CT-Sen: Drawing blood

Lieberman is freaking out, and I'm saying that without hyperbole or exaggeration.

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Ned Lamont Thursday said his opponent, U.S. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, skipped almost 400 votes since 1999, including 33 of the 63 total votes taken on the Iraq war.

Earlier in the week, Lamont focused on a smaller slice of the senator's Iraq war voting tallies, but expanded that Thursday to cover a seven-year period, the same amount of time Lieberman used almost two decades ago when he ran critical ads against then-incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Lowell Weicker.

Lieberman won his first of three terms in the Senate in 1988 after beating Weicker. Lamont beat Lieberman last month for the Democratic nomination for the Senate and Lieberman is now running as a petitioning candidate.

"It is astonishing that Senator Lieberman has missed the same amount of votes that he criticized Weicker for, in half the time," Lamont said, which includes 25 percent of all votes in the Senate in the last 3-1/2 years.

Lieberman, in a conference call with reporters, said Lamont was "hypocritical" and "persistently negative."

Of course it's "negative." Not showing up to do the job your constituents hired you to do is a bad thing. Was it not "negative" when Lieberman leveled those charges against Weicker? And really, why does Lieberman think that whining is an effective campaign strategy?

Lieberman staged that conference call to try and rebut those charges. His surrogates are claiming Lamont also missed a bunch of votes as a Greenwich selectman. You know, votes on filling potholes. They are staging a full-on defense against these charges.

There's a reason Lieberman and his people are so freaked out -- this was exactly the line of attack that Lieberman rode to victory against then-incumbent Lowell Weicker in 1988. And now we find out that Lieberman has been twice the no-show that Weicker ever was.

Apparently, the voters of Connecticut expect a senator who shows up to work. Imagine that! And Lieberman knows this all to well from first-hand experience.