It’s a Monday afternoon and politics professor John Orman is doing some investigating. Five months after ending his second campaign for public office, he’s now digging up dirt on Ned Lamont. The millionaire businessman from Greenwich has assumed Orman’s place as the liberal Democrat attempting to un-seat Senator Joseph Lieberman in this summer’s primary.
His goal is to find a list of campaign donations given by Lamont, because rumor has it Lamont snubbed the Fairfield politics professor in favor of Lieberman last spring, donating $500 to the centrist Senator instead of the maverick professor.
After surfing the net for about a minute, he comes across the list and is happy to see that, though Lamont did donate to Lieberman, it was in February, before Orman entered the race. One might expect then, that with no personal grudge against Lamont, Orman would gleefully jump on the Lamont bandwagon and do anything he could to accomplish the goal he set out for nearly a year ago: to get Lieberman out of the Senate.
But that would be way too by-the-books for Orman, who has, among other endeavors, performed standup comedy at the Acoustic Café in Bridgeport and faced off against a guy named “Guts” in a hip-hop contest.
For now, Orman sees the race that he was forced to drop out of in September, when he could no longer afford the gas necessary to travel the state, as a face-off between two millionaires who, despite liberal track records, could care less about everyday people like him.
Orman, who ran quite unsuccessfully for Congress in 1984 (he managed just 30 percent of the vote against incumbent Rep. Stuart McKinney), is far from your ordinary politician. In fact, he isn’t a politician at all. But his status as a two-time Congressional candidate has given him all the material he needs to be the funniest professor on campus.
“I think he really lightens the mood for class,” says Steve Teti ’07, a student in Orman’s American Politics class. “The presentation of that kind of material can be a little divisive, so by making jokes it works to break the ice.”
What is Teti’s favorite Orman story?
“The one about Ronald Reagan coming to Fairfield to campaign against him.”
Good choice.
That would be the one in which Reagan, himself up for re-election against former Vice President Walter Mondale, was honored by thousands of local Republicans at a rally in front of the town hall. The rally, as Orman explains, was open to the public. So he did what any politically involved citizen would do: he showed up and handed out “Orman for Congress” literature. This action was much to the dismay of the partisans in attendance, some of whom were campaign operatives of former Connecticut Gov. John Rowland, who is currently in prison for accepting bribes from contractors but was then a congressional candidate in a neighbooring district.
“Some of the Republican activists were tough guys,” Orman says. “Some of the people who worked for Rowland really got upset, and they started tearing my literature up and hitting me with signs and stuff.”
There are, without exaggerating, enough tales from the campaign trail to fill a book, and one day, given Orman’s status as an author and political commentator, he may want to file them away in his memoirs. But none, including the Reagan story, tops the one about the infamous fundraiser he held during his first campaign. This story proves exactly why he is so beloved by students and exactly why he has never won an election.
“Dr. [Kevin] Cassidy and his wife threw a fundraiser for me at their house,” Orman explains. “We were calling for campaign spending limits, getting big money out of politics, and we came up with an idea to have a fundraiser, invite all the media and show them what was wrong with big money politics.
“So it was a dollar to get in and Native Americans got in for free, women got in for 52 cents because they made 52 cents for every dollar men made and African-Americans got in for a quarter. We thought we’d made our point, and in the next day in the papers, the newspaper headline said “Orman raises 27 dollars at a fundraiser.”
Twenty-two years, two failed campaigns and a hip-hop contest later, the professor still has the same smile and shoot-from-the-hip style that led him to the Democratic nomination in ’84. Now though, regardless of what happens in Connecticut’s battle of the millionaires for senate, he’s more than happy to sit back, relax and try out his comedy routine on unsuspecting politics students.
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