I happened to stumble upon an
interesting article about Ned Lamont, Connecticut's Democratic challenger to Joe Lieberman, in
The New Republic, of all places. While many of the New Republic's writers tend to be centrist to conservative Democrats, this article is actually quite reasonable and fair to Lamont, and doesn't take any unnecessary potshots at him personally, although it does not portray some anti-Lieberman bloggers in the most favorable light. So, what does this article tell us about Ned that we might not have known already? A few things you wouldn't expect, actually. Read on.
The first thing we learn is that Ned does not personally loathe Joe Lieberman.
Let the record show that Ned Lamont does not consider Joe Lieberman a whiny-ass titty baby. Nor does he believe that Connecticut's junior senator is a douchebag, an ass clown, or any of the other nasty names liberal bloggers have called Lieberman--whom, with those bloggers' help, Lamont hopes to defeat in this August's Democratic primary. "I really regret that rhetoric," Lamont said one recent afternoon, blushing a little as some of the derogatory appellations for Lieberman were read back to him. "I think he's a good man, I think he's a patriot, I think he does what he thinks is right. ... I just happen to think he's wrong."
Secondly, the article mentions how Ned is doing far better at this point than anyone could have reasonable expected when he first entered the race.
Since officially announcing his candidacy in March, Lamont has mounted a surprisingly serious challenge to Lieberman, who, in his previous two reelection races, faced only token opposition from Republicans--much less from a fellow Democrat. In his campaign's first 45 days, Lamont raised close to $350,000 from more than 4,000 online donors (he plans to substantially build on that dollar figure in the coming weeks with a series of nonvirtual fund-raisers in Massachusetts and California; and he has already contributed $370,000 of his own money to his campaign). And he appears to be well on his way toward securing the support of 15 percent of the delegates to his party's state convention and the petition signatures of 15,000 Connecticut Democrats--either one of which will earn him a spot on the Democratic primary ballot. "Even people who had a pretty rosy view of Lamont's chances are surprised at how many delegates he seems to be able to turn," The Hartford Courant political columnist Colin McEnroe recently said on Hartford's wtic-tv. "[Lieberman's] got a real nailbiter on his hands."
Indeed, by taking on Lieberman, Lamont has become a hero to those who reside in the angriest corners of the state and national Democratic Party--and whose brief against Lieberman goes well beyond his support for the war. (To wit, one ardent Lamont supporter who blogs at Daily Kos recently trash-talked: "Lieberman is a disloyal, Bush-kissing, torture-loving asshole who hasn't done shit for CT in years.") These Lieberman-haters hail Lamont for his "Nedrenaline" and celebrate his "Nedmentum." He is, in their eyes, "the anti-Lieberman." "Ned has a gift," a blogger at the website My Left Nutmeg recently wrote. "The more people see and hear Ned the more they like him and that's the polar opposite of our current junior senator." But, as Lamont seems to be discovering, being a hero to this rabid crowd is a strange role for a mild-mannered guy like himself.
Most interestingly, the article makes the point that Ned is NOT a firebrand, a bleeding-heart liberal, or a give-em-hell-type Democrat that you might expect would be a challenger to a sitting incumbent. In fact, he has a reputation for being quite mild and moderate.
The 52-year-old Lamont isn't a complete political novice, but, up until now, his political activities have tended, like his personality, to be of a moderate nature. He was elected as a selectman in his ultra-rich, ultra-Republican hometown of Greenwich and was appointed by the Independent (and formerly Republican) governor, Lowell Weicker, to serve as the chairman of Connecticut's pension oversight board. He has also donated money to numerous moderate state and national Democratic candidates over the years, including Lieberman. Even as a student in the mid-'70s at Harvard--where the undergraduate library is named after his great-grandfather, a former chairman of J.P. Morgan--Lamont steered clear of the radicals: His one major political act in Cambridge was to help bring the Indiana Democratic senator and 1976 presidential candidate Birch Bayh to campus.
But Lamont's campaign against Lieberman has now brought him face-to-face with the radical fringe. And, as he continued to talk in his campaign office, he sounded very much like a prude who had wandered into a swingers' club and was still trying to convince himself that he was comfortable with what he'd seen. "I was not a big blog guy," Lamont said, admitting that he tended to get most of his news from the "mainstreet" media. "But I've looked at them a lot more in the last 60 days than I did in the previous 52 years." Then, there are the people Lamont has met on the campaign trail who have exposed him to issues to which he'd previously not given much thought. "Oh boy, I get a lot of questions about media concentration," he said with a sigh. "Yeah, 'GE owns NBC or Murdoch owns Fox and DirecTV,' you know. I'm in media so I'm supposed to be more outraged by that than I probably am." And, of course, he has been feeling some pressure to stake out more extreme positions than those with which he's comfortable. He recalled a recent campaign appearance at the University of Connecticut, during which a student asked him whether he supported impeaching President Bush for war crimes. "Gee, I was thinking maybe we'd censure him for fisa," Lamont said.
