"Populist" millionaire is poised to beat Lieberman

BRIDGEPORT, Conn. — In January, when cable-television executive Ned Lamont held the event billed as his political coming-out party, one of the first to arrive was the mayor of Hartford, Eddie Perez — who stayed just long enough to tell him to get out of the race.

Standing before a small audience, Lamont said he felt a little like Adm. James Stockdale, Ross Perot's running mate, who introduced himself at the 1992 vice-presidential debate by saying, "Who am I, and why am I here?" It was a shaky analogy for Lamont; Stockdale's awkward performance made him material for late-night comedians.

Tom Swan, sitting in the audience, felt his heart fall into his stomach.

Swan, a veteran political organizer in Connecticut, had just agreed to manage Lamont's campaign, which, he said, "meant that three-fourths of the Democratic establishment was really hating me."

Here was his candidate: earnest, unguarded, a little goofy, with a political résumé that began and ended with town politics in Greenwich. Lamont's statewide name recognition at that point was 4 percent — or as Swan puts it, wryly, "within the statistical margin of error."

Seven months later, Lamont is poised to pull off the biggest upset in the state's political history. A recent poll shows he has a 13-point lead over Sen. Joe Lieberman, a three-term incumbent, among likely voters in Tuesday's Democratic primary.

His success has been driven by several factors, among them Democrats' fury at Lieberman's support of the war in Iraq; support from bloggers and other progressive activists; and Lamont's personal fortune, which allowed him to enter the race when others could not.

Lamont, 52, still comes off as inexperienced, but voters associate him with Jimmy Stewart, not Stockdale. In his broadsides against the war, he has referred to it as "this pickle we're in," and said it "really got my goat." He tells audiences that he was unfamiliar with blogs or "The Colbert Report" because he was "not really a political junkie" before getting into the race.

Inexperience can be asset

He lacks the ease of a seasoned campaigner; it is hard to imagine him blowing kisses, or holding a soulful hand over his heart, as Lieberman, 62, does when he spots supporters at campaign events.

Inexperience is a risk, but it has not hurt him in the primary, if you ask Cynthia Goetz, a nurse-midwife who raised her hand at a recent campaign stop to ask Lamont about his stance on gay marriage.

He got, she said, "a deer-in-the-headlights look," as if he didn't confront that issue very often. But then Goetz, 56, thought a little more, and said the look helped convince her. It means, she said, "that he's new; that he's unschooled. He's still very honest. He's not burnished yet." Yes, she would vote for him. "It's time for something new."

Lieberman's supporters see him differently. From the first, they have emphasized Lamont's wealth, an estimated $200 million, which has made it possible for him to function independently of the Democratic power structure. Lieberman spokeswoman Marion Steinfels points to his membership in an exclusive Greenwich country club, from which he resigned at the beginning of the campaign, and his swapping of a Lexus convertible for the hybrid he now drives around the state.

"This man is politically calculating; there is no doubt about it," she said.

Until January, when he made the final decision to run, Lamont spent his days in the offices of the company he founded, Lamont Digital Systems, which wires college campuses and gated communities for cable television.

His wife, Annie, works long hours as a venture capitalist — she earns more than Ned from her job, she said — and the two "made a deal early on" that one of them would be home in the evenings when their three children were growing up. Their children — two girls and a boy — are 13, 14 and 19.

"A lot of politics is evening work," Lamont said. "When my son was born, that was time for me to be able to spend a little time at home."

A vote against Lieberman

Lamont spent much of last year trying to recruit an established Democrat to run against Lieberman. He won't say whom he lobbied, but he will say that they refused, because, "They didn't like primaries, or they didn't want to rock the boat." Although he thought he would make a pretty good candidate, he said, "I wasn't the first guy who came to my mind."

Democrats' views on the war were already weighing in favor of a challenger: A poll done by the Lieberman campaign in January invented a mythical candidate who opposed the war and "felt the country needed a change," said Carter Eskew, Lieberman's media strategist. Among likely primary voters, 'that person got 45 percent of the vote," he said, "and they didn't exist."

In the most recent poll, released Aug. 3, 65 percent of Lamont's supporters said their vote was mainly against Lieberman.

Among the challenges Lamont faced was a cold shoulder from established Democrats, who were unwilling to challenge Lieberman. During early months of the campaign, "We had trouble finding law firms in Connecticut who would work with us. We had trouble finding accountants," Annie Lamont said.

Anyone joining the campaign was taking "a tremendous risk," said Gary Collins, a former assistant U.S. attorney who works as a senior adviser in the campaign. Donors would say, apologetically, that they could not risk having their names appear on campaign finance reports.

"In terms of, you know, the pollsters and media guys, we were kryptonite," Lamont said. "That's OK. I didn't need 'em, and frankly, I didn't want 'em."

Support for Lamont began to build with the so-called "Starbucks crowd," wealthy and highly educated voters, and then spread down the socioeconomic ladder, said Douglas Schwartz, Quinnipiac University's poll director.

Campaign manager Swan tapped into a robust network of progressive voters. If Democrats in the larger cities felt ties to Lieberman, their small-town counterparts did not, and Lamont visited town after town after town.

On the stump, Lamont hammers away at a range of issues — universal health care, abolishing No Child Left Behind, weaning the country off hydrocarbons — but circles back to the war.

"It's so important that we take the American face off this occupation," he said, at a recent stop in Killingworth. "What we're doing now is not working. I think our troops have done everything we've asked them to do. To me, the war in Iraq is a defining issue in our country. I talk to young people, and they're asking what kind of country we are. How much do we compromise in the name of this war, and do we compromise our values along the way?"

Looking past the primary

"In my opinion, he's amazing," said John Orman, a professor of politics at Fairfield University. "He's a Greenwich multimillionaire. We've got a battle between a millionaire and a multimillionaire, and the multimillionaire is coming off as the populist."

If Lamont wins the primary Tuesday, he will begin to address that message to a much broader audience. That is the moment that Jennifer Cook, of the Cook Political Report, refers to as "the pivot," and it often requires candidates to reposition themselves toward the political center. Lieberman plans to run as an independent if he loses the primary, and a July 20 poll from Quinnipiac University showed Lieberman winning in a three-way race.

Lamont, though, shows no signs of repackaging himself.

"My deal with Swan is he handles the politics. He won't even tell me what the polls say. I don't really want to know," Lamont said. If he has learned one thing in the race, he said, it is that "the media and politicians don't understand the wisdom of the American people."

And by now, after watching "the world ... turned upside down in seven months," even the handlers are keeping their hands off, said Collins, the senior adviser to the campaign.

"His credibility is that he's unique. He's genuine," Collins said. "It's almost like tinkering with a beautiful grandfather clock. You can do a lot of damage by tinkering with it too much."