In case you’ve been away or haven’t been reading your Ledger lately, there is a primary election for Democrats in Connecticut coming up in a few days. You need to vote on Aug. 8 if you want to participate. Who represents the Democratic Party as its nominee to run for the U.S. Senate is what’s at stake, and pollsters are saying that challenger Ned Lamont has a good chance of winning-or more to the point, Sen. Joseph Lieberman has a good chance of not winning.
We’re not happy with the way this campaign has gone.
Connecticut’s Jewish newspaper naturally has its own perspective on every election, and we take seriously our job of defining the candidates’ positions on issues that are important to Jewish readers and voters. We realize of course that elections aren’t all about Israel-we’d be shortsighted to think that-but this is the issue that we focus on and the one we’ll continue to watch throughout the elected senator’s tenure.
Because Joe Lieberman has been senator for 18 years, his views on Israel are well-known, and a long record that speaks to his positions. Mr. Lamont, however, posts his views on his website, and we found them ambiguous. We tried to reach him last week so that we could get a better idea of where he stood, and didn’t succeed. The Jewish Ledger might not be on the top of his media call-back list, but when it comes to Israel, he is at the top of ours. As a Lamont adviser said when we were asking for some clarification earlier in the campaign, “Everyone knows that the Ledger has been taken over by the Orthodox,” whatever that means. Lamont did talk to us by phone once early in the campaign, and we thought then and have no reason to think otherwise now, that his views weren’t fully formulated on most topics except for the war. So in writing the article about where the candidates stand on Israel, which we published last week, we had to depend on the innocuous stuff on his website. That’s not good enough.
The Ledger doesn’t endorse candidates, but we do try to focus them on issues that we feel are important to our community, and we generally let their words speak for themselves. For Mr. Lamont, the grade on his performance on our issues is at best “incomplete.”
We have some other problems with the Lamont candidacy as well.
First there is the issue of the people behind the Lamont campaign. When people like Maxine Waters and Rose Mary Kaptur come into Connecticut to campaign against its sitting U.S. senator in their own party and their former vice presidential candidate, it is worthy of note.(after publication of this article it was announced that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton were coming in to campaign for Lamont) The animus towards one of their own has to be pretty high to merit that kind of attention in a primary, but more disturbing is that both of these ladies have not been notablu unfriendly towards Israel during their careers in the House of Representatives.
MoveOn.org‘s anti-war stance is well known, but the rallies they’re involved in often appear to be as much anti-Israel as they are against the war in Iraq. Also, one of Lamont’s most ardent supporters is Markos Moulitsas, and his blog, the Daily Kos. Their uncritical and wholehearted promotion and support of anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan, who goes around the country saying, “My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel,” makes us uncomfortable. In another time and place, a Lamont would be distancing himself from this kind of help instead of countenancing it.
And mostly, we’re concerned with the way some significant things we care about have been finessed. One of them is the news that Ned Lamont and his family were longstanding members of a Greenwich country club that had few if any Jewish members and resigned only when he decided to run for office. The New York Times, which chose to endorse his candidacy and has much access to him, glossed over this story, but we feel that the explanation of his resignation, which was that he did it so that it wouldn’t distract from his candidacy, is not good enough. If the club was restricted either in fact or by its rules, we’d like to know. And we’d also like to know why he didn’t leave it long before he decided to run for office. For the record, we believe people are free to associate exclusively with anyone they’d like to, but that is not what this is about. Dissembling on this kind of issue is unseemly.
Sen. Lieberman is a great campaigner, but his strategy and planning for this contest hasn’t reflected that. The primary has turned out to be a one-issue campaign, and that poorly serves the voters of Connecticut. This is the first contest where Joe has been seriously challenged, and the lack of urgency evident early in his campaign is being felt now.
Ned Lamont started this race way behind, but by making full use of the internet and mixing it with the energy of the anti-war sentiment in the Democratic Party, he’s been able to capture a momentum that has carried him to a small lead in the polls. The whole campaign has felt like Lamont trying to win it while Joe is trying not to lose. This is most evident with Lamont reaching out to constituencies that don’t normally vote in the Democratic Primary while Lieberman is trying to energize a traditional base that still isn’t concerned or listening.
If there is a general election with both Lieberman and Lamont on the ballot, a contest that will include mostly unknown Republican Alan Schlesinger, we hope it turns into something more than what we’ve seen in this primary. Both Lieberman and Lamont should be able to articulate their views on a broad range of issues. Mr. Lamont’s one-issue candidacy can’t be allowed to dominate the election.
During the next few months, the Ledger will try to get the candidates to focus on what our readers believe is important, and we, for our part, will strive to understand where each of them really are on these issues.
–nrg

Comments are closed.