What is Ned's case against Lieberman? It goes farther than Iraq.
Like many of his supporters, Lamont has tried to turn his disagreement with Lieberman about the war--which, according to a February poll, is opposed by 61 percent of Connecticut residents--into a broader indictment of Lieberman's party disloyalty. "I doubt that anybody will call me 'George Bush's favorite Democrat,'" Lamont typically says on the stump, going on to declare that, if he wins, "You're not losing a senator, you're gaining a Democrat." But, when pressed on the issue of what exactly makes Lieberman such a bad Democrat, Lamont doesn't seem to have the heart to argue the case too forcefully. "He supported the energy bill," Lamont said, "and it was Senator Lieberman who, on 'Meet the Press,' said, 'Of course the federal government has got to intervene in the Terri Schiavo case.'" But, soon, Lamont circled back to the war. "I'd say Senator Lieberman has been all Iraq, all the time," he continued. "So it's not necessarily a question of being wrong on these [Democratic] issues, it's just sort of being silent."
But Ned actually has a better view of Bush than many of us on this site.
Even when it comes to President Bush--who may be the only person Lamont's supporters hate more than Lieberman--the candidate tends to pull his punches. "I don't dislike people, I'm not that type of person," Lamont said of Bush. "Was I ever sympathetic to his politics or what he was trying to do? No." Still, Lamont did confess that he respected some of Bush's symbolic actions in the immediate aftermath of September 11. "I liked it when he went to the Yankee game," Lamont said. "That was gutsy as hell. I mean, I was putting on plastic gloves to open the mail coming into my office."
An example of Ned's successes with town committees:
Eventually, Lamont arrived in the Hartford suburb of Windsor to meet that town's Democratic committee. It was about the twentieth such town committee Lamont had visited in his pursuit of at least 240 delegates to the Connecticut Democratic Party convention in May. But the Windsor meeting was special, since it was that town committee's 34-to-one vote in February to reprimand Lieberman for his support of the war that partly inspired Lamont to get into the race. "There's a sense that our 132,000 troops stuck in the middle of a bloody civil war are not making the situation better," he told the crowd of about 60 people--the men mostly in plaid shirts and with beards; the women primarily wearing sweaters and sensible shoes--who had gathered in the town hall. "We're going to have to start investing in this country again. We're spending three hundred million dollars a day over in Iraq; we're going to have to start investing in our own infrastructure and our own democracy."
When the crowd finished applauding Lamont, a Lieberman staffer named Ken Dagliere addressed the committee. (Lieberman himself would appear before the committee the following weekend.) Dagliere, a portly man in an ill-fitting suit, had recently been detailed from Lieberman's Senate office in Washington to work on the tightening campaign, and he didn't seem terribly pleased to be there. Desperately scanning the room for friendly faces, he beseeched those in attendance not to let their views on the war cloud their judgment. "Obviously, you know, we can all disagree about that, but there are a lot of things we agree on," he pleaded, citing instances in which Lieberman had opposed or criticized the Bush administration. He rattled off a laundry list of liberal interest groups that had given Lieberman high marks for his voting record. And then he trotted out the hoariest argument available to incumbents--the argument about seniority. "He's a member of the Armed Services Committee," Dagliere said of Lieberman. "He has great influence in obtaining Department of Defense contracts." But the crowd seemed unimpressed, peppering Dagliere with hostile questions, such as why Lieberman's campaign literature fails to mention his foreign policy views. "Frankly, I just don't want Senator Lieberman representing my party," said one questioner. "How do you respond to that?" Dagliere stammered for a moment and then was speechless...
It had been a good night for Lamont, and, as he made his way across the emptying parking lot to his Lexus, he seemed to have only one regret. "There was all that talk about Lieberman's seniority," Lamont said. "But his seniority hasn't done us much good," noting that Connecticut is forty-ninth out of 50 states in terms of the federal aid it receives compared with the tax dollars it sends to Washington. "I didn't want to say that at the meeting, though," he continued. "I don't like being that confrontational."
Hopefully you now know the man better, and think even more highly of him as a result. My friend and I met him at a frameshop in Woodbridge, CT about a month ago. We accidentally stumbled into a photo-op he was doing, but he was more than happy to speak to us for 10-15 minutes, looking completely relaxed and calm the whole time. He's definitely a better communicator than Lieberman, and I hope he gets out and about among the people of Connecticut a lot more over the next few months. It can only help him.