True Blue, Or Too Blue?

"We walked out of it," Swan recalls, "and we liked him. But because he wasn't political," which is to say he lacked experience, "we wondered if our reaction was just about how badly we want to beat Joe."

It's what you might call the Johnny Bravo question. Lamont brings to mind that classic "Brady Bunch" episode in which Greg briefly is transformed into a pop idol with that heroic name because he fits an ornate suit that record execs already had. Polls suggest that Lamont's greatest credential is that he is not Lieberman. But to win in November -- as opposed to giving Lieberman what he has called "the fight of my political life" -- Lamont says he believes that he will have to offer someone to vote for, rather than merely someone to vote against. He must convince the electorate that he isn't just a presentable grown-up who fits a pre-made suit.

Which is what he did with Swan. At a subsequent meeting, Swan hurled a bunch of insults: You're rich, you don't know issues, you don't know how much work is involved. It was a test, and Lamont passed.

"We left that meeting and we thought, 'This isn't what we were looking for, but he's different, he's smart,' " says Swan. "And he reminded us of Jimmy Stewart."

Aiding these paid staffers is a flotilla of volunteers from the blogosphere. Like Beau Anderson, a 25-year-old who attends community college in Connecticut when he isn't extolling Lamont and contradicting Lieberman ads and speeches at his Web site, Spazeboy.net. Anderson is a little bit booster, a little bit heckler, and he has both energy and bandwidth. He pops up at Lieberman events and asks pointed questions of the candidate, or he snaps photos and annotates them on his site. On Sunday he posted a photo of Lieberman on a sidewalk, talking to two reporters and two staff members, according to Anderson.

"Joe's bus tour is drawing crowds totaling zero members of the public," reads the caption, "either because he has no support or because he doesn't publicize the events at all."

Above this was a photo of a recent campaign stop for Lamont before a crowd of voters at a factory in Bristol, all of them clapping.

Some $300,000 has rolled into Lamont's coffers via the Internet, from more than 15,000 contributors. The sum is a pittance compared with the roughly $3 million that Lamont has pumped in from his own bank account. The campaign has spent $3.7 million so far, compared with the $6.6 million spent by the Lieberman camp.

Better than cash, though, the Web sites raised the insurgent campaign's profile. Lamont would expect 25 people at some meet-and-greet, and 125 would show up.

"I think somebody told me early in the campaign, 'Hey Ned, they're talking about you on these sites,' " Lamont says. "I took a look the next day and someone wrote about my speech at some meeting. 'He started off really passionately but he seemed tired by the end, and his suit was really weird.' "

On paper, Lamont is an unlikely maypole for a campaign of progressives, online or otherwise. He was raised on Long Island and attended boarding school at Exeter, then went to Harvard. He edited a newspaper in Vermont after graduation, and later tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade the New York Times to start the first cable news channel. (Ted Turner, father of CNN, is one of Lamont's heroes.) He worked for Cablevision before splitting off to form his own company. He's married and has three kids.

What counts as a skeleton in his closet is his membership in the very white Round Hill country club, from which he resigned before the campaign. The only hint of prior mischief is the name of his band in high school, the Flowerpots.