Hartford Courant -- Northeast section: Can Lamont Get Tough?

[Larkspur]

http://www.courant.com/news/local/northeast/hc-bass0305.artmar05,0,338306.story

No one would have mistaken Ned Lamont for Rick Blaine as he slipped into a squat building by the prop planes at the airfield.

Lamont did have a secret meeting with a potential co-conspirator, though. And he is plotting an insurgent campaign; although, unlike Humphrey Bogart, he's not taking on an evil foreign power. He's stalking the popular U.S. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, a decent and likable fellow in desperate need of forced retirement.


Ned Lamont at Meet & Greet at Killingly Community Center on Feb. 21, 2006
(Mark Mirko, Hartford Courant)

Lamont was meeting at this stand-alone office at the edge of Hartford's Brainard Field with a man more suited to a role in the final scene of "Casablanca:" strategist Tom D'Amore. D'Amore has a history of plotting challenges to Connecticut's political status quo.

It was D'Amore who helped Lowell P. Weicker try to open up state party primaries in the 1980s. He was alongside Weicker when Lieberman swiped Weicker's U.S. Senate seat with a bare-knuckled sneak attack from the right. Then he helped steer Weicker to a historic third-party grab of the governor's mansion in 1990, and served as Gov. Weicker's chief of staff.These days D'Amore has settled into a role befitting Claude Rains' Captain Louis Renault - lobbying and consulting at a firm housed at the airport: Doyle, D'Amore & Balducci. His job doesn't entail working for idealistic clients. But he's still eager, if the right opportunity arrives, to slip to the barricades of a noble quest.A quest, perhaps, like the one Ned Lamont arrived at D'Amore's office to discuss.

Lamont, 52, wants to topple a three-term Democrat whose approval ratings are second only to those of Connecticut's den-mother-in-chief, M. Jodi Rell. Lieberman is entrenched with his party's leadership, even though he serves as a Bush administration shill for an unwinnable, counterproductive and corrupt Iraq war.

SNIP