John Orman was a teacher and a practitioner of politics

Published 5:00 am Sunday, July 12, 2009

John Orman, a politics professor at Fairfield University who took his subject out of the classroom by seizing control of the very minor party that Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., set up to secure his re-election in 2006, died July 5 at his home in Trumbull, Conn. He was 60.

The cause was a heart attack, his wife, Reenie Demkiw, said.

Orman, who made two quixotic bids for public office, was chairman of the department of politics at Fairfield, where he had taught since 1978.

“I tell students they have an obligation to step forward, so I better do it myself,” he told The New York Times in 1998 when asked to look back at his first election campaign.

In 1984, Orman ran as a Democrat for Congress against Stewart McKinney in the overwhelmingly Republican 4th District. He lost in a landslide. Four months later, he asked the congressman to keep a campaign pledge by coming to his class and telling “my students how you beat me.”

Three years ago, saying he was troubled that no one else had entered the Democratic primary, Orman started a campaign to oust Lieberman, a three-term incumbent. He dropped out after a candidate with far more support, Ned Lamont, decided to challenge Lieberman.

When it became clear that Lamont would win the Democratic primary, Lieber- man created the Connecticut for Lieberman Party, and managed to keep his name on the ballot. Although the senator easily won the general election, he did not plan to keep his party active.

“It was a joke, there was a mockery of the system,” Orman said. So he filed papers with the Connecticut secretary of state asserting that he was chairman of the Connecticut for Lieberman Party; in January 2007, his filing was approved.

The party “is still in existence with the purpose of holding Lieberman’s feet to the fire,” Donald Greenberg, a politics professor at Fairfield, said Tuesday.

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