Lieberman has been making a lot of his attacks on Lamont based on the basis of Lamonts voting 'with Republicans 80% of the time.' For something that makes up so much of Lieberman's campaign, this attack holds up poorly to scrutiny.
The problems:
The math is deceptive, and deceptive by design.
Local issues are different from national ones - siding with Republicans may make a lot of sense, if their policies are sensible. This is especially true in Greenwich, which is a pretty unusual town.
The real issues become the individual votes. We can clearly find Leiberman votes that we disagree with, what about Lamont?
Details below the fold.
First, 80% sided with Republicans means that he voted with them a fair amount, but a lot of those votes were procedural and unanimous. If, for example, 75% of the votes were procedural, uncontested, or otherwise meaningless votes and Lamont voted with Republicans 80% of the time, he would really have only voted with them in 20% of the votes that mattered.
Leiberman tries to trick people by quoting the opposite number for himself - 90% voted with Democrats. Well, in the above example, if 75% of the votes were uncontested, Lamont would have voted with Republicans 95% of the time.
An excellent example of a meaningful vote was Lieberman's vote to close debate on Alito's supreme court nomination - and he chose to vote with Republicans. Alito was wrong for the job, and is now there for life. Voting against cloture was the vote that mattered. Voting against his confirmation was meaningless, and Lieberman safely voted with Democrats. Only 50% Republican perhaps - but its which 50% that matters.
Toss in votes to open session, close session, and vote for lunch, and he hits 80%! He's also 80% with Democrats. He also betrayed Democratic values, 100%.
Local issues are, for the most part, far less partisan in nature. Where does a parkling lot go, zoning, and so forth rarely have a significant partisan impact. School funding may be an issue, but you'd be surprised how different that gets when its local, when its the local voters kids and the local voters money - suddenly, partisan lines become blurrier. (Authors note: In more innocent days, I was a big advocate of ignoring party when voting in local elections, but nationally Republicans have become so odious I can't support building their farm team.)
Greenwich, in particular, has a few things to recommend it, and policies that would make sense on a national level. They tax and spend. I know, that's Democratic, Republicans borrow and spend and tax people that can't vote yet. But in Greenwich, Republicans and Democrats have been careful to avoid deficits and borrowing even on larger civic projects, such as new libraries or schools. This is facilitated by a high real estate values of course, leading to low tax rates but high enough revenues (I lived in about the cheapest condo in Greenwich, which was tax heaven, trust me.)
Greenwich also pays teachers well, relative to other municipalities, has excellent schools, libraries and parks, and is overall fairly well run.
I'd be curious to see if Lieberman could come up with any individual votes that Lamont made the violate Democratic principals in any way. I suspect he can't - if he could, he surely would have. If he could find one or two, I'm surprised he would criticize someone else for voting their principals, which seems to be his major defense for some of his uglier votes.
((There: A whole Lieberman/Lamont Dairy, without once mentioning Iraq or Foxnews. The thing is, you really don't have to.)