It was many, many years ago when I saw Dick Blumenthal campaigning, in the pouring rain, outside the old Hartford Civic Center.
Here was Connecticut’s ever-popular attorney general, with approval ratings on a par with Cohen the Columnist, shaking soggy hands and kissing babies, to guarantee that he would win reelection with 97 percent of the vote, instead of only 92 percent.
Don’t buy the idea that his mediocre campaign for U.S. Senate is based on overconfidence, or that he is merely rusty from lack of urgency in campaigns past.
No, he has sufficient mental illness to always run an aggressive campaign; the problem this year has more to do with message than method.
To be sure, the polls that reflect a competitive race with wrestling czar Linda McMahon result in part from the fact that Linda’s checks don’t bounce and that she is surrounded by a campaign staff that no Republican candidate for attorney general was going to attract in previous races against Blumenthal.
But beyond Linda’s strengths or weaknesses, who in the world does Dick think he is talking to on the campaign trail, or in those odd television campaign ads?
Blumenthal apparently thinks that the trial-lawyer tricks over the years that he played on businesses and somnolent regulatory agencies, which won him lots of headlines, are going to get him elected to the U.S. Senate on a populist wave that simply doesn’t exist.
While McMahon is going on and on about business and jobs, Dick is chanting about the evils of big ‘pharmaceutical drug companies.’ Did you get that? Not just pharmaceutical companies. Not just drug companies. No, make sure you get the point: pharmaceutical drug companies. That campaign message must go over well in southeastern Connecticut, where Pfizer is a major driver of employment and economic stability.
Blumenthal’s weird speech to a major union audience, suggesting that all those Democrats in Washington, which labor already bought and paid for, aren’t doing much to help the common man, left insiders mumbling in their beer.
Beyond the particulars, Blumenthal is running in a state that is sustained in considerable part by the Wall Street witch doctors who live in Fairfield County, by the corporate office towers in metro Hartford, by a flat-line, but still significant, blue-collar affluence unknown in much of the rest of the nation.
The Populist cha-cha probably isn’t the best approach in such a jurisdiction.
To add to the puzzle, Dick, in sort of his role as attorney general, jumped on the bandwagon early on to beat up on Craigslist for its sex ads. So, the liberal, progressive Connecticut candidate for U.S. Senate stands on the street corner, preaching against the fornicators. Who would have thought?
Is Blumenthal on the wrong path? He need only look at the tanking popularity numbers for Obama, whose anti-business rants and pseudo-hostility towards ‘the rich’ are getting him nowhere.
At the end of the day, Linda McMahon remains a sufficiently odd Senate candidate to freeze the undecided voters until they stagger into the voting booth. She’s assembled a strong team and she apparently listens to their advice, which is enough of an instinct to make you at least a C+ U.S. Senator.
Blumie is no man of mystery. He’d vote lefty Democrat, he’d hog every television microphone within miles of the U.S. Senate, and he’d champion a few issues that fall between the cracks.
The end result won’t be embarrassing for Connecticut. The campaign? Blumenthal is making it more interesting that it might have been. Bad Big Pharma. Bad Corporate America. Bad. Bad. Sigh.
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Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
