Just when you think the politics of pandering had bottomed out like drops of mercury in a mineshaft, the gravity of the U.S. Senate campaign plunges a little lower.

Consider the Veterans of Foreign Wars post in otherwise bucolic East Hampton, about 10 miles over the Connecticut River from Middletown.

You're driving east along state Route 66, humming "Goes through St. Louie, Joplin Missouri, Oklahoma City is oh so pretty," when the VFW appears on the right.

Actually, you don't see the building as much as the Army-surplus Cobra attack helicopter. Most VFW and America Legion posts have hardware such as Korean War-vintage artillery pieces on their lawns.

The East Hampton VFW has a real Vietnam-era Cobra, on a pedestal, seemingly hovering in an attack angle, with a dummy pilot looking over the 20mm guns and astride the rocket launchers. On the side, in white paint, are the words "The Peacemaker."

Yikes! You think. It's so tiny, the main rotor so huge. It must have been a reassuring sight, though, making a strafing dive over a rice paddy in 1969, with its rack of rockets aimed at the tree line. Now, though, it's an artifact, a reminder of 58,000 dead Americans in a 10-year quagmire. Is this really the kind of prop Lieberman wants? A reminder of a failed U.S. excursion, the origins of which few can now remember? Unfortunately, it has become a prop in U.S. Joe Lieberman's shameless, desperate attempt to retain his $158,000-a-year job in the Senate.

There's a podium

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set up, so the news cameras can't miss the chopper that's now watching his back, as the formation of a group called "Vets for Joe" is announced. A Lieberman staffer distributes the "Vets for Joe" press releases and Lieberman hugs a few guys and shakes hands with others.

"Vets for Joe" is led by Ed Banas of East Lyme, former national commander-in-chief of the VFW.

"When it comes to national security, the November election comes down to a very clear choice between the strong, clear and principled leadership of Joe Lieberman and the inexperience and inconsistency of Ned Lamont," Banas says.

This is only a warm-up for the main event, which is inside and will become a 38-minute criticism of Senate primary winner Ned Lamont in this campaign that has become a name-calling festival in the aforementioned mine shaft. The actual news will be a proposal for a 10-point plan to seek international cooperation in Iraq from Arab and European nations, force Iraqi leaders to work harder and somehow increase the population of the U.S. military.

Lieberman will escape the scene before any reporter can ask him whether the U.S. needs to restore the kind of military draft that, combined with the body counts and a massive shift in public support, ended the Vietnam War. Before the speech, you duck inside the men's room, where you get an another indication about the VFW post, whose membership includes former Gov. Bill O'Neill.

In one urinal is a sticker with a picture of "Hanoi Jane" Fonda, as a target. In the other is a similar target of Osama bin Laden. Figuring that at least one person in the building can let bygones be bygones, you choose the latter.

Lieberman, who cut his speech-making teeth more than 45 years ago when he won the Voice of America contest as a Stamford High School student, pulls out the stops on this speech.

He plays to his strength as a lawyer and experienced orator, pulling away occasionally from the prepared text given to reporters, other times reading rewritten sections that shows he worked hard on the speech and hopes that voters are thoughtful enough to listen.

Lamont's crew boiled their reaction down to a criticism that Lieberman wants the same-old, same-old in Iraq, keeping American troops there indefinitely.

Lamont said a phased removal of American troops would give Iraqis time to fill the gaps.

"It's time for the Iraqi's to take control of their future, so that we can refocus on the threat of terrorism and do what's right for the American people and re-deploy our troops out of Iraq," Lamont said.

Lamont, the Greenwich multi-millionaire and political neophyte who invested $4 million of his personal wealth in the Democratic primary victory, has tossed in another $2.2 million with a month left before the election.

So he's on track to put $8 million into the air war that congressional politics has become. But the same way that well-armed Cobras weren't enough to win in Vietnam, slick TV commercials may not be enough for Lamont to overcome Lieberman's 10-point lead among likely voters.

And as the campaign goes on, Lamont's "timetable" of withdrawal has become amorphous, even as Lamont attempts to market his message beyond the war.

It seems at this point that Lamont, in some ways, is like President Bush, who didn't have a decent plan beyond the removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Lamont, surprised that he persuaded Democrats that Lieberman should lose the primary, got what he wanted and now, like the president, is lost in the desert and doesn't know how to close the deal with voters.

Ken Dixon's Capitol View appears Sundays in the Connecticut Post. You may reach him in the Capitol at (860) 549-4670 or e-mail him at dixon.connpost@snet.net.