Connecticut campaign

Lots of us have been following Ned Lamont's challenge of incumbent Joe Lieberman's Connecticut Senate seat with a great deal of interest. Lieberman, often referred to as Bush's favourite Democrat, is in danger of losing and has hinted broadly that he may run as an independent. Lamont, on the other hand, has pledged to support Joe if he wins. Joe appears to be running scared and many observers see his strange attack ad as an example of his desperation. Paul Bass in the New Haven Independent sees it as positively Rovian.

The new ad brings another modern Beltway campaign attack mode to Connecticut: Bush adviser Karl Rove's strategy of taking your own weakness and turning it into your opponent's weakness instead, through relentless misrepresentation of facts.

Rove's strategy first appeared in the 2004 presidential election. Democrat John Kerry was a war hero. George Bush was a National Guard dodger. Through a front group, the Bush team, fueled by corporate campaign contributions, unleased a torrent of commercials and other attacks portraying Kerry as the war shirker, through a disinformation campaign about the "Swift Boat" episode.

In this case, Lieberman, who has raised more than twice Lamont's money because of his ties to corporate special interests, has used a similar strategy in addressing his chief weakness in a Democratic primary: that he sides with right-wing Republicans on the issues most important to Connecticut Democrats these days, such as the Iraq war, civil liberties, the right to dissent, appointees like Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, gay marriage, and the Bush-Cheney energy bill. On all those issues, as well as universal health care and tax policy toward the wealthy, Lamont is squarely in the camp of the Democratic opposition.

So the Lieberman team has pursued a strategy of relentlessly labeling Lamont the Republican. Why? Because 12 years ago, as a Greenwich selectman, he and other Democrats voted alongside Republicans on some non-ideological town issues. The Lieberman has further portrayed Lamont as anti-schoolchildren and anti-health care. The basis for that: He voted for a final budget that cut a requested health department budget increase from 12 to 6 percent. He voted against a $35 million school renovation project that included an asbestos clean-up because he wanted an independent audit. And he joined a unanimous vote to require top-level school administrators to pay the same increase in health care expenses as unionized town employees.

Lieberman himself called for an end to such old-record-twisting character-assassination ads in his book In Praise of Public Life. He wrote that in 2000, when he didn't have a serious challenger to his Senate seat.

For the back-and-forth between the Lamont and Lieberman campaign team on the ethics and accuracy of the new ad, click here to read Mark Pazniokis's account in the Courant.

Whether Lieberman's ads succeed will signal how much politics is changing -- whether corporate-financed, Beltway-style puerile attack ads, the kind Lieberman himself criticized in a 2000 book, can still silence debate and pound out of contention challengers to incumbents.

About Lieberman's ads, the Manchester Journal-Inquirer (a conservative newspaper more aligned with Lieberman's than Lamont's views) recently editorialized: "The whole point of being Joe Lieberman used to be decency, dignity, and thoughtfulness. Lieberman's attack ads look like the appeals of just another sleazy, desperate pol, grasping madly to hold on to office."