Ned Lamont, a Connecticut millionaire whose candidacy for the United States Senate soared from nowhere on a fierce antiwar message, won a narrow victory in the Democratic primary last night over the incumbent, Joseph I. Lieberman.Senator Lieberman, a national party leader and the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2000, conceded defeat in a phone call to Mr. Lamont shortly before 11 p.m. But then, in a combative speech to supporters in Hartford that was carried live on television news, the senator declared that he was not dropping out of the race, but would instead run for re-election as an independent this fall.???As I see it, in this campaign, we???ve just finished the first half and the Lamont team is ahead ??? but in the second half, our team, Team Connecticut, is going to surge forward to victory in November,??? Mr. Lieberman told cheering supporters.The senator said he was staying in the race because Mr. Lamont had run a primary campaign of ???insults??? and ???partisan polarizing??? that relentlessly blamed Mr. Lieberman for President Bush???s wartime policies, which the senator has supported and defended but also criticized at various points.???For the sake of our state, our country and my party, I cannot, I will not let this result stand,??? Mr. Lieberman said of the Lamont victory.Mr. Lieberman???s determination to remain in the race may soon collide with the will of many Democratic leaders in Washington and Connecticut, however. The Senate minority leader, Harry Reid, and Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, who is leading the effort to elect more Democrats in November, planned to announce this morning that they were supporting Mr. Lamont and that the party should unite around the nominee, according to Democrats close to both men. A spokesman for Mr. Schumer said a statement would be forthcoming, but declined further comment.???Reid and Schumer will back Lamont, but the big question is if they will approach Joe about dropping out, because they don???t want to get his back up against the wall,??? said a senior Senate Democratic aide who was involved in the Reid-Schumer discussions but was not authorized to discuss them publicly.Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, Mr. Lieberman???s Democratic ally, privately congratulated Mr. Lamont last night and was expected to appear at a ???unity press conference??? with Mr. Lamont and other candidates at state party headquarters this morning. Two Lamont advisers said that they expected Mr. Dodd to help smooth Mr. Lieberman???s exit from the race; a spokeswoman for Mr. Dodd, however, said he would not play a go-between role to broker the senator???s exit.A spokeswoman for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, meanwhile, restated Mrs. Clinton???s announced intentions to support the Democratic nominee in Connecticut ??? now Mr. Lamont. A spokesman for former President Bill Clinton, who campaigned for Mr. Lieberman last month, did not return a phone message late last night.Unofficial returns this morning showed that Mr. Lamont won with 51.8 percent of the vote, with 98 percent of the electoral precincts reporting. Even before Mr. Lieberman conceded last night, Lamont advisers were making plans to pressure him to drop out if he did not do so on his own. Tom Swan, Mr. Lamont???s campaign adviser, said last night that the candidate would appear on television morning talk shows to call on Mr. Lieberman to respect the will of the Democratic majority, and then send the same message at the unity event this morning. Mr. Lamont also intended to call national Democratic leaders in Washington, including Senate colleagues of Mr. Lieberman, and ask them to speak to the senator about dropping out, Mr. Swan added. Mr. Lamont said that former Senator John Edwards, the Democrats??? vice presidential nominee in 2004, was the first Democratic leader to call him last night. Mr. Lamont also gave a prominent spot at a rally last night at his headquarters in Meriden to several African-American supporters, including the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson.???We think that Joe should respect the will of the Democrats,??? Mr. Swan said. ???We will seek and welcome help from any Democratic leaders in making sure that Joe respects the will of Democratic voters.???Advisers to the senator said last night that Mr. Lieberman was emboldened to continue in the race because of the narrow margin of Mr. Lamont???s victory. Yet the advisers said he might still drop out if the next round of opinion polls showed Mr. Lamont well ahead of Mr. Lieberman in the fall general election.The Connecticut race drew national and even international attention this summer as a barometer of the mood of American Democrats over the Iraq war. Among political insiders, too, it was seen as a test for liberal bloggers to affect a major election, instead of merely commenting on politics in cyberspace.Mr. Lieberman, a leading moderate Democrat, drew scorn from members of his own party for supporting the war and for forcefully defending President Bush???s foreign policy. Some voters also felt that Mr. Lieberman had lost touch with Connecticut after 18 years in the Senate, a period in which he was influential in national affairs, a vice-presidential nominee in 2000 and a presidential candidate in 2004.Many liberals never forgave him for his friendly manner in a vice presidential debate against Dick Cheney in 2000, and they were further angered when Mr. Lieberman said on national television last