Salon.com > Colin McEnroe

Lieberman and McCain: Kissing cousins in Connecticut

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 17:15:00 +0000

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.

Lieberman: A surge of buyer’s remorse?

Wed, 17 Jan 2007 12:24:00 +0000

One day last week a grumpy citizen of Connecticut called my talk radio show and asked, half-seriously, if we could trade our senator, Joseph I. Lieberman, straight up to Nebraska for Chuck Hagel.

The caller's point was that we want a Democrat and they want a Republican; and even though each senator wears the opposite political label, when it comes to Iraq, Hagel sounds like a blue-state Democrat, while Lieberman has proven more loyal to President Bush than many Republicans have.

Tempers are little frayed here in Connecticut because our junior senator spent last summer fighting for his political survival by insisting, among other things, that the policies he supported would result in troop withdrawals. Lieberman said some American troops would be able to leave Iraq by the end of 2006, and more than half would be out by the end of 2007. According to exit polls on Nov. 7, more than 60 percent of Connecticut voters opposed the war in Iraq and/or favored withdrawal of some or all troops, and nearly four out of 10 of those antiwar voters supported Lieberman. Lieberman had barely digested the food from his victory party before he spun 180 degrees and added his voice to the "surge" chorus.

The Lieberman spoiler

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 13:34:00 +0000

Alan Schlesinger thinks of himself as a piñata.

The Republican candidate for U.S. Senate from Connecticut feels like a papier-mâché punching bag, he says, because of the abuse he has taken from the media and his own party. The press has often acted as if he did not exist and the GOP leadership has treated him like a bombastic nut with no chance of winning.

Schlesinger is running against Democrat Ned Lamont and Democrat-turned-independent Joe Lieberman, the incumbent. Schlesinger gets angry sometimes, he says, when he thinks about the way President Bush "basically gave a wink and a nod for the big money to go out and support Lieberman." He also got angry when the state party publicly called on him to withdraw from the race over allegations of erratic behavior at our nation's fine gambling establishments. "I was thrown under the bus," he gripes. "That's what made fundraising so difficult."

And he gets mad at the media, which has been covering something it calls "the Lieberman-Lamont race," usually because it's just too exhausting to type in a long third name with three syllables for a candidate pulling about 3 percent in the polls.

Unfamiliar taste of victory

Wed, 09 Aug 2006 12:24:00 +0000

At a certain point, amid the chanting and confetti throwing and the unambiguous, surging happiness on the faces of Ned Lamont supporters late Tuesday night in a Meriden hotel, I saw a certain appetite. Like hikers who'd been lost in the mountains, these people were being led down to their first real meal in a long time. They were hungry and grateful and a little overwhelmed.

They had beaten (for the moment) incumbent U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, and the banquet spread before them had been so long in coming it was almost too good to be true.

Whether it was peace activist Flo Woodiel or gay and lesbian activist Shawn Lang or Hartford arts leader Will K. Wilkins, they said the same thing to me, in nearly identical words.

"I haven't been on the winning side for a long time."

Or, as Lang put it, "There was the Red Sox in 2004. And now there's this."

In the room were people who had believed in Ted Kennedy in 1980 and Jesse Jackson in 1988 and Jerry Brown in 1992 and Nomar Garciaparra in 2003. They had supported Democratic challengers against former Connecticut Gov. John Rowland and lost to him three times. They had lined up for Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, and what did they have to show for it?

How Joe went wrong

Mon, 31 Jul 2006 13:25:00 +0000

On Sunday, the two most influential newspapers in Connecticut issued endorsements in the Democratic primary race between U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman and Greenwich businessman Ned Lamont.

The Hartford Courant offered a tepid endorsement of the incumbent, arguing that since the war is only one issue and Lieberman votes with his party 90 percent of the time, there isn't enough reason to turn him out of office.

What the New York Times said, on the other hand, was momentous. The editors endorsed Ned Lamont, accusing Joe Lieberman not just of shilling for George Bush's war, but of providing Bush cover for his abridgement of civil liberties and expansion of presidential power. Whatever momentum Lieberman might've gained from Bill Clinton's recent drive-by in Waterbury had been slowed with a few sharp words from the paper of record.

But newspaper endorsements have a notoriously iffy impact on political races. Though they can be used to good effect in advertising, it's tough to find a voter who will admit to having been swayed by an editorial. Besides, both papers emphasized Lieberman's support for the Iraq war, which I think misses the point. The reasons for Connecticut's disenchantment with its junior senator long predate the invasion of Iraq or that kiss on the cheek from George Bush or even his strange crush on the whole Bush administration. Lieberman and his home state Democrats have been slogging for years through a troubled marriage, a slow, painful breakup straight out of an Ingmar Bergman movie. Indulge me in a little history.

Why is Bill Clinton in Connecticut?

Mon, 24 Jul 2006 13:45:00 +0000

"They're desperate. They're losing," Rep. Maxine Waters told me on Saturday. The California Democrat was 3,000 miles from home in Hartford, Conn., at Ned Lamont for Senate headquarters in the black neighborhood known as the North End. By "they" she meant the Joe Lieberman campaign.

Waters had just spent the day storming through the state, even knocking on doors, trying to persuade people to vote for Lamont, a white Greenwich millionaire she'd probably never heard of a few weeks ago. Even so, she can see in him great virtues, chief among them the fact that he is not Joe Lieberman. Lieberman and the very liberal Waters have been at it since at least 1995, when he chaired the centrist Democratic Leadership Council and spoke in favor of California's anti-affirmative-action initiative. Waters would probably campaign for an attractive Ikea wall unit if it were running against Lieberman.

But as a campaigner, Waters can't hold a candle to America's greatest living "black" politician, who will make his own trip to Connecticut Monday afternoon, except he'll be working for the other side. William Jefferson Clinton will appear at a rally in Waterbury on behalf of Lieberman, in hopes of rescuing the incumbent senator's foundering reelection bid.