The Morning After The Debate, Lieberman's Debate Charge That Lamont Is A Closet Republican: Dubious
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The Morning After The Debate, Lieberman’s Debate Charge That Lamont Is A Closet Republican: Dubious
July 8, 2006
By CHRISTOPHER KEATING And DAVID LIGHTMAN, Courant Staff Writers
As incumbent Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman tells it, his Democratic primary opponent, Ned Lamont, is a closet Republican.
As Lamont tells it, Lieberman is an ineffectual legislator who fails to bring home a fair share of federal largesse.
Those were among the broadsides leveled by the two opponents during their first and only face-to-face televised debate leading up to the Aug. 8 primary for the U.S. Senate nomination.
Neither accusation held up well under next-day scrutiny.
Lieberman repeatedly tried to paint Lamont with a Republican brush, saying he voted consistently with the Republicans more than 15 years ago as the only Democrat on the three-member Greenwich board of selectmen.
But Greenwich Republicans do not consider Lamont to be one of their own.
Lamont was never known for intense partisanship in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a selectman and then as a finance board member, the Republicans say, where votes were on strictly local issues, rather than hot-button topics such as Iraq, abortion or the death penalty.
“Most of the stuff we dealt with was the mundane stuff – parking signs, roads,” said Republican John B. Margenot, who served as first selectman when Lamont was on the board. “There were no Democratic principles involved or Republican principles. I think it’s kind of spurious that Lieberman raises the issue. It’s a non-issue.”
When asked if he viewed Lamont as a Republican, Margenot replied, “No, I wouldn’t think that at all. He was more like a liberal Democrat.”
Despite being labeled a “Greenwich millionaire” by Lieberman, Lamont is not known for flashing his wealth, does not live in one of the biggest houses in town and is known simply as just another neighbor in Greenwich, Republicans said.
Sam Romeo, a longtime Greenwich Republican who served as campaign manager for then-Sen. Emil “Bennie” Benvenuto in the 1990 state Senate contest against Lamont, termed Lieberman’s characterization “a little misleading” because the local boards often operate on a bipartisan basis.
“It’s about running the town of Greenwich,” Romeo said Friday. “Greenwich is in its own world down here in the way we run things. It has nothing to do with politics, really.”
Republican Chris Antonik, a former elected member of the town’s representative town meeting and a current member of the Republican town committee, said, “Ned was a Democrat. I never even recall him acting like a Republican. He’s not a Republican.”
Lanny Davis, a longtime friend of Lieberman’s since their undergraduate days together at Yale University, said Lieberman was intentionally aggressive in the debate to blunt what the Senator considers a distortion of his own record. Davis harshly described Lamont as “a bogus Democrat without a record” in public life.
“The suggestion that Joe Lieberman is flanked on the left by Ned Lamont is a joke,” said Davis, a former special counsel for President Bill Clinton.
In a television commercial that debuted Friday night, Lieberman’s campaign continued airing the charge that Lamont agreed with Greenwich Republicans 80 percent of the time, an estimate based upon a front-page article in the Greenwich Time newspaper on May 30, 1989, in which Lamont defended a series of votes he took in opposition to the board majority.
For his part, Lamont claimed in their debate that Lieberman does a poor job bringing home the federal bacon, charging that Connecticut ranks 49th in that category, trailing only New Jersey.
But trying to figure out whether Connecticut gets a generous or skimpy amount of money from the federal government is difficult – and it’s easy to make either argument.
This much is clear: “The factors that drive federal spending are largely beyond any individual’s control,” said Matt Kane, economist for the Northeast-Midwest Institute, a Washington research group.
Much of the federal money going to states depends on formulas. A state with a less wealthy population, for instance, could get more funds from social programs designed to help the poor. A state with a disproportionate share of elderly residents would benefit more from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid payments.
Not even a president has a great impact on spending. In 2000, the year before President Bush took office, Texas ranked 36th in federal spending received per dollar of tax that residents paid. That ranking has not changed.
By that measure, Connecticut ranks 49th, about the same place it’s been since the early 1990s, according to data from the Tax Foundation, a Washington research group.
But that figure masks some positive news about Connecticut’s federal money. In 2004, the last year data are available, Connecticut got about $30.3 billion from Washington, placing it a healthy eighth in federal spending per capita. About one-third came from defense-related items and other procurement, and $7.8 billion involved retirement and disability payments.
At the same time, because the state is unusually wealthy, it had the highest per capita federal tax burden in the nation. As a result, the state got 66 cents back for every dollar it paid, and hence its place in the 49th spot.
Contact Christopher Keating at ckeating@courant.com.