True Blue, Or Too Blue?

"Ned Lamont, everybody!" shouts the bandleader at the end of the song. "Can he play?"

Cheers all around.

"Can he legislate?"

More cheers -- though, truthfully, nobody can answer that one. A few months ago, when he first declared his intention to unseat Lieberman, the question Lamont heard most often was "Are you out of your mind?"

Now it's "Who is this guy?"

He's Not Lieberman

A very rich man is one answer. The grandson of a partner of J.P. Morgan, Lamont was born with a pile and then made a pile of his own. He's now worth about $200 million, his advisers say. The money he earned comes from a company he founded in 1984 that installs customized cable systems at universities. If a Baptist college didn't like MTV, Lamont could deliver a system that was MTV-free. No advanced-calculus program? Lamont wired a distance-learning channel that filled the void.

"I became the Johnny Appleseed of academic communications," says Lamont, sitting down at a Dunkin' Donuts in Norwalk one recent morning over a gigantic cup of iced coffee. "I think I've been to just about every university in this country."

Lamont is 52 years old, sunny, earnest and surprisingly wry, like a dad in a sitcom. He has a perpetual tan from running a few miles every morning. Like a lot of politicians, he has the alarming habit of referring to himself in the third person, and there's a blank, stunned-for-a-moment pause before he answers most questions.

But he has yet to turn his every answer into a crowd-tested sound bite. So when he says he's for universal health care, and you then ask if he has a universal health care plan, he deadpans, "No, it's just a slogan I throw out." For a moment you think he's serious and then you realize he's saying, "Well, duh."

His ads are funny, too. One on TV parodies the attacks Lieberman has mounted against him: "Meet Ned Lamont," a narrator sneers, over grainy footage of Lamont at breakfast with his family. "He can't make a decent cup of coffee." Cut to Lamont singing "Everybody Wang Chung tonight." "He can't sing karaoke," snickers the narrator. One radio spot described Lieberman as a medication with lots of negative side effects: "Joe Lieberman is safe for lobbyists, big oil, and friendly dinner conversations with Republicans. He may be combined with Fox News."

The ads come from the same Minneapolis firm that handled the guerrilla-style spots that years ago propelled Paul Wellstone to the Senate, and they aren't the only sign that Lamont has hired good help. His campaign manager is a disheveled, fiery-eyed veteran of Connecticut politics named Tom Swan, who has taken a leave of absence from a Naderite public interest group where he's worked for years.

Last year Swan was searching for a candidate to challenge Lieberman and, after canvassing the ranks of political veterans -- all of whom politely declined -- he heard through a friend that Lamont, a former Greenwich selectman for two terms, was interested. For a senatorial hopeful, the guy had a lousy résumé. Selectmen in Greenwich deal with potholes and the like, and Lamont had lost a run for state senate. But Swan and the friend, an attorney, were a little desperate. They held a meeting in December.