year that he would have kept Terri Schiavo on a feeding tube against her husband???s wishes.Mr. Lamont, a former Greenwich selectman who, at 52, has never held statewide office, capitalized on the disaffection by spending at least $4 million of his own money on hard-edged television commercials, like one in which Mr. Lieberman???s face changed into President Bush???s as an announcer said the senator ???talks like George W. Bush and acts like George W. Bush.???Mr. Lamont battled the perception that he was a multimillionaire pawn of the bloggers, trying to broaden his antiwar message with a liberal load of proposed federal programs, such as universal preschool and expanded health insurance.The returns showed Lamont narrowly winning such cities as Danbury and New London and having a commanding edge in Norwalk and his hometown of Greenwich, where he captured 68 percent of the vote. He also held the edge in incomplete returns from New Haven. Mr. Lieberman was ahead in Stamford, which is in Mr. Lamont???s home county, Fairfield.Douglas Schwartz, director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, said last night that a Lamont victory would scramble Mr. Lieberman???s current edge in polls forecasting the general election.???Lamont is going to get even more positive news coverage from his win, and Democrats will likely rally around their party???s candidate,??? Mr. Schwartz said. ???Lieberman will be viewed differently Wednesday ??? he will be viewed as the losing candidate.???The hard-fought contest took an especially bitter turn this week as Lieberman advisers denounced the collapse of their campaign Web site, which disrupted communications among supporters on the final day of the campaign. The Lieberman camp blamed unnamed ???political opponents.???Yet it was not clear who was at fault. The Lieberman advisers said they had no evidence implicating the Lamont campaign and could not explain the precise nature of the problem, except to say that the campaign server???s bandwidth had been overwhelmed.
Fatback
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More evidence that the tide is turning?
of course that has nothing to do with Lieberman...any GOP favoring group just want Lieberman to run so as to split the democratic vote and thus possibly get lucky and have a republican pull away with the senate seat.
that's why the Dem's will push Joe to not run.
But yeah...i haven't been a fan of Lieberman since his "first amendment ballyhoo" back in the '00 elections. He was a big reason a didn't vote for Gore...
Liberal McCarthyism
Bigotry and hate aren't just for right-wingers anymore.
BY LANNY J. DAVIS
Tuesday, August 8, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
WASHINGTON--My brief and unhappy experience with the hate and vitriol of bloggers on the liberal side of the aisle comes from the last several months I spent campaigning for a longtime friend, Joe Lieberman.
This kind of scary hatred, my dad used to tell me, comes only from the right wing--in his day from people such as the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy, with his tirades against "communists and their fellow travelers." The word "McCarthyism" became a red flag for liberals, signifying the far right's fascistic tactics of labeling anyone a "communist" or "socialist" who favored an active federal government to help the middle class and the poor, and to level the playing field.
I came to believe that we liberals couldn't possibly be so intolerant and hateful, because our ideology was famous for ACLU-type commitments to free speech, dissent and, especially, tolerance for those who differed with us. And in recent years--with the deadly combination of sanctimony and vitriol displayed by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Michael Savage--I held on to the view that the left was inherently more tolerant and less hateful than the right.
Now, in the closing days of the Lieberman primary campaign, I have reluctantly concluded that I was wrong. The far right does not have a monopoly on bigotry and hatred and sanctimony. Here are just a few examples (there are many, many more anyone with a search engine can find) of the type of thing the liberal blog sites have been posting about Joe Lieberman:
??? "Ned Lamont and his supporters need to [g]et real busy. Ned needs to beat Lieberman to a pulp in the debate and define what it means to be an AMerican who is NOT beholden to the Israeli Lobby" (by "rim," posted on Huffington Post, July 6, 2006).
??? "Joe's on the Senate floor now and he's growing a beard. He has about a weeks growth on his face. . . . I hope he dyes his beard Blood red. It would be so appropriate" (by "ctkeith," posted on Daily Kos, July 11 and 12, 2005).
??? On "Lieberman vs. Murtha": "as everybody knows, jews ONLY care about the welfare of other jews; thanks ever so much for reminding everyone of this most salient fact, so that we might better ignore all that jewish propaganda [by Lieberman] about participating in the civil rights movement of the 60s and so on" (by "tomjones," posted on Daily Kos, Dec. 7, 2005).
??? "Good men, Daniel Webster and Faust would attest, sell their souls to the Devil. Is selling your soul to a god any worse? Leiberman cannot escape the religious bond he represents. Hell, his wife's name is Haggadah or Muffeletta or Diaspora or something you eat at Passover" (by "gerrylong," posted on the Huffington Post, July 8, 2006).
??? "Joe Lieberman is a racist and a religious bigot" (by "greenskeeper," posted on Daily Kos, Dec. 7, 2005).
