Most people who have been following this year’s election season know that the Connecticut senate race is among the most competitive and confusing. What they may not be able to tell you, however, is that it all started with Fairfield University politics professor.
Dr. John Orman originally tried to take down political giant Joe Lieberman in March of 2005. He was forced to drop out of the race just six months later in September because of a lack of financial resources.
It wasn’t that Orman was particularly bad at asking people for their support, although he will tell you now that he was. After six months of campaigning he had only raised a total of $1,000 dollars, which he says is less than he had spent on gas.
The bigger problem was that he was stuck in a catch-22.
To get the money necessary to seriously challenge Lieberman he needed support from local organizations, but these organizations wouldn’t help him out until he could get himself on the ballot, which required a lot more money than he had to spend.
While he may not have been able to stick with the race due to gross differences in financial backing, he did garner a lot of attention from political bloggers and help to inspire Ned Lamont to run against the incumbent senator for the democratic nomination.
“I got a call coming from an interested party trying to figure out what someone would need to do to challenge Lieberman,” he says. “I told him that one thing he would need was a lot of money. When he said that money wasn’t really an obstacle I got a little angry since it was the main reason I was forced to drop out.”
“I didn’t think too much of the call and didn’t even recall the man’s name. A few months later I saw that Ned Lamont had entered the race and it finally clicked. It makes sense that he wouldn’t see money as a problem since he’s worth between 90 and 300 million dollars.”
So you may be asking yourselves, “Why would two Democrats be running to dethrone such a large figurehead of their political party?”
After all, it was just six years ago that Lieberman was running to become vice president of the United States.
Instead of dropping out of the senate race and focusing only on the vice presidency, Lieberman decided to run for both. If he had won both elections, Republican Gov. John Rowland would have been in charge of appointing a new senator, and would have almost certainly given the seat to a fellow republican.
It was at this time that Orman began to protest Lieberman on a statewide campaign of sorts. He said that he was almost alone when he started to bring up questions about Lieberman’s loyalty, but by Election Day polls showed that 46 percent of Connecticut agreed with him.
“Today, people can’t believe that I’m just a citizen against Joe,” Orman says. “Everyone thinks that I’m part of Ned’s campaign, but I’m not. I have nothing to do with his campaign right now.”
The 2000 presidential campaign is not the only problem that Orman has with Lieberman. A major concern that he shares with democrats statewide is Lieberman’s handling of the war in Iraq and his recent closeness to President Bush.
The problem that they have with this is not that he originally voted in favor of going to war with Iraq, but that he never said he made a mistake or apologized. Also, while Lieberman may have a record of voting overwhelmingly democrat, he has been accused of simply waiting to make sure that some key issue would be out of his control before committing a Democratic vote.
When the primary results came in on August 8, Ned Lamont had won the Democratic nomination with 52 percent of the vote. Lieberman, upon hearing that he had lost, declared himself as an opponent and decided to run as an independent.
Many states have banned this kind of behavior with “sore loser acts.” Connecticut, unfortunately for Lamont, is not one of them.
Currently Lieberman is ahead in the latest polls, but Orman doesn’t think he has it wrapped up just yet. According to him, “Undecided voters generally break towards the challenger as Election Day draws near. Besides, right now he is closer to Joe than Joe was to the incumbent the first time he won.”
This political endeavor is only the latest in a series of actions that have put Orman in local and national spotlights. In 1984, for example, Orman ran for the congressional seat in Fairfield as a Democrat.
He ran a staunchly anti- Regan campaign against U.S. Rep Stuart McKinney, a close friend of Ronald Regan. While Regan was in the area, in fact, he actually stopped at Fairfield and campaigned against Orman in person. Orman eventually lost this race in a landslide.
He has also published four books on political science that range from the politics involved in rock music to the macho attitudes of presidents in the 80s.
It was his latest book, which dealt with the recent influx of celebrities into the political realm that brought him his most recognition. The book came out just as the political scene in Hollywood was peaking, with Schwarzenegger being elected governor of California and a mounting celebrity outrage over the war in Iraq.
Orman used this newfound celebrity of his own to continue his assault on Joe Lieberman and utilize his fame on the talk show circuit for all the press he could get. What Orman has done over the years has gained him respect in both the political world and here at Fairfield.
“John really activated interest in replacing Lieberman and showed everyone that he wasn’t doing what a Democratic senator should do,” says Donald Greenberg, a close friend of Orman and the chairman of the department of politics. “He showed us that we could have an alternative candidate and that we didn’t have to settle.”
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