Lieberman and McCain: Kissing cousins in Connecticut

In Fairfield, the former Democrat stumps with the GOP front-runner -- and plants one on another Republican.

By Colin McEnroe

Read more: Republican Party, John McCain, Politics, Joseph Lieberman, News, Iraq War, 2008 election

AP Photo/Douglas Healey

Republican presidential hopeful John McCain, right, with Sen. Joe Lieberman at a rally at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn., Feb. 3, 2008.

Feb. 4, 2008 | FAIRFIELD, Conn. -- In retrospect, what happened between Rep. Chris Shays and Sen. Joe Lieberman here Sunday afternoon seems inevitable.

There, on the stage of the Fairfield University gym, in open-necked pink shirt and blazer and holding a mike, stood Shays, R-Conn., who kissed President Bush last week at the State of the Union address. He was introducing Lieberman, I-Conn., who even more notoriously exchanged a kiss with Bush at the same event in 2005. Lieberman's job, in turn, was to warm up the crowd for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who famously broke a long period of frost with the Bush administration by -- eyes closed, nose burrowing into shoulder -- hugging the president during a campaign stop in the summer of 2004.

As Shays handed the mike to Lieberman, Connecticut's lone House Republican and its formerly Democratic senator drew very close together. From up on the press platform, it was hard to tell how close. "Did they?" I asked Hartford Courant reporter Mark Pazniokas. He was uncertain. "I was looking down to write something," a blogger named Connecticut Bob chimed in. "I missed it."

It was left to Lieberman to erase all doubts. "Notice we kissed each other," he announced to the crowd of 1,500. "I don't want to go into details."

Though he still caucuses with the Democrats, Lieberman's habit of crushing on Republicans, particularly the bellicose kind, is well known. But he and GOP front-runner McCain and Lieberman have swapped a lot more than spit. Like a yin and yang, they have been fetally curled toward each other for years. They have had their differences with the Bush administration on other issues, but together they have supported going into Iraq and have been even more supportive of staying there. Trying to get McCain elected president is only their latest joint initiative.

Getting Connecticut in the red column come fall, however, may be too much for McCain and Lieberman to ask. McCain won the state easily from George W. Bush in the 2000 Republican primary, and looks set to win it again Tuesday. He has been endorsed by Gov. Jodi Rell, and he was up 22 points in one recent poll. But Republicans have been decimated in a state that has become reliably blue in presidential elections. Some of the state's voters have buyer's remorse about the senator who shared the stage with him Sunday, in large part because of the issue that both McCain and Lieberman have made their own: Iraq.

Outside the gym, among the protesters who'd gathered for the McCain rally, the rancor was aimed at both the candidate and his biggest local booster, and it was about Iraq. Mary-Ann Tirone Smith, a successful crime novelist, held a sign that said, "Lieberman and McCain -- Warlords." It was streaked and spattered with faux blood, sort of like the cover of a crime novel.

Across the street from Tirone Smith with about 100 noisy antiwar protesters was Jim Dean, Howard Dean's brother, who runs a grass-roots group called Democracy for America. Eight years ago Jim Dean was inside the same gym for a McCain rally. In 2000, "I was in that building for a guy who was against special interests and would take very seriously the act of sending other people's kids to war," Dean told me. "The John McCain I knew would never have voted for this war and wouldn't be pandering to conservatives by taking a stand against a woman's right to choose."

Inside the gym, support for the Iraq war earned Lieberman and McCain their biggest applause of the afternoon. There was no doubt that the crowd had come to hear about security and the battle against Islamic terror, more than the economy or immigration or climate change. People who attended the 2000 event describe it as loud, raw and urgent; Sunday's crowd included more casual political windowshoppers, and came to life mainly when McCain promised, about Iraq, "I will never surrender," and when he made his usual promise to track Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell.

Even the Man from U.N.C.L.E. was there for that reason. "I'm listening to all of them," he said. "The key for me," said Robert Vaughn, who played TV master-spy Napoleon Solo from 1964 to 1968, "is how the next president handles Islamic jihad."

And there were those in attendance who were drawn to McCain as a supposed maverick. Robin Sandler, who had brought his 12-year-old son from Branford, Conn., to see the candidate, said he admired McCain's independence. But he was undecided, and was hoping for more signs of that independence. "He might say something that hits me in the face, or it might be more subtle, but I'll know it when it comes," he said.

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