Paul Bass Photo
East Haven Mayor April Capone Almon (at right) asked people to pony up for Blumenthal.
Richard Blumenthal kicked off the next chapter of Connecticut’s U.S. Senate race in Independent Voter Country with a swipe at his opponent’s decision to pour her personal wealth into the race. The chapter’s emerging title: Who’s The True Angry Populist?
“The people of Connecticut want this to be an election, not an auction,” Blumenthal declared to 350 supporters gathered Sunday evening at a campaign barbecue. “And we’re going to make sure that people like you matter more than money.”
Blumenthal chose East Haven’s Village at Mariner’s Point condos overlooking Long Island Sound for a “kick-off” barbecue for the general election campaign now that the primary season has ended. Democrat Blumenthal is facing Republican Linda McMahon for the seat being vacated by U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd. McMahon, a former World Wrestling Entertainment executive, has vowed to pour $40 million to $50 million into her campaign; she already spent over $20 million to win her party’s nomination in last week’s primary.
An Independent Bellwether
Both candidates have already devoted extra attention to East Haven, a 28,000-population blue-collar town just over New Haven’s eastern border. McMahon opened her Third U.S. Congressional District headquarters in town, not in a Republican stronghold like North Haven. Blumenthal was just in town for another event three weeks ago.
The candidates have lavished attention on East Haven for a reason: It mirrors the challenge they face in the general election, in which unaffiliated voters, Connecticut’s largest “party,” hold the key to power. The state has 832,725 people who registered as unaffiliated with either major party, compared with 742,980 registered Democrats and 412,155 registered Republicans. Independent/unaffiliated voters dominate East Haven, too: 8,234, compared to 6,240 Democrats and 2,621 Republicans, as of last Oct. 27. And voters tend to pick candidates, not parties, on election day: They keep sending liberal Democrat Michael Lawlor to the state House of Representatives, for instance, and conservative Republican Len Fasano to the State Senate.
“East Haven is a bellwether. Whoever wins there usually wins the state,” observed former State Republican Party Chairman Chris DePino, who moved to the town this year. He noted that East Haveners voted for both Republican Gov. John Rowland and Democratic U.S. President Bill Clinton.
And as East Haven Mayor April Capone Almon put it Sunday, the fiscally conservative, socially moderate town is prime territory for knock-down drag-out campaigns like the one brewing for U.S. Senate, with some of the highest voter turnouts in the state. “The town sport is not football. It’s not soccer of lacrosse like in some other towns,” Almon said. “The town sport is politics. And it’s full contact.”
Outsider Jostling
In East Haven, as in the state as a whole, Blumenthal and McMahon are laying claim to the populist mantle in order to lure independents disgusted with the two major parties and with Washington. Their competing claims mirror the emerging tacks taken by Democrats and Republicans nationally this unpredictable election year, with decidedly divergent definitions of “outsiders” and “fighters.”
McMahon has sought to portray herself as an outsider taking on untrustworthy, insider politicians — noting that Blumenthal has served as state attorney general for 20 years and was caught by The New York Times misstating his military service during Vietnam.
Blumenthal, meanwhile, devoted his remarks Sunday to his record fighting corporate special interests like the insurance industry and portraying McMahon as one of those interests — a corporate executive trying to purchase a U.S. Senate seat with her personal wealth.
“We’re going to be outspent. We’re not going to be outworked,” the candidate declared.
“People are angry and frustrated. They feel Washington isn’t listening. Washington isn’t working. They are right,” Blumenthal said. “What I want to do is change Washington, make sure that sweetheart deals and giveaways to the big energy companies and the pharmaceutical industries and all the special interests are stopped …
“And I know how to fight them. We stopped them in Broadwater [when he and shoreline towns opposed a natural gas plant in the Sound]. We recovered money from the pharmaceutical drug companies. We fought the tobacco companies. We fought the health insurance companies when they denied insurance to people who deserved it.”
McMahon spokesman Ed Patru called it an “insult” to “some of the most intelligent and educated voters in the country” to suggest that a candidate can buy their support.
