Mark Peterson/Redux, for The New York TimesLinda McMahon represents a political culture that was unknown in Connecticut 20 years ago.
September 23, 2010
By MATT BAI
You could spend your life around political campaigns and never see a celebration quite like the one Linda McMahon held last month after Connecticut Republicans made her their Senate candidate in a three-way primary. McMahon is the fabulously wealthy founder (along with her high-school sweetheart and husband, Vince) of World Wrestling Entertainment, a company the McMahons transformed into a sort of Disney for the age of postindustrial American anger. Unknown to Connecticut voters before she began her run, she spent more than $20 million of her own fortune to beat out two Republican candidates — one of them recruited by the national party — for the right to square off this November against Richard Blumenthal, the state’s longtime Democratic attorney general, in a contest to succeed Christopher Dodd, who is retiring.
The first thing I noticed when I wandered into McMahon’s victory party, at a Crowne Plaza Hotel south of Hartford, was the lavish spread — not the usual weenies and plastic cups, but warm pasta and flaky pastries and drinks from an open bar, all of it consumed by supporters carting free “Linda” tote bags and T-shirts. The second thing was the vintage 1980s soundtrack, which included decidedly unpolitical tracks like the AC/DC classic “You Shook Me All Night Long.” She had the sightless eyes, telling me no lies, knocking me out with those American thighs. . . .
Onstage, a tableau of supporters carefully constructed for television in the way of modern campaigns — nonwhite faces up front, directly behind the candidate — stood assembled under a banner that read, blandly, “It’s Time for Something Different.” Just behind the lectern, alongside other family members, loomed McMahon’s ponytailed, R.V.-size son-in-law, the wrestler known as Triple H. Then a state senator, Len Fasano, delivered one of the more bizarre political orations I had ever heard, getting himself so worked up that he apparently forgot which state he served and introduced the crowd to “the next U.S. senator from the great state of New York!”
The 61-year-old candidate herself walked onstage in a pink suit and pearls, looking for all the world like the president of the Fairfield P.T.A., and proceeded to deliver a victory speech that was sort of amazing for its amalgamation of clichés and a complete, almost defiant, lack of substance.
“I had a great fear that the American dream was in the greatest jeopardy that it has ever been in our lifetime, and I didn’t want to lose that opportunity for the American dream for our children and our grandchildren.”
“The great communicator Ronald Reagan had it right, but this president and this Congress have it wrong!”
“This campaign has never been about the political pundits or the establishment. This campaign is about you!”
And so on. Then McMahon strode off the stage to Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.”
Such a spectacle might not seem out of place in a state like California, where millionaires and celebrities are always jumping into the fray, or in one like Minnesota, where popular revolt seems to come in waves. But this is Connecticut, my home state, where the business of campaigns and governance used to be a predictable, serious affair, the province of mostly estimable public servants who worked their way up through town councils or local party machines. Sometimes called the Land of Steady Habits, Connecticut was never a place for garish campaigns and outsize characters with bank statements to match.
Until recently, the closest thing Connecticut experienced to an overturning of the political order, at least in modern times, was the revolt over a state income tax in the early 1990s. So incensed were the voters then that they replaced their moderate governor, the former longtime senator Lowell Weicker, with a more conservative career politician, a three-term congressman named John Rowland. Take that, status quo!
That, however, was before Rowland and a small cadre of other Connecticut officeholders were hauled away to prison on corruption charges; before Democrats ousted Joe Lieberman from the party only six years after they nominated him for the vice presidency; before the politicians in Hartford blew a hole the size of Long Island Sound in the state budget. As I watched McMahon’s hopeful supporters file out of the ballroom clutching their tote bags, I found myself wondering: when, exactly, did genteel Connecticut become Louisiana? And if politics could get this weird here, then what did that mean for the rest of the country?
