The candidate was trying to defeat the once-popular incumbent in a race for a U.S. Senate seat from Connecticut.

"You can choose between a senator who has been there 18 years and seems to have lost touch with our common concerns," the challenger told a Rotary luncheon in Bridgeport. "Or you can vote for a senator who will be there when you and your family need him."

Was this 2006 Democratic candidate Ned Lamont on the attack? How timely. How in-your-face. How ... dated.

It turns out the candidate being quoted was Joseph Lieberman -- 18 years ago -- when he was running to defeat Republican Lowell Weicker.

I happen to know he said this because I was there, covering the campaign for The Washington Post. Looking back at the articles I filed on the Weicker-Lieberman race in 1988, my jaw drops at the similarities.

Lieberman, then a popular two-term attorney general, was the underdog for much of that race -- much as Ned Lamont, the millionaire cable executive, was until this summer.

Now, with a fresh statewide poll in hand showing him ahead Lieberman by 13 points, Lamont heads into the Aug. 8 primary with all of the advantages the younger Lieberman once had.

This time, Lamont is the fresh face. Lieberman is the Washington insider. Lamont is the nimble challenger. Lieberman is the comfortable incumbent who awoke only slowly to the potent political force on his doorstep.

The driving issue, of course, has been Lieberman's support for the war in Iraq. Furious Connecticut Democrats expressed such unhappiness with their senator that Lieberman announced last month that if he does not win the primary, he will run as an independent in the fall.

But as much as the Iraq war debate has dominated this campaign, Lieberman's apparent willingness to leave his party to hang onto his Senate seat has some Democrats especially upset.

And because there seems to be nothing new under the sun in politics, it has stirred other comparisons to the 1988 Senate race.

"Lowell Weicker is not a real Republican," Lieberman said then. "He's not a real Democrat. He does what he wants when he wants to do it."

Lamont is saying roughly the same thing now. When we caught up with him at an Irish Festival in Trumbull one weekend in June, he told me: "Senator Lieberman's got some decisions to make. He's going to have to decide if he's a Democrat."

If Lieberman does run as an independent, Lamont suggested on that hot day in June, Republicans will flock to him and to the weaker Republican nominee -- leaving the field of Democrats to Lamont.

That seemed far-fetched on a hot day in June. Not so much on a hot day in August.

That same June weekend, we found Lieberman campaigning like a man who had no idea someone else might be breathing down his neck. He cheerfully recalled how Bill Clinton -- then a Yale law school student -- supported him in his first race for the state Senate, and how he boarded the Clinton national bandwagon in 1991.

(He did not bring up his decision to denounce Clinton from the Senate floor some years later, a speech that helped grease the skids toward impeachment.)

Clinton repaid that early favor last week, traveling to Connecticut to help Lieberman. But even as Lieberman and Lamont have been playing tit-for-tat on celebrity political endorsements, voters' opinions appear to be hardening.

There are a number of wild cards waiting to be slammed on the table between now and Tuesday night:

• Whose voters will be most likely to turn out in force on a hot Tuesday in August?
  
  
• How successful will Lamont-friendly liberal bloggers be in getting like-minded Democrats to the polls?
  
  
• Are some Democrats annoyed enough at Lieberman -- and unmoved enough by Lamont -- to simply stay home?
  
  
• And which candidate will be pouring the most money into last-minute television ads, high-profile rallies, robo-calls to registered voters and get-out-the-vote campaigns?
  
  
• And which Lieberman will voters see on Election Day? The one who beat Lowell Weicker 18 years ago, thanks in part to an endorsement from Citizens for Reagan and support for the invasion of Grenada?
  
  
• Or will they see the Lieberman President Bush embraced at the State of the Union speech, and who still won't back down from his support for the Iraq war?
  
  
• And if they reject the senator now they elected then ... what then?

-- By Gwen Ifill for the Online NewsHour