Today's Wall Street Journal has published an Op-ed piece by Ned Lamont. The Democratic nominee for Senate from Connecticut emphasizes his business experience, suggesting that his background will be key to his ability to resist Joe Lieberman's efforts to paint him as a captive of the extreme left.

Lamont also lays out a simple explanation for his election and makes it clear that his campaign message will be about pragmatism, mixing fiscal responsibility with the argument that getting out of Iraq is the right thing to do in practical terms, not just ideological ones. Lamont writes:

In the past week, my victory in the Connecticut Senate primary has been labeled everything from the death knell of the Democratic Party to the signal of our party's rebirth. Beneath all of this punditry is a question that I want to face directly: how the experience I will bring to the U.S. Senate will help Connecticut and the Democratic Party during this time of testing for our country.

I ran at a time when people said "you can't beat a three-term incumbent," because I believed that President Bush, enabled by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, had weakened our country at home and abroad. We're weaker economically, because we're more dependent on foreign energy and foreign capital. Our national security has also been weakened, because we stopped fighting a real war on terror when we made the costly and counterproductive decision to go to war in Iraq.

Read the whole thing here.