As in much of the Northeast, Connecticut politics for most of the last century was the purview of two distinct cultural camps: the urban, ethnic machines that dominated the Democratic Party and the patrician Republicans (the Bushes of Greenwich, most notably) who considered it their duty to serve. In postwar suburbs like Trumbull, where my parents moved from Bridgeport and raised their three children, the two groups coexisted uneasily but, for the most part, productively and congenially. Democrats and Republicans might have argued over where to build a new school or whether to let the highway plow through a park, but rarely was there anything personal about it.
Things started to change in the 1980s, for reasons both cultural and economic. A new generation of politicians ascended to power — liberals and conservatives with sharply moralistic approaches to politics. At the same time, the manufacturing decline that was beginning to erode the nation’s economic base, along with the “white flight” that began in the 1960s, hollowed out Connecticut’s cities and weakened its governing establishment. Outsiders tend to think of Connecticut as a collection of wealthy suburbs and rural horse farms, as portrayed in books and movies like “The Ice Storm.” That side of things does exist, particularly on the “gold coast” that runs along the southwest edge of the state, where many hedge-fund managers and movie stars live. And yet much of the state is heavily industrialized, or at least it was until the 1970s. According to data compiled by the Brookings Institution that looks at the core cities of the 100 largest metropolitan areas, two of Connecticut’s largest cities — Hartford and New Haven — are now among the dozen poorest in the country. Hartford, the capital, is the poorest in America.
The effects of this kind of industrial decline, politically, were so gradual as to be almost imperceptible on a daily basis, but cumulatively they took a toll on the political climate. Fear of crime created political pressure for stricter sentencing guidelines, which drove up the state’s incarceration costs significantly. College graduates went off to other regions in search of jobs, leaving behind an aging population whose Medicaid costs are soaring. Public-sector unions replaced trade unions as the dominant political force, and soon the state was paying out unsustainable retirement benefits to its employees. The state budget has grown 60 percent in the last decade, sustained mainly by an income tax that everyone hates.
And then there’s the corruption, the sudden proliferation of which nobody I talked to in the state could adequately explain. No fewer than half a dozen major political scandals erupted in the past several years. Bridgeport’s former mayor just got out of jail after, among other things, accepting free gifts from city contractors; Hartford’s mayor is headed in for doing the same thing; and Waterbury’s onetime mayor (a convicted sex offender) isn’t getting out anytime soon. Governor Rowland, who also accepted free services from contractors, resigned from office in 2004 and served 10 months in prison.
Voter outrage at both parties, but particularly at Democrats, has been building since at least 2006. That’s when Ned Lamont, a cable-television executive whose great-grandfather was a partner at J. P. Morgan, defeated Joe Lieberman in a primary that focused mostly on the war in Iraq. (Lieberman went on to win re-election as an independent.) This year, Lamont spent $9 million to run for governor against another of his party’s entrenched politicians, a former Stamford mayor named Dan Malloy, but without a single galvanizing issue like the one he rode four years ago, he found himself unable to stir much passion from the disillusioned Democratic base, and lost.
The next incumbent after Lieberman to feel the walls closing in was Dodd, who just a few years ago seemed very likely to live out his days in the Senate. Instead, he decided not to seek a sixth term after polls revealed he had very little chance of winning. Dodd is the chairman of the banking committee and is the second-ranking Democratic member on the health-and-education committee — hard-won appointments that would, at another time, have made him seem virtually indispensable to the state. Instead, even fellow Democrats pilloried Dodd for his close ties to Wall Street executives, who make up a significant part of the state’s economy. In other words, Dodd was blasted as a sellout to his state for championing the interests of what had always been, up to now anyway, a crucial constituency.
