A party of two

Post-election Connecticut for Lieberman update from the New Haven Register:

JLamont beat Lieberman in a bitter Democratic primary, which forced the incumbent to use a backup option he’d been preparing for months. The day after the primary, Lieberman handed state election officials more than 7,500 signatures supporting his bid to run as a candidate of the Connecticut for Lieberman party.

At the time, Orman protested that there really was no such party, and that Lieberman was simply manipulating the election system to invalidate the outcome of the Democratic primary. Election officials disagreed and Lieberman said he’d been forced to take that route in order to allow all of Connecticut’s voters the opportunity to vote for him.

Lieberman promised over and over to be an “independent Democrat” if elected to a fourth term. With lots of support from Republican and unaffiliated voters, Lieberman won with 50 percent of the vote.

Orman’s response was to trot down to his local registrar’s office to try to switch his party affiliation from Democrat to Connecticut for Lieberman, which is something no one else has done.

Although that switch isn’t official yet, Orman waggishly proceeded to convene a one-man party organizational meeting and elected himself “chairman.”

Chairman Orman also passed some rules for the party, including one requiring that, “If you run under Connecticut for Lieberman, you must actually join our party.”

Another of his tongue-in-cheek party rules reads as follows: “If any CFL candidate loses our party’s nomination in a primary, that candidate must bolt our party, form a new party and work to defeat our party-endorsed candidate.”