a break when Blumenthal’s Vietnam exaggerations were revealed, and she’s running in a year when the Republican Party exists to swing voters almost exclusively as a protest vehicle. If this same race had been held in 2008, she’d be hopelessly behind and no one outside the state would be saying much about it. Her success doesn’t really say anything about the decline of party machines or the demographic evolution of Connecticut. It’s simply another illustration of how toxic the political climate is for Democrats in 2010.