Transcript for Aug. 6

MR. DAVIS: His view, along with every Democrat in the United States Senate, was to allow legislation to pass to give the family, the parents, another chance at the Florida court system. That legislation passed by unanimous consent. When Mr. Lamont criticizes Senator Lieberman on that vote in his advertisements—another distortion—he doesn’t say that every Democratic senator took the same position and allowed that legislation to pass.

MR. RUSSERT: Yeah, no Democratic senator objected. Tom Harkin, liberal from Iowa, was the one who was trying to fashion the compromise. Jesse Jackson, who was in Connecticut last week for your candidate, said that it was “cruel and crude” to remove the tube from Terry Schiavo. So is it fair for Mr.  Lamont to use that as an issue when no other Democrat stood up and opposed it, and Jesse Jackson, his supporter, was saying “cruel and crude,” which is basically Lieberman’s position?

MR. DEAN: Yeah. You know, I think Ned’s position on this is that this isn’t and was not then and is not the federal government’s business. And I concur with that. I think this is a family decision. They’d certainly been through the state court system up and down. It’s a gut-wrenching situation for, for both sides of this. And this was not something that the Congress or the Senate or the federal government should be getting involved in.

MR. RUSSERT: I even asked your brother, Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, why he didn’t speak up during the debate. He said, “I wish I would have.”

MR. DEAN: Well, again, Ned is extremely committed to the fact that the federal government really needs to stay out of issues like this among family members, as well as a lot of other personal and moral issues. People send their legislatures—or people to Congress, Tim, for them to solve the problems that we have of health care, solve the problems that we have of our schools, to solve our foreign policy and national security problems. They don’t send people to Congress to start telling them what they’re supposed to do in their personal life or make these difficult moral decisions.

MR. RUSSERT: Let me go to the nub of this campaign, because it has been focused on the war and whether Senator Lieberman is a sufficient enough Democrat. The Congressional Quarterly does a comparison of voting records, and this is what they found in 2005. Lieberman’s in agreement with the Democrat Party 90 percent of the time, and in opposition to the party 10 percent of the time. That places him equal or better than 17 other Democratic senators of the 44 who are there. Why is Lieberman being—alone being picked out for a primary of this nature, and not others, who also voted for the war?

MR. DEAN: Well, I think, you know, it’s—again, it gets back to this sort of culture of incumbency. And again, I’m not trying to hang Joe on this, but Connecticut is a state that gives a lot more than it gets from the federal government. I think the voters are OK with that there. I think the voters understand that solving some of these difficult issues of transportation and health care in Iraq take some time, but the problem is there’s a great deal of frustration among the voters now in Connecticut because these huge tax breaks to the energy companies that are going on, the huge tax breaks to big pharma, the $200 million bridges to nowhere—you know, they see their money just going directly out and going down the drain and getting nothing back, and I think that’s really contributed a lot. I mean, obviously, Iraq is a big deal.  Senator Lieberman’s statements supporting the Bush administration, I think, have, have highlighted that quite a bit. But some of these other things that’ve been simmering for over 20 years are, are also coming into play here.

MR. RUSSERT: But money for I-95 or for ferries to lessen the traffic congestion...

MR. DEAN: Yeah.

MR. RUSSERT: ...bringing home the bacon for Connecticut...

MR. DEAN: Yeah.

MR. RUSSERT: ...would Lamont see that as part of his duties as a senator?

MR. DEAN: I think he would fight for that. And you know something, Joe has fought for that. But the real problem here is that we live in a system where there’s 63 lobbyists for every single person in Congress, and Connecticut is getting the short end of the stick.

No matter who wins this race, Tim, I don’t want them, six years from now, saying, “I saved 10 defense industry jobs,” because that’s all the defense industry jobs we have left in Connecticut. We’re playing a zero-sum game that we’re on the wrong end of, and we need someone who’s going to say, “the heck with this culture of incumbency, we got to get something done for the voters and taxpayers of our state.”

MR. RUSSERT: Lanny Davis, The New York Times watched this race very closely, and they weighed in last Sunday with an endorsement for Ned Lamont. And they said it this way: “It is critical that the minority party serve as a responsible, but vigorous, watchdog. That does not require shrillness or absolutism. But this is no time for a man with Mr. Lieberman’s ability to command Republicans’ attention to become their enabler, and embrace a role as the president’s defender.”