The state has lost 103,000 jobs and counting during the current recession. And so the moment would seem well primed for Republican officeholders, who don’t control the government in Washington. The problem for Connecticut Republicans is that they don’t really have a lot of candidates left from which to choose. Ever since the party took a hard right turn in the 1980s, it has been slowly disappearing from the state. The last of the state’s moderate Republican congressmen, Rob Simmons and Chris Shays, were defeated in the past two election cycles. (Simmons, who was the national party’s choice to run against Blumenthal, was one candidate Linda McMahon defeated in the primary.) The one centrist Republican on the statewide scene, Gov. Jodi Rell, is retiring. The Republican who is bidding to replace her, a longtime party fund-raiser named Tom Foley, is, like McMahon, a self-financed candidate from Greenwich who had never run for office.
“The Republican Party is a nonentity in Connecticut today,” Weicker, who formed his own party when he ran successfully for governor in 1990, told me when I visited him at his home in Old Lyme. “It can’t find men or women that have come through the chairs to get to where they are. They find people with a wad of dough who just try to buy the office.” (Dodd, who said he was shocked when McMahon got the Republican nomination, puts it another way: “Her main selling point is money.”)
Coincidentally, and a little oddly, Weicker sits on McMahon’s board at W.W.E. After a lengthy discussion of the health care reform law, I asked him if McMahon, who favors repeal, knew what she was talking about. “No,” he answered, waving me away as if I had just asked whether either of his large dogs could fly. “I think she’s following the Republican line — to say no.”
Contrary to conventional thought, you can’t just go out and buy yourself a substantial political office in America. Al Checchi spent $40 million trying to become governor of California in 1998 and couldn’t get past the Democratic primary. Tom Golisano, a New York businessman and philanthropist, spent $93 million on three futile attempts to become that state’s governor between 1994 and 2002. The Texas entrepreneur H. Ross Perot spent $60 million during his 1992 campaign, back when 60 million bucks really meant something in presidential politics, and even though he won 19 percent of the vote, all anyone really remembers are a couple of flip charts and some “Saturday Night Live” skits. That said, $50 million — which is most likely a very conservative estimate of what Linda McMahon calls “investing in myself” — will get you a serious hearing in a state the size of Connecticut. And the way McMahon goes about spending her wrestling fortune is about as subtle as a folding chair to the skull.
Two days after the primary, I arrived at McMahon’s headquarters in the swanky suburb of West Hartford. The headquarters looked more like some interior-design-by-appointment showroom than any campaign office I had ever seen. The glass storefront, over which the word “Linda” was elegantly stenciled in small letters on a navy blue awning, sat between a toy store and an exclusive clothing boutique that had a rack of summer dresses on the brick sidewalk.
Inside, brand new iPads, still in their packaging, lay scattered on desks where you might have expected to see discarded pizza boxes. Upstairs, where the press aides sat, a dozen or so flat-screen TVs hung from a futuristic grid of metal rods, with a stack of digital recorders within easy reach. It felt as if McMahon were campaigning to be commander of Starfleet.
In person, McMahon has a confident, likable presence. Her voice retains the lilt of her native North Carolina, and she laughs easily and warmly, with the sense of humor of a woman who had no problem pretending to violently feud with her husband in front of a national television audience. She is also intensely disciplined with a script, and repeatedly, in the course of our hourlong conversation, she came back to her central theme — that what was missing in Washington were officials who understood what it took to make a small business work. “I’ve built a business,” she told me right off. “I’ve put capital at risk. I understand what rules and regulations and taxes do to business.”
At another point, she told me: “What I continued to hear even before I got into the race was: ‘Do we not have anybody who’s run a business, who can be a part of government? Can government not be run more as a business, with a little bit of attention to the bottom line?’ ”
What McMahon has in mind for the country, more specifically, is to slash or freeze a slate of corporate taxes, while also abolishing the estate tax and the gift tax and creating a series of new deductions for capital expenditures. Businesses will create jobs, McMahon says, when the government stops taking so much of their money away and wasting it on so-called public investments, and those jobs will in turn lift more Americans into affluence.
