WASHINGTON, 10 August 2006 — The Iraq war was fought on another front Tuesday when Sen. Joe Lieberman lost his Democratic seat in Connecticut to anti-war novice Ned Lamont.
It was a race against a Democratic senator with a national reputation and a political novice who had two things in his favor: Substantial personal wealth and the potent anti-Iraq issue.
Lieberman was in hot water with his party. He was perceived as being too close to President Bush and adamantly supported the Iraq war.
Still, almost no one saw the political upset coming. Six months ago, Ned Lamont’s name-recognition was, within the margin of error, zero. He even made campaign flyers on a copy machine.
From day one, Lamont, now Connecticut’s Democratic nominee for the Senate election in November, stuck to a simple message: The war in Iraq was wrong and Sen. Joseph Lieberman was wrong to continue supporting it.
But while Lamont’s success has been widely attributed to the rising power of the anti-war movement and liberal internet bloggers, the 52-year-old upstart from Greenwich became a political giant-killer by blending new and old-style politics. He tapped the net roots to promote his cause — but used grass root campaigning to win over voters.
Despite the national implications of Lamont’s candidacy, his campaign retained a distinctly local flavor, staffed by veteran state operatives and a home-grown volunteer corps.
As the hype grew, the campaign stuck to the basics. It focused on building a file of likely voters, organizing a turn-out effort, and circulating Lamont at events, including gatherings in lounge rooms.
“The story is really about voters in Connecticut who stood with Ned Lamont,” Tom Matzzie, political director for the anti-war organization MoveOn.org, told journalists. “He went from town to town, house to house, for months. It defined grass-roots campaigning.” Lamont, a multimillionaire cable television businessman, is not a typical insurgent. Preppy and mild-mannered, he is the scion of a patrician banking family, with a lineage that includes a great-grandfather who was chairman of J. P. Morgan. He had dabbled in politics, but had never run in a statewide race.
His campaign raised and spent about $4 million up to July 19. More than half of it, about $2.5 million of that total, came from his own pocket.
Lieberman was not the only person to lose his seat in runoff elections Tuesday.
Rep. Cynthia A. McKinney, the fiery congresswoman known for her conspiracy theories about the Sept. 11 attacks and a scuffle this year with a US Capitol police officer, lost a runoff election yesterday for her district’s Democratic nomination.
McKinney, Georgia’s first black congresswoman, lost to Hank Johnson, a former county commissioner, 58 percent to 41 percent. And in Michigan, Republican Rep. Joe Schwarz lost his district’s nomination to a staunchly conservative challenger in a race dominated by a struggle over GOP principles that attracted more than $1 million in spending by outside groups.
