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I'm not sure when I first heard/read about Ned Lamont, but I'm certain it was on one of Jane’s posts, months and months before anyone else was paying attention to Lieberman or the possibility that he might be challenged in the Democratic primary. I’m a little slow, so it took me a while to figure out that Jane knew exactly what she was doing and that the key to the Democrat’s chances in the mid-term elections might very well depend on what happened to Joe Lieberman. How did she know that?

Part of the problem was that my initial reactions to Jane, who I first read over at HuffPo, were so negative; I think I left several pretty nasty comments over there, complaining about how timid and bland she was and urging her to find a little humor and more colorful language if she wanted to get my attention. She's gotten a little better, I suppose.

I moved over to Firedoglake to watch her progress. And Jane was persistent. She kept telling us that this was important, that what Joe did mattered, and that even if we couldn't beat an entrenched incumbent with huge, insurmountable advantages, we still had to make the effort, to send a message, to make the Joe Liebermans of the world work harder if they wanted to represent us.

There were lots of reasons to distrust Joe, like his positions on Plan B and social security, but the big issue was the war. It was everything about Joe's war: how we got there and Joe's sponsorship of the Authorization for Use of Military Force, his unwillingness to acknowledge the lies that led us to war, his defense of Bush and his criticisms of any Democrat who challenged Bush and the war. For me, it was also his inability to see that the evil hatred he saw in the "enemy" was lurking in his own heart. Jane's focus on Lieberman made us look closer and when we did, the "nice guy" and "good friend" and "loyal Democrat" veils that Joe always wore all fell away. What was left was not pretty.

But if Joe was unacceptable, who was this guy Ned Lamont? I remember some of Jane's earliest writings about Ned. She described this intelligent guy, a new candidate she’d met. He seemed progressive, had some good ideas, and was appalled by the war and the positions Lieberman was taking. But there was something else: she described a genuine "Mr. Smith"; and in our cynical world, there aren’t supposed to be any genuine Mr. Smiths. They were ridiculed out of politics decades ago. Okay, I said, I'll accept the fact that he opposes Lieberman on the war and just take the rest on loan for a while. Hope he does well. (I would later meet Ned – we all met Ned, many times, because he was always accessible to us. Jane was right: He is "Mr. Smith," and it only takes about 30 seconds after you meet him to figure that out. The contrast between this fundamentally decent man and the distorted creature described by the Lieberman campaign speaks volumes about the lack of integrity in Lieberman's campaign.– but that's getting ahead of the story.)

Jane was not going to let us cynics off that easily. In late 2005, she shamelessly used guilt to get me to do something. Why wasn't I talking to my Congresscritters? Writing letters and sending faxes? By now, I was a hooked firedog, and so, just to get the Lady off my back, I agreed to hook up with a bunch of DFH (darn fine heroines) activists and a couple others and go visit my Senators. That's when I met Selise and Kathryn from MA and this really strange person who said she was a minister – RevDeb. I had never done anything like this in my life, and now I knew why, although at first I thought Kathryn was probably rational. We sorta formed a little group and started doing these visits, pestering the staffs of our elected officials to do better and act more courageously and actually oppose the outrages in the Bush Administration instead of just whining.

From there it was just a short trip to Connecticut. When Jane finally said "come to Connecticut," in one of her July posts, we were already primed. The Massachusetts Irregulars began weekend visits to little towns in Connecticut – places like Willimantic, and Meriden and Middlefield – all to help the local Lamont supporters canvass their neighborhoods. Up until then, Connecticut was just the space for I-84 for getting between Massachusetts and New York, but now there were real places and real neighborhoods with nice people, and we met hundreds of them. I asked Selise for a stream of memories from that period:

Remembrances? Canvassing in the truly oppressive heat of july and aug.... meeting people at HQ (actually getting assigned as canvass or poll watching partners) who had come from out of town to volunteer for Ned after reading about him primarily on FDL. Jane’s generosity. Sullivans. The kiss float, all the CT bloggers and their great stories. Being told at campaign HQ that we were working to save lives and end the war. Meeting Trex, tommy yum, siun, jen, lisadawn82, gina, dab from CT, Sharon.... Staying up for hours talking with TRex and gina in Trex’s room at the sheriden. Pancakes and scrambled eggs at the breakfast places you found in Meriden. Meeting Ned’s family.

But mostly, canvassing and more canvassing. To my surprise, I found myself liking it. It's not often I have a reason to spend hours talking with complete strangers about what kind of country we want to have and about issues that matter most to us. I think we'd be a better country if we could do more of that.