MR. DAVIS: First of all, I respect The New York Times, but I think the Connecticut newspapers that know the candidates best should probably be listened to more by Connecticut voters. All five Connecticut papers who have endorsed any candidate—all five—endorse Joe Lieberman, including Ned Lamont’s hometown paper, The Greenwich Time.

The New York Times devoted 11 paragraphs to criticizing Joe Lieberman without mentioning all of the specific instances where Joe Lieberman opposed President Bush, as I mentioned earlier, including on Abu Ghraib, in which he said that he was outraged; including calling the surveillance program illegal. The New York Times simply omitted those facts, and I was allowed to write a letter to the editor pointing that out.

But compared to five out of five Connecticut newspapers, including the Greenwich Time, his hometown newspaper—and if I could just respectfully suggest to my friend Jim--90 percent voting with Democrats is a fact. Another fact is that Ned Lamont, when he served on the Board of Selectmen, bragged, bragged to The Greenwich Time, the same newspaper that endorsed Joe Lieberman, “I support 80 percent of the time what my Republicans on the Board of Selectmen.” So those are facts that Mr. Lamont is not mentioning in his ad.  When he clones and morphs Joe Lieberman—from the face of Joe Lieberman to the face of George Bush, that is a distortion of what you put on the screen, that Joe Lieberman votes 90 percent with the Democrats.

I’m accustomed to Republicans distorting Democrats in campaigns. We saw what happened to Max Cleland, being morphed into Osama bin Laden. When Joe Lieberman is morphed into George Bush, and Ned Lamont doesn’t say that he votes 90 percent with the Democrats, that’s a distortion, and the people of Connecticut should consider whether distorting Joe Lieberman’s record is a fair thing, and whether that’s something that Mr. Lamont should regret, before they vote for him.

MR. RUSSERT: Give you a chance to respond.

MR. DEAN: Yeah, sure. Well, first of all, you know, I think that 80 percent with the Republicans has been a little bit blown out of proportion. This is a select committee that’s dominated by Republicans, and we’re talking about pot holes in streets, here. But let’s go up to not 30,000 feet on this thing, Tim, but about 100 feet. If you look—I mean, both campaigns have given as good as they’ve gotten in this race, on both sides of it. But the overwhelming tenor, or, or, view of the totality of this race is the fact that the voters are getting very, very excited about the fact that they are empowered to set the course for Connecticut, set the course for their party.  We have a situation right now where 11,000 people have registered, reregistered from being Independent to being Democrat. We have a lot of people that are engaged in this debate and getting very, very excited. And I think, really, that’s been the temper of this debate, and that’s, and that’s been the, the tone of this election more than anything else. It’s been extremely positive.

And I’ll say one thing about the party brass, most of whom were in Joe’s corner because of the convention, they’ve done a great job at handling this and keeping this debate civil. Nancy DiNardo, head of the party, it’s not been an easy three months, she’s done a great job. Chris Dodd with his statesmanship. This has benefited the three outstanding congressional candidates that we have: Diane Farrell, Chris Murphy, Joe Courtney. You know, that’s really been the tone of this. And there’s been some stuff in the direct mail on both sides of this. But that’s not really the—it’s about this big compared to everything else that’s going on.

MR. RUSSERT: In late June, Senator Lieberman said, “I’m a Democrat, I’ve always been a Democrat, I always will be a Democrat.” Twelve days later he started circulating petitions for an independent run; an insurance policy if he loses the Democratic primary. The last time there was an Independent running for the Senate in Connecticut who was a Democrat was 1970, and here’s the result: Lowell Weicker, the Republican, got 42 percent of the vote; Joe Duffey, the Democrat, got 34 percent of the vote, and Tom Dodd, the Democrat running as an Independent—father of the incumbent Senator Chris Dodd--24 percent. If Joe Lieberman loses this primary on Tuesday by a significant margin, will he still try to run as an Independent and risk losing the seat for the Democratic Party?

MR. DAVIS: The answer is he will run as a Democrat. He will run, he will win on Tuesday night, in my judgment. The facts will catch up, five endorsements by Connecticut papers. He will win Tuesday.

But in the hypothetical question you’ve asked, he is ahead by 24 points in a three-way contest. He will win Democratic support, Independent support, and moderate Republican support. He will caucus with the Democrats, and he will stand for a Democrat who’s progressive for 40 years that I’ve known him, reaching across the aisle...

MR. RUSSERT: So he’ll definitely run as an Independent?

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