Lieberman launches independent campaign

updated 3:06 p.m. ET Aug. 10, 2006

WATERBURY, Conn. - Sen. Joe Lieberman set out on his go-it-alone re-election campaign Thursday and seized on the terror arrests in Britain to argue that his Democratic opponent, Ned Lamont, does not fully understand the danger facing the nation.

Lieberman's stop in Waterbury was his first public event since losing Tuesday's Democratic primary, dismissing his campaign staff and launching his independent bid.

He seized on the terror plot in Britain to criticize Lamont's opposition to the war in Iraq.

"I'm worried that too many people, both in politics and out, don't appreciate the seriousness of the threat to American security and the evil of the enemy that faces us _ more evil or as evil as Nazism and probably more dangerous than the Soviet communists we fought during the long Cold War," Lieberman said.

"If we just pick up like Ned Lamont wants us to do, get out by a date certain, it will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England. It will strengthen them and they will strike again."

The politics of terrorism
Lieberman lost by 10,000 votes in Connecticut's Democratic primary to Lamont, a millionaire businessman who ran on an anti-war platform. Although top state and national Democrats support Lamont in the November general election, Lieberman on Wednesday filed petitions to run as an independent.

British authorities on Thursday arrested 21 people and said they thwarted a terrorist plot to simultaneously blow up several aircraft heading to the U.S. using explosives smuggled in hand luggage.

"We are at war with a brutal enemy," Lieberman said while visiting a pizza parlor. "How the heck can we be in a battle in which we are fighting as Democrats and Republicans against each other when these terrorists certainly don't distinguish based on party affiliation? They want to kill any and all of us."

An independent Connecticut
Waterbury gave Lieberman 60 percent of its Democratic vote in the primary. The gritty factory town also has a history of electing independents: Its mayor was re-elected as a write-in candidate last year after he lost the Democratic primary.

"I think in a primary you are dealing with a very limited audience," Mayor Michael Jarjura said Thursday.

"Unfortunately, here in Connecticut, the Democratic Party has shifted, I think wrongly, too far to the left and that limited audience does not reflect the majority view of the people of the state of Connecticut," he said. "That was very evident in my election, and I think it will be extremely evident in Joe Lieberman's re-election in November."

Connecticut voters have embraced other independent candidates. Former Gov. Lowell Weicker, a former Republican who lost his Senate seat to Lieberman in 1988, ran for governor as an independent in 1990 and won.