If money is everything, the rest is nothing

Conferring their endorsements over the weekend, delegates to the Republican state convention were happily seduced by money, choosing a pretty rich guy, former Ambassador Tom Foley, for governor and, for U.S. senator, maybe the richest woman in the state, wrestling entrepreneur Linda McMahon. Now there will be primary elections and all Connecticut Republicans will have a chance to help confer the nominations. Will money be just as seductive then?

The prospect of the virtually infinite money behind McMahon’s candidacy was all the more seductive at the Republican convention on account of her having just had a hand in gravely wounding the supposedly unassailable Democrat running for senator, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal. Apparently it was the McMahon campaign’s extensive “opposition research� that found Blumenthal pretending, among audiences of military veterans, to be a Vietnam veteran — pretending even on a videotape forwarded to The New York Times.

McMahon’s lack of political participation and any record in public life, her presuming to start at the top, her financial contributions to Democratic congressional campaigns and the grotesque sleaze of her business are hard to overlook. But with Blumenthal’s big lead in the polls suddenly cut to almost nothing and his image transformed from stiff-necked integrity to pathetic phoniness, Republican delegates just as suddenly could overlook McMahon’s deficiencies as they dreamed of tens of millions of dollars being spent on television and radio commercials and mass mailings attacking Blumenthal.

One set of commercials and mailings surely will replay the video of Blumenthal’s “misspeaking� about Vietnam and display the many newspaper clippings falsely describing Blumenthal as a Vietnam veteran.

Another set may express outrage at the fantastic patronage the attorney general’s office arranged in Connecticut’s share of the national tobacco lawsuit — what ended up as $65 million divided among Blumenthal’s former law firm, the law firm of his former partner’s wife and the law firm that represented then-Gov. John G. Rowland, the latter share buying Republican silence.

Maybe another set will dissect the Blumenthal family fortune, which somewhere may include a mutual fund that owns shares in Gulf of Mexico despoiler British Petroleum or world economy despoiler Goldman Sachs — or even World Wrestling Entertainment.

If McMahon really is prepared to spend $30 million or more showing Connecticut some perspectives on Blumenthal that the state’s fawning news media have largely declined to pursue, no response may be very effective. After his 20-year free ride as attorney general, during which his own targets felt similarly overwhelmed by his command of the media, Blumenthal may have such character assassination coming. But does Connecticut? For its price may be six years of McMahon in the Senate.

Of course every political campaign involves money and propaganda. But in most campaigns they combine with some substance, experience and character. With its Senate endorsement the Republican convention has just discarded the latter elements. If money is everything, everything else is nothing.

Maybe it’s because they find McMahon so hideous that liberal journalists are contorting themselves to make excuses for Blumenthal’s Vietnam posing. Or maybe it’s only because McMahon is a Republican.

These liberal journalists insist or want to believe that Blumenthal just made a few slips of the tongue, that he didn’t mean to deceive, that his telling the truth about his military service much of the time negates his lying or misleading some of the time. It’s as if these journalists never heard of a politician’s tailoring his message to his audience, saying one thing to one audience and something different to another.

Vietnam fibbers in politics are legion and it is impossible for both Blumenthal and those liberal journalists not to have heard of them. No honest politician — indeed, no merely sane politician — talks about his military service in the context of Vietnam without the greatest care.

Further, while Blumenthal has been fully accessible to journalists — or was, prior to this scandal — he also has been most calculating and precise with his words, and probably the least candid major officeholder in the state.

But defending his politics and their own, his friends in the press argue that he couldn’t have known what he was doing. They may know what they’re doing anyway.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.