Ned Lamont: Linda should have gone positive sooner

Ned Lamont knows a thing or two about running a self-financed campaign for U.S. Senate.

The Greenwich businessman/millionaire successfully challenged Democratic U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman in 2006, won their party’s primary, but lost the general election when Lieberman ran as a third party candidate.

Lamont, who unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for governor earlier this year, is at the Hilton Hotel in Hartford tonight to celebrate friend/fellow Greenwich resident Richard Blumenthal’s victory over Republican Linda McMahon.

McMahon, former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, has sunk around $50 million of her own fortune into the race – over three times what Lamont spent in 2006.

I asked Lamont, as one self-financed candidate to another, where he thought McMahon went wrong. He said she ran too many negative ads.

“If she had gone with those positive ads earlier,” Lamont said, referring for example to a recent television spot of McMahon sitting at a counter, talking directly to the voter, wearing a sweater. “I don’t think people got to know her and I don’t think those ads did her a service.”

Lamont and his opponent in the gubernatorial primary, Dan Malloy, were accused of going too negative in the final days prior to their August 10 face-off.

Brian Lockhart