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http://www.newhavenindependent.org/archives/2006/06/lieberman_lies.phpHe did it with this new attack flyer mailed to Democratic voters.
Joe Lieberman's reelection campaign for U.S. Senate has already been widely criticized, even by conservatives sympathetic to the candidate, for its low-grade attack tactics on Ned Lamont, the challenger seeking to wrest the Democratic Party nomination from the three-term senator in an Aug. 8 primary. In terms of outright lying, gutter graphics, and utterly misleading twisting of fact, the Lieberman campaign may have hit a new Rove-ian/Atwater-ian milestone with the two-sided glossy direct-mail flyer which Democratic voters in Connecticut started receiving at their homes on Saturday. It was the second glossy direct-mailer the Lieberman campaign sent within a week.
The Lie
"Ask Ned Lamont Why..." the back page begins.
One of the "ask whys" read as follows: "... He Hired The Former Republican Party Chairman To Run His Senate Campaign."
Not true. Connecticut's leading left-leaning Democratic Party activist, Tom Swan, runs the Ned Lamont campaign.
The flyer is referring to someone else, Tom D'Amore. D'Amore ran the state Republican Party in the 1980s. He quit in 1990 to help Lowell Weicker defeat the Republicans and win the governor's office as an independent. D'Amore is a registered independent.
He in no way "runs" the Lamont campaign. The Lamont campaign did hire his firm, Doyle, D'Amore & Balducci (the third named partner being the former Democratic speaker of the Connecticut House of Representatives), to do consulting work.
The Lieberman flyer cites me as a source for this lie: "Source: Paul Bass column, Hartford Courant, 3/26/06."
Actually, my column in the Courant reported that D'Amore had signed on as a consultant, not that he would "run" or "manage" or in any way direct the campaign. (Apologies: That particular column, and an earlier, March 5, one on D'Amore and Lamont are no longer available on the Courant's web site.)
The relevant point is that nowhere was it ever reported that D'Amore would run the campaign. That's a crucial distinction. Lieberman is trying to fight back against the Lamont campaign's argument that based on his support of the agenda of President Bush and right-wing Republicans in Washington on key issues, Lieberman isn't a true Democrat. So it has tried to portray Lamont -- who, in direct contrast to Lieberman, is running against Iraq war, against Lieberman-supported Bush nominees like U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, against the Bush-Cheney energy bill, for universal health care -- as the Republican in the race.
As is widely and publicly known, Lamont's campaign manager, the person who works full-time running every aspect of the effort day to day and is in charge of strategy, is Swan. He's on leave from his regular job as director of the state's leading liberal advocacy organization at the Capitol, the Connecticut Citizen Action Group.
"For the record," Swan said Monday, "I have never been chairman of the state Republican Party." SNIP Sounds like Lieberman has been nursing ideas from Karl Rove. And great retort by Tom Swan, Lamont's campaign manager.
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