If all this stirs in you a feeling of nostalgia, like the songs on McMahon’s campaign soundtrack, that’s because it is a perfect distillation of what was once called “supply-side economics,” the gift that Ronald Reagan bequeathed to America in the 1980s and that George W. Bush then regifted in a sparkly new box. In fact, McMahon’s economic plan is largely the work of the economist and sometime television commentator John Rutledge, a supply-side evangelist who helped design Reagan’s program back in the day.
The supply-side argument, which George H. W. Bush once derided as “voodoo economics,” is prevalent among conservative candidates running this year. But as David Stockman, who was Reagan’s first budget director, argued in a Times Op-Ed essay in July, supply-siders during the Reagan and second Bush eras proved far more adept at cutting taxes than they did at scaling back federal spending, which is the main reason we have trillion-dollar budgets deficits. And so it would seem to be incumbent on a candidate like McMahon, who also rails against the debt and who advocates a balanced budget in Washington, to articulate some specific idea of where the budget can be scaled back.
I asked her, for instance, whether she was in favor of reforming entitlement programs that, along with military outlays, represent the principal forces driving spending levels ever higher. “We’re going to have to look at them,” she said, “but I can tell you that that has got to be done in the legislative arena, with open debate, with people on both sides really tackling this and talking about it. We’ve got to strengthen our entitlement programs. We’ve got to make sure that our contract with seniors is maintained and upheld.” But, she added: “I’ve made a specific point of saying I’m not going to go into that on the campaign trail, because I don’t think that’s appropriate. I think the appropriate arena is the legislative arena.”
In other words, this business of governance was too serious to be discussed in any detail during a campaign, which McMahon seemed to regard more as an exercise in theater, like “Saturday Night’s Main Event.” Instead, she returned, once again, to the value of her business experience.
“What I’ve said to people as I’ve gone around the state,” McMahon said, “is: ‘Look, I don’t have all the answers. I wish I had a magic wand and could go to Washington and wave it. But one thing that you will have from me is to take my 30 years of experience, roll up my sleeves. I built a company with 24/7 sweat equity, and I don’t think you can take your eye off the ball until you can solve all these issues and keep working at them.’ ”
For Republicans, the surprising win by the Tea Party candidate Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, in a Senate race they now seem resigned to losing, has made the campaign in Connecticut more pivotal. It is hard to see how Republicans can retake the Senate without capturing Dodd’s seat in November. But Democrats in Washington don’t seem terribly worried about McMahon’s candidacy. For one thing, they are confident that the details of McMahon’s lifestyle and her involvement in a steroid-addled industry won’t sit well with the state’s well-mannered voters. McMahon had a yacht called Sexy Bitch, and the most famous video clip of her — shown by a Republican opponent in the primary — shows her kicking Jim Ross, a W.W.E. announcer, in the groin.
And Democrats remain bullish on Blumenthal, a fixture in Connecticut politics for 25 years who has already won five statewide elections. Blumenthal’s campaign suffered through an existential crisis in May, after Raymond Hernandez reported in The Times that Blumenthal repeatedly misled voters about having served in Vietnam. But Blumenthal apologized — after several agonizing days — and maintained his double-digit lead over McMahon in the polls. This advantage, which has since narrowed considerably, led elated Democrats to conclude that if he could survive that kind of scandal with hardly a hiccup, then he could very likely survive anything McMahon might throw at him.
Near the end of my interview with McMahon, I asked her how exactly she intended to take on Blumenthal in a reliably Democratic state. What was her critique of a man the voters seemed to find eminently acceptable, even after his integrity had been called into question? McMahon didn’t hesitate.
“The voters in Connecticut are going to have a very clear choice in November,” she told me, describing Blumenthal as “a career politician” who has never created a single job. “He’s been in the lawsuit business. His business is suing people. My business is creating jobs. My business is adding and building to the economy. So it’s just a very clear choice.”
She paused and held up a hand to literally frame the choice for me. “The primary differences are career politician versus businesswoman,” McMahon said, sounding very much like a human bullet point.
