<div>I know him personally: awesome guy.</div> <div> </div> <div> </div> <div><A href="http://www.courant.com/news/politics/hc-swan0804.artaug04,0,1079748.story?coll=hc-big-headlines-breaking">http://www.courant.com/news/politics/hc-swan0804.artaug04,0,1079748.story?coll=hc-big-headlines-breaking</A></div> <div> </div> <div>Unlikely Trail Boss By ELIZABETH HAMILTON Courant Staff Writer August 4 2006 Tom Swan is mumbling into his cellphone as he speeds down Route 8. That's nothing new. These days the phone seems to be permanently affixed to his head, like a nose or an ear, and Swan's barely audible, fragmented speech patterns have been rued by Connecticut's political reporters for years. But today the topic is a bit more intriguing than most - his candidate, Ned Lamont, has been invited to appear on Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report" the following week - and Swan is unusually animated. It's a risky move: Lamont could look foolish, or worse, if the host of the satirical news show, Stephen Colbert, can rattle him. But Swan, Lamont's campaign manager, is inclined to accept the offer. "I have a lot of people who, to be blunt with you, will think I'm [expletive] crazy for this one," Swan growls. Colbert's producer is on the other end of the line. "But unless he shows up in spandex and a helmet, I think it will be OK." Swan's gamble paid off. Lamont, who stayed loose during the interview on Monday, managed not to embarrass himself, and the campaign reached more than a million young viewers - for free. It is Swan's hardball instincts, on this issue and others, that make him valuable to Lamont as he attempts to unseat a three-term incumbent from the U.S. Senate. But it is clearly one of the weirdest political partnerships since the Democrats threw a foul-mouthed Texan, LBJ, into the presidential campaign of Eastern aristocrat Jack Kennedy. To merely say that Lamont - a pedigreed, impeccably groomed multimillionaire whose great-grandfather was a partner of J.P. Morgan - and Swan - an Irish Catholic working stiff who until recently lived in a self-described "Unabomber shack" and eschewed marriage, money, and ironed shirts - are opposites is insufficient. Not only is Swan, 45, Lamont's inverse when it comes to appearance and wealth, but he has spent his entire career lobbying (some would say agitating) for the kinds of causes that people like Ned Lamont don't really have to think about much - universal health care, for example, and workers' rights - and some that would directly, negatively impact Lamont, like a higher tax on millionaires. To be blunt - which is also a Swan characteristic - Swan has engaged in what many people from Lamont's stratum would call class warfare. But after a few meetings last winter, Swan was convinced that Lamont's progressive politics were authentic. He agreed to take a leave of absence from his job as director of the Connecticut Citizen Action Group, and bring a few similarly minded friends with him, to run Lamont's campaign. George Jepsen, the former state Democratic Party chairman who is supporting Lamont, is amused by the partnership between the Greenwich businessman and the coffee-stained, sandal-wearing CCAG crew that Swan leads. "They've been on the other side of the barricades throwing rocks at the tanks every day of their lives and here they are, possibly on the verge of one of the greatest political upsets in national history," Jepsen said. "I like to tease them that they were Bolsheviks in a former life and they're being punished now by being forced to work for the grandson of J.P. Morgan's partner." Until recently, Swan was probably best known for the street theater he has staged with CCAG since becoming its executive director in 1993. There was the hot tub outside the state Capitol, of course, and the armada of boats filled with chanting protesters that followed an apoplectic Senate Republican leader Lou DeLuca - and the lobbyists he was entertaining -down the Connecticut River. There were the Team Enron trading cards slipped under windshield wipers at one of then-Gov. John Rowland's public speeches, metal detectors outside the governor's mansion, and a "Bad Santa" that belted out mocking lyrics to "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" at a GOP holiday dinner. But Swan has taken his wicked sense of humor and sharp political acumen a step further in recent years, first by helping to unseat a powerful state senator, Bill Aniskovich, in 2004 and now, in his most recent incarnation, as Lamont's campaign manager. In his new role - for which he has exchanged his "$60-something" a year salary at CCAG for a $2,000 a week paycheck from Lamont - Swan has had to repeatedly answer the obvious questions about working for a millionaire, which he does calmly. "I don't feel bad at all," Swan says, adding, "Even though he's a rich guy, I think he's principled. We asked him about universal health care and gay rights and he didn't even bat an eye." These are issues over which CCAG and Lieberman have been at odds for more than a decade. "I'll never forgive [Lieberman] for his role in killing universal health care in 1994," Swan says. And once Swan decides he's against you, it's almost impossible to change his mind. Not that Aniskovich ever tried. He's been watching the Lamont-Lieberman match from the sidelines, chuckling, and - he says - grateful he's not one of the candidates. He also says he bears no hard feelings toward Swan, who is widely credited with masterminding his defeat, but he has some pointed criticisms of him, nonetheless. "I think he is a partisan in saint's clothing," Aniskovich says. "He purports to be for good government, but he's really just a Democratic operative. I don't know of a single time when he looked around and said, `Here is a good, solid, upstanding Republican who is running against a corrupt Democrat - let me go to work for