ned lamont: principled antiwar candidate or opportunistic high-class phony?

I can't stand Senator Joe Lieberman. He's your typical liberal eastern establishment political elite, but worse. Worse because this gun-grabbing little weasel is a neocon hawk on foreign policy, endorsing every step toward global conquest made by the Bush administration. So at first I was heartened to see his opponent in the Connecticut primary, the super rich Ned Lamont, beating him in the polls. Lamont, you see, has made his opposition to the Iraq war a cornerstone of his platform. What could be better than to see Joe Loserman get booted out on his ass by an antiwar candidate? But then I began to look into this Lamont character, and I fear he may not be what he seems.

First of all, make no mistake - the Phillip Exeter/Harvard/Yale educated Lamont is another socialist eastern establishment elite, even more socialist than Lieberman in some ways. But even if we ignore all that, can he really be trusted to provide any real resistance to the neocon effort at global hegemony? As much as a single senator from Connecticut can do, anyway?

Lamont never held any office higher than city councilman in Greenich, CT. In general, I view that as a good thing, but how did he get the momentum to get where he is in the polls today? He failed his one bid to run for state senator in 1990. It seems odd that all of the sudden he's providing such a strong challenge to Lieberman. Are there forces behind the scenes with an agenda unknown to us? Talk of a three-way race, with Lieberman running as an independent should he lose the Democratic nomination make such speculation more confusing...and intriguing.

It's all seems eerily similar to the Howard Dean run for the presidential nomination. Dean was somebody the antiwar liberals latched onto as their great white hope. Alas, this Yalie was a nothing but a high-class phony. Dean certainly didn't have a great anti-war track record. In 1995, for example, he urged President Clinton to take take unilateral action in Bosnia against the Serbs. And we haven't heard him say anything against the Iraq war, or proposed attacks on Iran, since his failed presidential bid. It seems like he was raised up as a magnet to attract the liberal antiwar crowd, then he was quickly shot down, with his followers mostly switching to the status-quo Kerry, whom Dean endorsed.

And whether Lamont is sincere, I don't know. This whole post is mere speculation with no real evidence with which to draw any conclusions. It just seems like somebody cut from the same cloth as Bush, Kerry, and Dean isn't likely to change things for the better. That said, I hope he beats Lieberman and proves me wrong. As to whether or not he wins, we should know soon!