Lamont's Loss to Lieberman Was A Progressive Gain

By David Sirota, In These Times. Posted November 13, 2006.

It was raining hard when I returned my rental car at Hartford's Bradley International Airport on Wednesday -- the weather was not helping to raise my spirits from the night before. I had been working as a strategist and rapid response staffer for Ned Lamont's Senate campaign against pro-war incumbent Joe Lieberman, and we had just lost the general election by 10 points. Needless to say, I wasn't happy. But my mood lifted when the middle-aged woman at the Avis counter said, "I voted for him."

She was pointing at the Lamont for Senate button still pinned to my rumpled jacket lapel. During a day where I, like thousands of others in Connecticut, were looking for answers, her simple statement -- "I voted for him" -- was a much-needed reminder to me that we had done something very profound.

"I wish he would have won," she went on. "I just don't get why he lost."

A lot of people don't get why Ned Lamont lost and Sen. Joe Lieberman (CFL-Conn.) won. But over the coming weeks and months, both the right and left will try to explain Lamont's high-profile loss in ways that are advantageous to each side. Already, two major narratives on what happened have emerged -- both of which conflict with each other, both of which are wrong, and both of which will be debunked right here, right now.

The Two Prevalent Narratives

The first storyline comes from Republicans and from the ashes of what remains of the "New Democrat" faction that, in the wake of this week's election, is clearly a thin shadow of its formerly relevant self. These folks assert that Lamont lost because his platform challenging the Iraq War made him look "weak" to voters. This is a riff off both Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman's claims that anyone who opposes the Iraq War is a terrorist sympathizer.

They will also say that Lamont getting only 40 percent of the vote proves that those bloggers, activists and grassroots organizers who built the foundation of Lamont's campaign have once and for all proven they are unable to win elections, and that, additionally, Lieberman's victory was an electoral vindication of Washington's out-of-the-center definition of "centrism."

No doubt, we will soon hear the argument that the challenge to Lieberman was a mistake from the get-go, because now, with the Senate so evenly divided, Lieberman is supposedly more powerful than ever.

On the other side will be criticism from those on the left who claim that Lamont, far from presenting himself like a terrorist appeaser as the right suggests, instead supposedly stopped talking about the war until the last week of the campaign, thus stripping himself of the major issue that had propelled his candidacy. Some have publicly asserted that, after the primary, the campaign was hijacked by Washington insiders who, with smarmy D.C.-style caution, manipulated Lamont into going silent on the war.

So to review -- one side will say Lamont lost because he talked only about the war and therefore alienated a mythical, pro-war "center" even though polls show most Americans oppose the Iraq War. The other side will say he lost because he stopped talking about the war entirely.

What Really Happened

Ned Lamont lost by 10 points. Such a margin indicates that something structural was happening that could not have been addressed by any of the tactical or rhetorical tweaks either side says made the difference. Some of those structural problems were unique to this particular race, some were more generic, but together, they steepened the climb for Lamont in ways that made victory almost impossible. The challenges included:

• Entrenched incumbency: Lamont was attempting something no one other than Paul Wellstone has done in the modern political era: defeat a statewide incumbent as a candidate who has never run for major office before. And Lieberman was no regular incumbent -- this was a man presenting himself as a hybrid of both parties, and a 36-year political institution in Connecticut -- the most careerist of career politicians.
• Abandonment of the Democratic nominee by the Democratic Party: The story of the national Democratic Party's abandonment of Lamont will likely be written more fully in the coming weeks, with explanations of both how this happened and even more importantly, why. But the broad strokes are obvious: Almost every major figure in national Democratic politics save John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Wes Clark and John Edwards refused to seriously help the Lamont campaign. We saw this coming when, right after Lieberman lost the primary, he was welcomed with a standing ovation back to the Senate club by his Democratic colleagues. Subsequently, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid indicated that Lieberman's seniority would be preserved if he won reelection, despite the fact that he officially abandoned the party. To understand how much this abandonment affected the race, consider that Lieberman bragged in October to the Associated Press that he was actively using Reid's promise of seniority to promote his key "experience and seniority" argument -- and that such an argument was helping him win over voters. On Election Day, Lieberman appeared on Fox News to thank the national Democratic Party for refusing to help Lamont, the Democratic nominee.

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David Sirota is a senior editor at In These Times. He served as a top strategist and researcher for Ned Lamont’s U.S. Senate campaign. Before that, he was a top strategist for the gubernatorial campaign of Brian Schweitzer, Montana’s first Democratic governor in 16 years. His new book Hostile Takeover was published by Random House’s Crown Publishers.

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