Colin McEnroe: Big Love (for Lamont) at the Expo Center

[Larkspur]

http://blogs.courant.com/colin_mcenroe_to_wit/2006/05/ive_had_some_st.html

I've had some stranger nights covering politics, but not many. I have never seen a group of people as elated to lose 2-1 as the Ned Lamont supporters nor a winning side as lifeless and frozen-faced as the Lieberman crowd when Friday night's votes were counted.

I spent about an hour before roll call cruising the convention floor, checking in periodically with the Lamont floor team members who were attempting to count votes by congressional district and getting a whole lot of nowhere. These were, in many cases, experienced pros but they couldn't get a solid count because ... well it was hard to say why. A lot of the small town delegates apparently just never told anybody what they were going to do until they did it. As the roll call began, the Lamont people were telling each other it would be between 20 and 25 percent, but not in the tones of people who were really sure. More like people who hoped they were right.

Gradually, several patterns emerged, the most striking of which was no pattern at all. That is, the Lamont support seemed to be coming from almost everywhere, in dribs and drabs. (His floor manager David Pudlin, whose Mort Sahl-ish jokes sometimes take a moment to sink in, said when it was all over: "He seemed to do well with the very rich and the very poor. The radical left tells me that's the whole state of Connecticut.") Another pattern was that those small towns, with two or three delegates and nobody to boss them around, went heavily for Lamont.

The Lamont floor teams were clutching sheets of paper speckled with "NO ID," meaning they had no idea how these delegates would vote. It seemed eventually that the mysterious people went overwhelmingly for Lamont, as if they were afraid to tell anyone what they planned to do in case someboy showed up to break their arms. Arm-breaking, though, was not the Lieberman way, from what I could tell. The senator and his people may have pressured some old allies, but they also let longtime supporters off the hook without threat of reprisal. They could have played a more vicious brand of hardball than they did.

SNIP

[wordpix2]

1. a delegate told me Lamont would have had more votes if there were secret

balloting

[DODI]

2. I firmly believe he would have had Hartford if not for the damn

machine. Perez is so tied into the machine it is scary!