If McMahon’s sleek storefront command center was the antithesis of what one would expect from a campaign office, then Blumenthal’s headquarters in downtown Hartford was depressingly predictable. It is just the kind of ground-floor suite that campaigns rent for nothing, with faded dingy walls and industrial-strength carpet to match, illuminated by yellowy fluorescent bulbs. When I met Blumenthal there, the day after my conversation with McMahon, he showed me into an office that was bare except for a couple of chairs and a battered wooden desk.
After decades on the immediate periphery of the state’s Democratic landscape, always next in line for a Senate seat but biding his time with the patience of a monk, Blumenthal is a recognizable brand in Connecticut. He doggedly shows up everywhere, listens attentively, takes copious notes and makes prudent statements. He has sued or subpoenaed tobacco companies and subprime-mortgage lenders, to name just a few, and even took on MySpace (in order to get the names of sex offenders) — a record of “standing up” for businesses and families that, more than any one issue, forms the basis of his pitch to voters. Surprisingly boyish for a man of 64, with prominent ears and squinty eyes, he comes across as earnest and a little robotic. “One of my most important strengths in this race is that people know me,” Blumenthal told me. “Not just from the TV, but personally. I’ve been to the parades and the fairs and the funerals and the christenings and, you know, places where people talk and interact.” He added, “I think that personal touch is still very important to people.”
Blumenthal said he can understand why Connecticut voters seemed enraged at anyone in power these days. “I feel the anger and frustration about the way Washington is failing to listen and to respond,” he said carefully. “And I share it, because I’ve fought it as well. So, you know, some of the sense of distance and frustration and even anger — I feel it as a public servant and as a citizen. It’s very well justified, and I share it.”
Blumenthal didn’t sound angry; he sounded as if he were dictating a letter. But this was his message, and he steered back to it no less than three more times in a 20-minute conversation. “So when people are angry and frustrated about what’s happening in Washington, they’re right,” he said at one point. “They’re dead right.” And then: “I’m an outsider to Washington.” And later: “I’m as frustrated and angry as anyone.”
Blumenthal has faithfully done the people’s business all these years, in a way that has apparently gratified them. But now that his moment has arrived, just having been in office for all that time turns out to be his most significant vulnerability. It may not help that Blumenthal just seems so stereotypically incumbent. Even if he hadn’t been in office for a quarter century already, it would probably feel as if he had.
The assault on Blumenthal’s Vietnam half-truths didn’t stick with the voters because it didn’t reinforce anything they already believed about him. This is how it is in politics; because the voters long ago decided that this Blumenthal guy they kept reading about was basically an honest sort, it will likely take more than a few misstatements to derail him. But the other argument that McMahon is just now beginning to make, that Blumenthal is your typical insider, a lifelong politician who just doesn’t get what they’re going through — this is an attack that might flower in the current environment, and he seems to know it.
And so perhaps Washington Democrats should be more concerned about McMahon and the challenge she presents. At a time when unemployment in the state hovers around 9 percent, voters may not especially care about McMahon’s yacht or whether she gave her wrestlers health care plans or tacitly encouraged them to shoot up steroids. (And, in any event, it’s doubtful they consider anything that happened at W.W.E. to be so much less respectable than the path traveled by some of the investment bankers and trial lawyers who have made it to the Senate.)
McMahon is a talented candidate, in the sense that she knows how to choose a point and drive it home, and you can bet she will spend the next six weeks hammering away at the center of the electorate — that is, at all those civic-minded former Republicans in Connecticut who routinely provide Democrats their margins of victory but who long for a better alternative. She has been careful not to box herself into any positions that might strike voters as kind of wacky, unlike the party’s Senate candidates in Kentucky (where Rand Paul qualified his support for the Civil Rights Act) and Nevada (where Sharron Angle has suggested that voters might look for “Second Amendment remedies” to a dysfunctional Congress). There is little Tea Party presence to speak of in Connecticut, and so McMahon was never caught having to take a stand on repealing the direct election of senators or anything like that. She is pro-choice and pro-stem-cell research, and she supports Connecticut’s right to codify gay marriages — all positions well within the mainstream of the state’s moderate electorate.