him.'" Others say Swan is more principled than that and targets people on issues he is passionate about - like campaign finance reform - and not on party affiliation. Several people, for example, recounted how Swan approached House Minority Leader Robert Ward, a North Branford Republican, and thanked him for allowing a campaign finance bill to go to a vote in the final minutes of the legislative session last spring. Swan also has praised Ward for the position he took during Rowland's impeachment hearing. Ward, who disagrees with almost every policy Swan espouses, remembers Swan's compliments. "I had a brief conversation with him and he said something to me. ... I think it was a general comment that he thought I was an honest legislator," Ward said, adding that he, too, believes Swan is representing the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. "I've never questioned that he believes in the things he works for. The fact that I disagree with people on policy doesn'tmean I think bad things about them. I just disagree." </div> <LI> Thomas Raymond Swan is the oldest of four children born to Thomas and Mary Gene Swan, who raised their Irish Catholic brood in Jamesville, N.Y., a town that got its first traffic light in the 1980s. The Swan family shared a love of storytelling and an appreciation for a good joke, preferably combined - like the time Mary Gene accidentally put Super Glue in her husband's eye instead of eye drops - and a belief in public service. What they didn't share - with their oldest son at least - was any political common ground. Tom was a liberal Democrat; his parents were conservative Republicans. "I was at his house a number of times when he would be in shouting arguments, particularly with his father, over politics," says Troy Oechsner, who met Swan when they were both students at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. "At the end of the day, though, there was a love and respect." The elder Swan and his brother co-owned a jewelry store in downtown Syracuse for many years, but the business eventually started to fail. Rather than declare bankruptcy, the two brothers took pay cuts and Swan's mother, Mary Gene, went back to work as a teacher. A tough time for the Swan family followed. The business shut down and Swan's father had a hard time finding work. He eventually went to work for a museum, but lost his job after he turned in his boss for stealing from the company. Long stretches of unemployment followed. Swan's political beliefs were formed early - through a combination of factors that included the struggles he witnessed among working people, like his parents, and a fairly liberal, well-read grandmother to whom he was close. "My parents would have told you they knew all along there was something not quite right," he jokes, adding that he wrote an essay in the third grade critical of a large corporation's takeover of a local business. When he got to college in 1979, Swan was a hard-drinking rugby player who almost immediately became involved in the school's student government association. That's where he met Oechsner, who hung out with the hippies. "Swan wasn't one of us," says Oechsner, a lawyer who now works for New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. "He was a rugby guy and he was kind of working class rough-and-tumble and we didn't know if he was going to be an ally or an enemy." Oechsner, who eventually lived with Swan, came to the conclusion that "he could have easily become a right-wing redneck, but he always had a sense of injustice and trying to look out for the underdog." Swan says he has held onto those beliefs, through a variety of low-paying activist jobs in Albany, N.Y., and Washington D.C. - one of his friends describes him as the "perfect communist because he has nothing and shares everything" - and during his time at CCAG. Swan quit drinking before he arrived in Connecticut in 1993, but he still smokes and drinks a lot of coffee. He lived, until last year, in a small cottage in Coventry with his cats - and then he went and did something no one close to him ever thought he'd do - he got married and bought a house. But in true Swan fashion, some aspects of the relationship remain unconventional. His wife, Suzanne Haviland, works for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees in Washington D.C., and they see each other only on weekends. Swan's friends say he's intensely loyal - the type of guy who will help you move, take time off to comfort you when you're going through a divorce, or drive for hours to be at your kid's birthday party. Then he'll turn around and give your kid a gift, like a remote-control fart and burp machine, for instance, or a whoopee cushion to be used in church, intended to torment you. He also has nicknames for everyone, most of them humorous and unflattering, his friends say. Swan won't reveal what his nickname for Lamont is - or if he even has one - but one of Swan's buddies, state Rep. Peter Tercyak of New Britain, gleefully divulged that Lamont calls his campaign manager "Swanny." "I've never seen him draw attention to it in case other people might like to call him that, too," Tercyak says, in a tone that suggests he hopes everyone who reads this story will do exactly that. Swan, who can be combative when provoked, settles for a mild "I don't care" when asked about the nickname and insists that he and Lamont have a great relationship - sappy nicknames aside. "I am amazed how good I feel about him as a candidate and a person." <div><CITE>Copyright 2006, <A href="http://www.courant.com/" target=_blank>Hartford Courant</A></CITE> </div></LI> <hr size=1>Yahoo! Messenger with Voice. <a href="http://us.rd.yahoo.com/mail_us/taglines/postman1/*http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=39663/*http://voice.yahoo.com">Make PC-to-Phone Calls</a> to the US (and 30+ countries) for 2�/min or less.