And these are some of the nicer examples.
One Sunday morning on C-Span I debated Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel on the Lieberman versus Lamont race. Afterwards I received a series of emails--many of them in ALL CAPS (which often suggests the hyper-frenetic state of these extremist haters)--that were of the same stripe as the blog posts, and filled with the same level of personal hate.
But the issue is not just emotional outbursts by these usually anonymous bloggers. A friend of mine just returned from Connecticut, where he had spoken on several occasions on behalf of Joe Lieberman. He happens to be a liberal antiwar Democrat, just as I am. He is also a lawyer. He told me that within a day of a Lamont event--where he asked the candidate some critical questions--some of his clients were blitzed with emails attacking him and threatening boycotts of their products if they did not drop him as their attorney. He has actually decided not to return to Connecticut for the primary today; he is fearful for his physical safety.
I do not blame Joe Lieberman's political difficulties on the liberal blogosphere. Most Connecticut Democrats voting for Mr. Lamont are genuinely outraged at President Bush for his Iraq War policies. They are entitled to express that outrage by voting for him and against Sen. Lieberman on that basis alone, although Sen. Lieberman's record as a progressive Democrat and his opposition to President Bush not only on most domestic issues but also on the conduct of the war cannot be disputed--despite egregiously distortive ads paid for by Mr. Lamont with $4 million of his own money.
Moreover, the support he gets from these haters should not be attributed to Mr. Lamont--nor should he be blamed for their extremism, bigotry and intolerance. But he ought to denounce them. He hasn't as yet.
Mr. Lamont and all other liberal Democrats should remember the McCarthy era and not fall into the trap of the hypocrisy of the double standard--that it's not OK when Ann Coulter dispenses her venomous hatred, but it is OK when our side's versions of Ann Coulter do.
Mr. Davis, former special counsel to President Clinton between 1996-98, is the author of "Scandal: How 'Gotcha' Politics Is Destroying America," forthcoming from Palgrave.
"Cow shit doesn't smell as bad when it's on your side of the fence"
oh give me a break. That article does some amazing spinwork, comparing some blogs on the internet to McCarthy? Huh? And comparing random crazy posts on a message board to Ann Coulter? What a joke. Like Lamont's supposed to speak out against every paranoid jackass in America with the internet?
Unfortunately, America is VERY anti-Semitic. Gore, being clueless, made his 2000 campaign more difficult by choosing a Jewish running mate than a pure-bred, good-ole' WASP. I believe he should have been able to choose who he desired, but the REALITY was that rednecky, xenophobic, dogmatic types (i.e., most Red staters) weren't havin' it. Through their ignorance, they fear those who they don't understand and praise those who speak to their insecurities and dogma. That said, I predict that Lieberman will NEVER win the Democratic bid for the presidency.
Peace,
Big Stacks from Kakalak
I agree. With Al Gore and Joe Lieberman I was worried about how they'd interpret the first amendment. With Tipper and her crusade against the music industry and Lieberman with his own agenda against videogames...it all seemed like a very slippery slope. That election I was thankful there was a 3rd party to vote for, though I knew Nader didn't have a chance - I was just hoping he'd hit 5%.
true! and yet, somehow:
I came to believe that we liberals couldn't possibly be so intolerant and hateful, because our ideology was famous for ACLU-type commitments to free speech, dissent and, especially, tolerance for those who differed with us.
amazing.
I don't really see how a couple of anti Jewish Internet post equal some underlying anti Jewish sentiment in the democratic party. I mean those comments were seriously stupid but I don't think Lieberman lost the primary because he was Jewish. If that were the case would he have ever been elected to the senate in the first place?
a frustrated Joe Lieberman takes out anger by suckerpunching an unsuspecting blue balloon.
When Lieberman loses in the South it's because of anti-semetic rednecks.
But when he loses in Ct. it's because ...well.......he sucks!!
You did notice who Lanny used to work for right?
Clinton I believe...although it looks like he was in a frat at Yale with Dubya...
this is the best line...I guess he's right, if by "progressive" he means blatantly pandering to the right.
progressive democrat = compassionate conservative
For me, everything is about the Iraq war. How we where led into it. How it has been managed. And the freaks who continue to act like all that was good. Minimally, these people should be removed from public service. Duh. They are NOT serving the public. And fucking come on, what more do you need as evidence of incompetence?
I'm sure Joe has a lucrative career ahead as the yankee Zel Miller.
sayin...
and this hit home (again) to me yesterday as i read the cover story in the new Time magazine. scary fucking shit is happening over there that will affect our lives for decades to come.
Au contraire.
He loses in CT because he's a "scumbag".