Blumenthal told me he takes “nothing for granted,” and apparently he means it. The day after I saw him, he left a phone message for my mother, who still lives in Trumbull. He knew my late father, a trial lawyer, and he wanted her to know he enjoyed talking with me, he said, and he left his home number. It was old-school, detail-oriented politics (what mother doesn’t want to hear kind words about her son?), and I had to admire the effort. But when I asked her about it later, my mother said she never called him back.
For the better part of three decades, from the years after World War II until his death in 1975, John Bailey was the most important man in Connecticut politics. Your classic cigar-chomping party boss of the industrial age, Bailey served as chairman of the state Democratic Party through five presidencies and as the party’s national chairman for seven years in the 1960s. He is said to have wielded nearly absolute power in the state’s urban wards, the force behind second-generation Irish, Italian and Jewish politicians who went on to long careers.
Paul Timpanelli, who runs Bridgeport’s business council — and who, as a young Democratic politician back in the 1980s, gave me my first summer internship — is just old enough to remember the tail end of that era, and over lunch at one of Bridgeport’s few really good downtown restaurants, he marveled at how party politics had changed. Specifically, Timpanelli was talking about how state Democrats failed to rally behind Dodd earlier this year — how they seemingly did not know how to offer an endangered incumbent, a man who served for 30 years in the Senate and became a giant of state politics, any incentive to seek re-election.
“John Bailey would have offered him the world, and he would have given the world,” Timpanelli told me. When I mentioned this to Dodd, he agreed. “The party apparatus didn’t seem to be there or know how to handle this,” he said, speaking of the erosion in his standing.
Party bosses like Bailey are a thing of the past in Connecticut, as most everywhere else. So is the party loyalty they inspired. As recently as 1982, Democrats in Connecticut made up 40 percent of the electorate, with Republicans making up about 27 percent and unaffiliated voters another third. By 2010, Democrats actually slipped a few points, to 37 percent, while Republican affiliation fell to 20 percent. Some 42 percent of the state’s voters now identify themselves as independent, a number that has been rising for 20 years.
Connecticut in my parents’ day was the kind of state in which institutions really mattered — religious congregations and city newspapers and insurance companies, garden clubs and the Knights of Columbus, with their towering headquarters in New Haven. Connecticut voters, like voters in a lot of the country, trusted in an established order that seemed to be working pretty well for them, but then people saw their cities and their industries collapse, and even the Catholic Church was tainted by scandal, and elected officials started selling their services for home improvements.
And this is what makes a Linda McMahon possible here and in other parts of America — not just her millions of dollars or the crippled economy, but the sense that the establishment has lost its credibility. It is something McMahon, having built a megaentertainment business without the imprimatur of cultural arbiters, intuitively understood about politics. The more her party’s leadership tried to write her off, the more Democrats scoffed at her candidacy, the more viable she became.
I was discussing the mood in the state recently with Tom D’Amore, a former state Republican chairman who has long since bolted the party, when suddenly he told me a story about his father, an Electrolux vacuum salesman who smoked more than a pack a day for most of his life. “One day, it must have been in the 1960s sometime, he just quit,” D’Amore told me. “Cold turkey. I said to him, ‘Dad, why did you suddenly decide to stop smoking?’ And I’ll never forget it. He pointed a finger at me” — and here D’Amore demonstrated by grimly pointing one at me — “and he said: ‘The surgeon general of the United States says smoking can kill you. And they wouldn’t lie about a thing like that.’
“I mean, can you imagine anyone saying that now?” D’Amore asked me. “In that generation, government really displayed by its actions that it was a force for good.” He leaned back in his chair and shook his head.
“Nobody here thinks that way anymore.”
Matt Bai is a national political columnist for The Times and a regular contributor to the magazine.
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