New Haven Independent

Lamont offered a spirited and gracious concession speech around 10:15 p.m. at the Meriden Four Points Sheraton hotel, as returns showed him trailing Lieberman by approximately the 12-point spread predicted by the Quinnipiac University poll.

He renewed his call for health care reform, a renewed dedication to funding public education, and, above all, a pullback from the war in Iraq.

“This election played a small part in the right direction” in the war, Lamont told a sad but cheering crowd.

Click on the play arrow to watch that portion of his speech.

“I am so optimistic about the direction of the country,” Lamont said.

It was in the same ballroom that pandemonium broke out on Aug. 8 when Lamont upset Lieberman in a Democratic primary; Lieberman has now won what he called “round two” as a “Connecticut for Lieberman Party” candidate.

With the balance of power teetering between the two parties in D.C., Lieberman will play an influential powerbroker role, just months after it seemed that Lamont had ended his career with an upset in the Democratic primary.

However, across the country, incumbent and other pro-Bush Republicans appeared to be falling to Democrats, who have become increasingly emboldened in drawing distinctions between their party and the GOP on issues ranging from the Iraq war to health care and the minimum wage.

And Ned Lamont helped them do it. His Aug. 8 primary win — and an unabashed platform for change — sent shock waves through the party and convinced candidates to run against the Bush agenda in the general election.

“We made it safe for Democrats to act like Democrats,” Lamont political director Rick Melita noted at Lamont’s campaign “party” at the Meriden Four Points Sheraton.

But that was cold comfort, at least for the night, for the veteran progressives like Melita and campaign manager Tom Swan, who hoped to repeat their miracle and unseat a senator whom many saw as the symbol of the Democrats’ drift to the right on issues ranging from war and civil liberties to health care and corporate regulation.

After the coming weeks of renewed national Lieber-mania calms down, though, they will probably be reminded that Democratic campaigns will continue to try to replicate the new model of grassroots/netroots organizing that enabled a political newcomer to put such a scare to a three-term incumbent who ran for vice-president just six years ago.

Netroots Change

Tim Tagaris had a lot to do with that, and will inevitably surface in future Democratic campaigns.

Tagaris is the 30-year-old dynamo who migrated to Lamont’s primary campaign from his perch as Internet guy at Howard Dean’s Democratic National Committee. He helped orchestrate and link up with a legion of bloggers during the primary to organize a nationwide campaign to help Ned Lamont humiliate three-term incumbent Sen. Joe Lieberman in the Aug. 8 primary. The victory was hailed as a coming-out triumph for web-savvy independent “gate-crashers” determined to shake up the Democratic Party and the federal government.

Before the rest of the established political world caught on, Tagaris understood that the independent bloggers could help the campaign best not by being directed with a top-down message of the day, but by harnessing, feeding, borrowing and sometimes coordinating their ideas and energy.

As soon as Lieberman launched an independent “Connecticut for Lieberman Party” campaign in the general election, though, that netroots crusade disappeared from public view. To some extent, the gate-crashers were tired. And their attention was diverted: Unlike in August, the Lamont quest now had to compete with dozens and dozens of competitive, important battles for Congressional and Senate seats across the country.

Below the radar, Tagaris and the remaining (largely but not exclusively Connecticut-based) bloggers switched to often less visible tactics, at least less visible to the mainstream.

Post-Pinch-Penny Progress

“The blogs got, and deservedly so, a lot of the credit in the primary,” Tagaris reflected as he awaited the election results Tuesday evening at Lamont party central, the Meriden Four Points Sheraton Hotel. He wore his trademark baseball cap and baseball jersey; the cap, marked by the letter P, appeared to conflict with his Cubs shirt. But it turns out the P stands for the Pinch-Penny Pub, a Carbondale, Ill., bar where Tagaris used to work as a bouncer before wrestling with establishment politicians through electronic networks.

“The biggest impact the blogs had in the primary was to keep issues and topics in the media,” he said. “Then you had 510 additional races instead of being the only one.”

So Tagaris and his crew turned to making more use of their expanded e-mail lists to enlist volunteers and build support one-on-one among Lamont-leaners in Connecticut. The focused on the “Family, Friends & Neighbors” effort, in which Lamont supporters sign up online to send personal postcards to relatives and friends urging them to vote Democratic in the Senate race. In the primary the campaign generated 15,000 such postcards. In the general election, they generated 85,000, according to Tagaris.

They also mined the e-mail networks to general phone-bankers and other volunteers. Half the volunteers working in the Third Congressional District, for instance, were found online, Tagaris said. On Monday night, at 9, the campaign realized it needed a lot more volunteers at the polls statewide. It sent out an e-mail — and found 150 to 200 new bodies by the next morning.

The highest compliment to the Lamont web operation came from the opposition — Dan Gerstein, Joe Lieberman’s media coordinator. Gerstein’s comments were regularly fact-checked and vetted by a loose network of dozens or more bloggers. He said that the Lamont primary campaign will serve as the textbook case for how campaigns will run 10 years from now; Gerstein helped raise Lieberman’s clueless primary web operation to, in not parity, at least a competitive answer to Lamont’s in the general election campaign. (Click here to read more on that.)

“If there’s one thing to take away from our Internet campaign, we were so successful because every department in the [Lamont] campaign recognized that we could be helpful,” Tagaris said — meaning that the research department, the fund-raisers, the field directors all made use of Tagaris’s network. They made history in August, and, however the general election turned out, helped change, and democratize, the American political landscape.

“We made one big miscalculation,” reflected key Lamont campaign strategist Tom D’Amore (pictured in this file photo), a former state GOP chairman who broke with his party along with former Gov. Lowell Weicker in 1990. “I would never have believed, based on my life experience, that [GOP candidate Alan Schlesinger] would be in single digits. This is the most upside down race I’ve ever seen in Connecticut.”

But, he added, “it was worth the battle.”