“If Linda sat back in a La-Z-Boy and threw money at this race without doing anything else, she would have lost long ago,” he said. “She’s done over 660 meetings and events — she’s simply outworking everyone, and she’s getting in front of voters.” He added that the money she’s spending brings her “parity” with a public official who has built his name recognition for over 20 years.
The Populist Tax Mantle
Like Republican candidates in other states, McMahon hopes to use the pending expiration of former President George W. Bush’s tax cuts as a palette from which to paint her Democratic opponent as a foe of tax-weary voters. McMahon has called for for Congress to extend all of the temporary cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003.
Democrats like Blumenthal, meanwhile, will either find themselves on the defensive, portrayed as liberal taxers; or they’ll go on the offensive, portraying Republicans as advocates for tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy who don’t pay their fair share.
Blumenthal didn’t mention taxes once in his remarks Sunday. Asked about the issue after his speech, he came out for preserving cuts for all taxpayers except those at the very top of the income scale. He called for preserving tax credits for day care and “small business,” the latter because of their central role in creating jobs. Democrats are generally calling for letting temporary cuts expire for the marginal rates for the top 2 percent of taxpayers earning over $250,000 a year and return to where they were during the Clinton administration.
Asked about estate taxes, Blumenthal similarly said he’s support extend some of the Bush-era cuts but not for the wealthy. He didn’t elaborate on the cut-offs. (Click on the play arrow to watch his responses.”
He said that renewing tax cuts for top earners, as McMahon has advocated, would “balloon the deficit”
McMahon spokesman Patru responded that McMahon would accompany an extension of tax cuts with $1.3 trillion of federal budget cuts, including a “freeze on all new hires and new pay increases” and the bank-bailout and economic stimulus plans.
Like Blumenthal, Patru cast the tax debate in light of job creation. He said that the estate tax and capital gains tax benefit the middle class as well as small businesses, which create jobs. “Independents are looking for economic recovery and jobs and the reason Dick Blumenthal continues to lose support among this critical voting bloc is because he’s admitted he can’t explain why unemployment is so high, he’s never created a single job and he thinks lawsuits create jobs,” Patru argued.
Former GOP Chairman DePino said the jobs and taxes issue can swing either way in East Haven.
Voters there are looking for “job opportunities for their children and grandchildren” and for tax “stability,” not necessarily tax cuts, he argued.
“Republicans are missing the boat with, ‘I’m going to lower your taxes.’ That doesn’t hunt anymore,” DePino argued.
2 Republicans
No independent voters were encountered in a brief sampling of supporters at Sunday’s barbecue. Some Republicans were spotted.
One of them, Barbara Natarajan (at left in photo) of East Haven, said she votes “for the person, not the party.” She voted for Republican presidential candidate John McCain in 2008. She’s voting for Democrat Blumenthal for Senate, she said. “He’s tough. He doesn’t back down. He takes on big business.”
The McMahon-Blumenthal battle for independents may come down to who is influenced by McMahon’s TV advertising and newcomer/ outsider image; and who has personally met Blumenthal over his non-stop 20-year tour of the state or has personally benefited from having him take up their problems with about insurance or government bureaucracies. Grateful constituents are the the emerging stars of his ads.
Put Republican Alfred DeRosa of Northford in the latter category.
He came to Sunday’s barbecue to support Blumenthal because Blumenthal settled a problem his wife Linda DeRosa (at right in photo) had at a Hamden nursing home. She got fired — on a pretext, she said, so that the company could avoid paying a workmen’s compensation claim. She told Blumenthal’s attorney general office. The office got her compensation claim approved and her “record cleared,” she said.
“I want to give him a check,” Alfred DeRosa said, looking at Blumenthal shaking hands a few feet away. “Do I just give it to him?”
Joe Santino was kept busy grilling the hamburgers, Hebrew National hot dogs, and Boca vegan burgers at the barbecue. All three offerings went as fast as he could flip them.
Money and corruption are ruining the land, crooked politicians betray the working man, pocketing the profits and treating us like sheep, and we're tired of hearing promises that we know they'll never keep.
Ray Davies