David Segal of the Washington Post profiled Ned Lamont and his hard-left crusade against Sen. Joe Lieberman in the Style section Wednesday. (It might seem a little weird since Segal is usually a rock-and-pop critic, but he used to work at The Washington Monthly.) Segal avoids the liberal and left-wing labels most of the time --and certainly the ultra labels his backers deserve. The headline is "True Blue or Too Blue?" But this sentence is the laugh-out-loud one, trying to nudge Lamont's image to the right by writing up his website position paragraphs:
"They are the views of a fiscal conservative, a social liberal and a foreign-policy moderate. He is a few degrees to the right, generally speaking, of the bloggers who have championed him."
But go to nedlamont.com and you find strong support for abortion on demand, so-called gay marriage, universal health care, universal pre-school, racial quotas, higher CAFE standards to fight "disastrous" carbon dioxide emissions and tough labor-and-environment language in trade agreements, not to mention strong support for censuring Bush for terrorist surveillance and saluting the "wisdom and patriotism" of John Murtha for supporting a quick withdrawal from Iraq. ("Foreign-policy moderate," are we?)
I'm assuming the "fiscal conservative" part would include Lamont supporting higher taxes for all these health and education and infrastructure programs he supports. But I didn't see any mention of a tax hike in those mini-position papers.
