Lamont Blasts “George W. Lieberman” in Connecticut Senate Debate

Last night, MSNBC and the local NBC affiliate WVIT-TV in Connecticut broadcast an hour-long debate between Senator Joe Lieberman and his Democratic Primary challenger Ned Lamont. However, the ghost of George W. Bush hung over the two as they took questions from the press and each other. That Senator Lieberman even consented to this debate is a sign of how much trouble he’s in. The fact that Mr. Lamont gave as good as he got just added to it.

Mr. Lamont looked nervous and is not an on-camera natural. His eyes were unsettling, and he turned his head away from the camera to address the senator too much. He isn’t slick. Yet he has uncovered the secret for the anti-incumbents in both parties this year – “Iraq is a symptom of everything that is going wrong in America.” That isn’t, of course, entirely correct, but it makes a very saleable sound-bite, and it takes one issue candidates and makes them look like ideological heavyweights. Don’t like the budget deficit? Blame spending on Iraq. Don’t like North Korean missile tests? Blame “axis of evil” rhetoric. Don’t like the New Orleans recovery effort? Blame the National Guard misdeployment in Iraq.

Mr. Lamont quite successfully labeled the senator as a George Bush Democrat, which is more like a Vichy Frenchman than like a Reagan Democrat. He said, “President Bush rushed us into this war. He told us it would be easy. We’d be welcomed as liberators. And Senator Lieberman cheered on the president every step of the way when we should have been asking the tough questions.” When asked if he backed a specific timetable for withdrawal of US troops from Mesopotamia, Mr. Lamont said, “Yes,” and went on to say that Senator Lieberman’s position was a de facto open-ended commitment to the Shi’ite-led, Baghdad regime.

For his part, Senator Lieberman resorted to paraphrasing the late Lloyd Bentsen, “I've know George Bush, I've worked against George Bush, I've even run against George Bush, but, Ned, I'm not George Bush. So why don't you stop running against him and have the courage and honesty to run against me and the facts of my record?” But that was the whole point of the Lamont campaign – the record is one of support for the war and all the ills associated with it. His statement that he wanted the troops out as soon as possible, but their premature withdrawal would be a disaster came right from the Karl Rove playbook.

Despite the Iraq issue dominating the debate, there was more to it than that. The candidates sparred over earmarked money. Senator Lieberman committed a major forensic blunder when he came out in favor of this kind of pork when Mr. Lamont said the whole thing should be illegal. The senator said they were good for Connecticut, citing some ferries that got cars off Interstate-95. Mr. Lamont noted that Alaska got 10 times as much in earmarks, so Mr. Lieberman was both playing a game of corruption and playing it badly.

When all is said and done, Mr. Lamont doesn’t need to win this race to win the argument. After all, President Johnson beat Gene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary in 1968, and then had to withdraw anyway because his opponent made too good a race of it. The same holds true for the Connecticut Senate race. That the grass-roots, anti-war Democrats can take on their party’s nominee for Vice-President in 2000 and force him to debate and consider an independent run for a seat he’s held for 18 years says it all. They don’t need to win in 2006, but they believe they will in 2008 – and they will remember who was on which side.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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