Lamont Went From Zero to Favorite in 7 Months

Back 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 Vice 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 progressive political organizer in Connecticut, had just taken a leave of absence from his job to manage Lamont’s campaign, “which meant that three-fourths of the Democratic establishment was really hating me.”

Here was his candidate: earnest, unguarded, a little goofy, with a political resume that began and ended with town politics in Greenwich. Lamont’s statewide name recognition at that point was 4%, or as Swan put 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 percentage-point lead over Sen. Joe Lieberman, a three-term incumbent, among likely voters in the Democratic primary Tuesday.

His success has been driven by several factors, among them Democrats’ fury at Lieberman’s support of the war in Iraq; backing from progressive bloggers and other 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 Admiral 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 has told audiences he was unfamiliar with blogs or the satirical “Colbert Report” TV show because he was “not really a political junkie” before getting into the race.

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 does when he spots supporters.

Inexperience is a risk, but it has not hurt him in the primary, at least 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 Lamont’s 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 presently drives around the state.

“This man is politically calculating, there is no doubt about it,” she said.

Others see him as an opportunist, exploiting the rift over the war. John Olsen, president of the Connecticut AFL-CIO, which endorsed Lieberman, has known Lamont for more than 20 years and said he has always been interested in elected office.

“Ned’s not an aw-shucks kind of guy. He looked at the polling data and what it would cost. You could have taken anybody and they would be where he is now,” said Olsen, an outspoken critic of the war. “Ned didn’t have anything to lose except $4 million -- which, by the way, is not a big deal. If there’s a lesson to be learned, it’s listen, sometimes you gotta step up.”

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 gated communities and college campuses for cable television.

His wife, Annie, works long hours as a venture capitalist -- she earns more than Ned, 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 now 13, 14 and 19.

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

At night, he would devour back issues of Foreign Policy and volumes of political nonfiction; his wife guesses he has read four biographies of every American president.

Annie Lamont describes her husband as “completely hyper”; on family vacations, the Lamonts specialize in “seven-sport days,” beginning with a run at 6:30 a.m. They also make time to keep up with policy issues. After mornings of skiing, for example, they attended a four-day seminar on Islam at the Aspen Institute, his wife said.

When their daughter Emily was little -- say, 6 -- Lamont liked to grill her about major issues of the day. “I’d be reading the paper,” he said. “She’d come in and I’d say, ‘Hey, we’ve got a large deficit. We’re sending out troops to this war. What would President Lamont do?’ ”

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 the person 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 by the Lieberman campaign in January invented a 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% of the vote,” he said, “and they didn’t exist.”

In the most recent poll, released Thursday, 65% of Lamont’s supporters said their vote was mainly against Lieberman.

John Orman, a professor of politics at Fairfield University, spent much of last summer running as a progressive candidate, and “after five months, I looked around. Joe had $4 million and I had $1,000.” The Lieberman campaign paid him little attention. “I was like a mosquito,” Orman said.

It was around that time he got a call from Lamont. When Orman explained the fundraising challenge, “he said, ‘That’s no problem.’ I sort of laughed.”

Orman was perplexed -- who was this guy? -- but he passed along this advice: Hire Tom Swan, who was then the director of the Connecticut Citizen Action Group; get Connecticut bloggers on your side; connect with the more active Deaniacs, and “you could possibly pull off the most incredible upset in Connecticut history.”

Swan met with Lamont and his wife early in December.

“He was very earnest, very smart. He had very good values,” Swan said. “And he was not political. He didn’t couch what he said. He didn’t initially have a full understanding of what it would take to do something like this. Having said that, he walked away, and I was surprised how much I liked him.”

Among the challenges they 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 advisor 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 Starbucks crowd,” wealthy and highly educated voters, and then spread down the socioeconomic ladder, according to Douglas Schwartz, Quinnipiac University’s poll director.

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. Teresa Barton recalls inducing 16 people to attend a February event in Killingly, in the rural northeast corner of the state; at that single event, she said, Lamont won the votes of six Democratic Party delegates.

By May, when the delegates convened to nominate a candidate for the Senate, Lamont had 505 delegates, a third of the total number, and twice as many as he needed to force a primary race.

On the stump, Lamont hammers away at a range of issues -- universal healthcare, 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?”

When people ask about experience -- could he save jobs in a military shipyard, as Lieberman did? -- he responds by advocating the return of “citizen-legislators” over career politicians.

“In my opinion, he’s amazing,” said Orman, who is not affiliated with the campaign. “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 Duffy of the Cook Political Report refers to as “the pivot,” and it often requires candidates to reposition themselves toward the political center.

If Lieberman loses, he plans to run as an independent, 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,” his campaign manager, “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 advisor 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.”