If you’ve seen pictures of firepups in Connecticut, including those here, there's a good chance that either Selise or Kathryn or Deb took them or had them taken. I always liked the one of all of the Firedoglake gang with Gwen Ifill on the night that Ned appeared at the Gospelfest in New Haven, just before the primary. (Siun's bro took that one, I think.) It was a fun night and we were all in good spirits, because we knew we had a chance.

nedmagroup2.jpg From left to right: Kathryn, Selise, Scarecrow, Gwen Ifill, TRex, Siun, RevDeb, LisaDawn and Gina. The smaller picture at the top was taken just before the General election, when Ned came over to greet his campaign workers. He always did that.

RevDeb, of course, does her own blog, so when I asked her if she had pictures and memories of our canvassing for Lamont, she wrote this. Check it out for more stories and more pictures. More here.

And from Kathryn:

I vividly remember the people I met while going door-to-door getting out the vote. After asking if they were registered as Democrats and would they vote in the Primary, I would ask if there was anything they would like Ned to hear – and some would burst into tears, and tell me devastating stories, and plead with me to be sure and tell someone. I would tell the precinct captain and be confident that indeed someone would get back to them. I also met people who were shut out of the process altogether because they were felons. This is such an injustice – no one should lose their right to vote.

While standing at the Casimir Pulaski HS holding a Ned Lamont sign in November, I was talking to the guy holding the Joe Lieberman sign. He was for all the good guys on the Democratic slate, but not for Ned. So I asked him why Joe and not Ned? He said because Joe was against the war. Well, after a few synapses fried off, I asked him, "What will you do if Joe changes his mind and supports the war again?" And he said Joe would never do that.

Much has been written about the impact of Ned’s candidacy. We all know that Ned Lamont changed the mid-term elections. His primary victory shook the Democratic Party and woke them up. The war was not just something at the bottom of a long list of concerns; it was the issue. And Democrats could look George Bush and Karl Rove in the face and say, “this is wrong,” and we need to start thinking about getting out -- and win in the mid-terms. Ned’s victory liberated Democrats all over the country to talk about the war, and that liberation allowed Democrats who might never have had a chance, to win back the Senate and storm the House. The Democrats owe Ned Lamont, big time.

Jane had been right. She was "all Lieberman, all Lamont, all the time," and she took heat for that, but she was right. When the entire media and most of the progressive blogosphere showed up to cover primary night returns, I knew what Jane had done. And when she was forced to stand back from the campaign for posting the courageous darkblack metaphor, we all owed her a huge hug. The metaphor told us the truth. Joe Lieberman and his buddy Bill Clinton were lying about who they were and what they stood for.

I think all of us knew, deep down, that when Joe Lieberman announced the morning after Connecticut Democrats rejected him as their candidate that he would carry out his threat to run in the general as an "independent," Lamont was likely to lose. Still, we kept going down to Connecticut, and we spent the weekend before the election, still going door to door. We owed at least that to Ned. There had been half-hearted attempts to get Joe to bow out, to be a statesman, to accept the results and follow the rules. But we should not have been surprised when the man most identified with supporting the most lawless regime in our history announced that the rules did not apply to him, either. There are rules and there are rules, and even Nixon understood that when the results say you lost, you leave. But Lieberman, like Bush and Cheney, does not believe in those honored rules. Rules are nothing; entitlement is all.

I'll save further applause for Ned Lamont, and his wonderful family, for the next thread, but I want to say something about the Clintons. It's not clear that, once Joe determined to ignore the primary result, Ned ever had a strong chance of winning the general election. But if there was a chance, it rested with the Clintons. Loyalty to incumbents and old friendships required something from them, but it did not require Bill to become the most important campaigner for Joe Lieberman. And it certainly did not require him to say that the war didn't matter, that it was okay to vote for Joe because the war wasn't important. But he said it to protect his wife's still inexplicable Iraq position and her ability to raise campaign funds for the Presidency. In light of what the Lamont primary victory did for the Democratic Party, that statement must rank as the worst piece of political advice Democrats heard last year. But that is not the worst sin Hillary's "bad and evil" man committed in that campaign.

The worst sin occurred when Clinton told Larry King that Connecticut was fortunate that it didn’t matter whether they picked Democrat Lamont or Democrat Lieberman. That was either the dumbest political assessment ever made, or the most cynical. Ex-Democrat Lieberman now holds every Democratic Senator hostage; he holds the Iraq war resolutions hostage; he holds actions to prevent the next war with Iran hostage. In my book, enabling Lieberman to have that power over war and peace is unforgiveable. I will not forget.