On Ned Lamont
Last Saturday, the news rolled across the blogosphere that the New York Times had endorsed Ned Lamont over Joseph Lieberman for the Democratic Primary in the Connecticut Senate race. Strangely I read the editorial in the honest-to-gosh print edition, having a copy of the print edition of the New York Times in my hand before I washed ashore online Sunday. In case you missed it, this is the totality of their case for Ned Lamont, as aside from the case against Joseph Lieberman:
I hear someone from the peanut gallery (albeit a really well-off and wealthy peanut gallery) shouting “Hey! I’m Someone Else!”
A spin through the New York Times archives shows that Ned Lamont was mentioned in the newspaper twice during the twentieth century, with just as much broadband. Case in point, January 30, 1983:
With about 125,000 households in the 10 towns in the area, Cablevision of Connecticut is hoping to sign up about every other household, said Ned Lamont, project director for Cablevision Systems. “As has been the case elsewhere, movies and sports are the mainstay of the services requested,” Mr. Lamont said.
The next town to be serviced will be Greenwich, starting in March or April, and all 10 towns are due to be wired by the summer of 1984, he said.
I don’t know what my point there is, precisely. Stick quote-marks around “cable television” and preface it with “so-called”, by way of explanation. But apparently Lieberman commissioned a poll at the dawn of the year to see how he would fair in a hypothetical primary match-up with a “Democratic candidate who opposed the war and was critical of the Bush Administration”. The poll came back 50-50. There’s a propensity to overthink these things. Who is Ned Lamont? A man who looks as though he can play give and take in a legislature and whose views better match your own on some very crucial issues than does Joseph Lieberman. Isn’t that enough?