Independents in Connecticut

The Washington Post has an interesting article on some history in Connecticut politics involving Lowell Weicker, the man Joe Lieberman unseated in his first campaign for the Senate. Weicker,  defeated as a Republican, turned independent and ran for - and won - the position of governor of Connecticut. It seems that state has a longish history for this sort of thing, then.

In politics, what goes around comes around, and now an eerily similar scenario is playing out for Lieberman, a three-term senator who lost on Tuesday in Connecticut's Democratic Senate primary to Ned Lamont. Lieberman says he will now run for the Senate in November as an independent.

Who would know better what it's like to run as an independent in that neck of the woods than Weicker?

Looking back on his independent candidacy, "my troubles were pretty clear," Weicker says from his home in Essex, Conn.

He says that his role in the Watergate investigation and his opposition to certain Reagan administration spending cuts "teed off a lot of Republicans."

But he says there were still enough moderate Republicans and Democrats to elect him governor.

Scott Overland, a spokesman for the Lieberman campaign, says his boss believes "deep in his heart" that he is the one person running for the Senate who can represent all of Connecticut's citizens and that he wants a chance to be reelected by all the voters.

Overland says that Lieberman has shown his independence by taking a stand on the Iraq war "that didn't help him politically."

"He believes it was the right thing to do," he says.

In 35 years of public service, Overland continues, Lieberman has built bonds with people of all political parties in the state. He says that Connecticut has shown it can elect an independent candidate. His example: Lowell Weicker.

Weicker, 75, says of Lieberman, "You have to take a look at the origins of his candidacy. And of mine. I made a decision, persuaded by Republicans, to run. But only to run as an independent."

You can pretty well write of Weicker's protestations that the situations are not identical. Weicker has a great deal of animosity for Lieberman, quite obviously. There are more similarities than differences, I think. At least they didn't trot out the tired conventional wisdom comparison of Jacob Javits and Al D'Amato. I debunked that one here.