She made no mention of a mansion in Greenwich or a certain yacht named Sexy Bitch. Addressing worshipers in New Haven’s Bethel AME congregation, Linda McMahon instead spoke of a hardscrabble youth in North Carolina, a trailer-park kid named Vince, a personal bankruptcy — and an upcoming election.
She swayed to “Oh Happy Day.” She sang along from a hymnal to “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior.” She spoke from the pulpit about the life she and her husband built from the ashes of adversity. “Neither of us were born with silver spoons in our mouths,” she said. She quoted the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
“We can testify to the fact,” declared Senior Pastor Rev. Joseph A. Hooper, “that if nothing else, she is a nice lady.” And he invited her back to worship after November, win or lose.
Paul Bass Photo
Tasha Hunt, Linda McMahon, press aide Jodi Latina, and Alderman Darnell Goldson at Bethel Sunday.
In all, McMahon spent three and a half hours Sunday morning at two of New Haven’s oldest African-American churches just nine days before the Nov. 2 election as she continued to pursue an unconventional path to a U.S. Senate seat, rewriting the rules for the standard campaign playbook.
Candidates usually focus on their strongholds so close to an election. McMahon’s Democratic opponent, Richard Blumenthal, for instance, rallied his union base again Sunday with a rally at a different New Haven church. Republican McMahon, by contrast, devoted a crucial weekend morning to a city that votes religiously Democratic — especially neighborhoods like Dixwell, home to the two churches she visited; especially churches like Bethel AME, where Democrats, not Republicans, are usually found holding last-minute get-out-the-vote events. McMahon marched into what’s traditionally the Democratic Promised Land.
And when they make campaign stops with everyday people, candidates traditionally try to reach far broader audiences by convincing reporters to come along, to take pictures, to write articles, to broadcast video on TV. Church stops or small-business meet-and-greets are supposed to be set pieces for “earned media.” McMahon’s campaign left Sunday’s visits off her schedule. It didn’t notify any reporters in advance. The same as when the candidate visited African-American churches in Hartford the previous weekend. The same as when the candidate popped in on New Haven’s Broadway district retailers.
“This is an opportunity for her to get to know folks,” said a campaign press aide present at Bethel Sunday, former WTNH reporter Jodi Latina.
The McMahon campaign has successfully avoided exposing the candidate to packs of reporters since some such encounters went south a few weeks ago, as she wrestled with barrages of questions about her stands on the minimum wage, the health care reform law, and tax cuts. After the third and final debate with Blumenthal, she left the hall without the customary stop in the press room. She hasn’t held press conferences or notified the press corps as a group of any public events since.
Instead the campaign has sought to get out its job-focused and meet-Linda message on two levels other than “free media”: Carpet-bombing the airwaves with commercials. (McMahon is on track to spend $50 million on the campaign, a Connecticut record.) And “retail” campaigning on local Main Streets and in churches, with the hope that word of mouth can spread virally from people who meet the candidate without the filter of media. She has proved far more adept and comfortable speaking one on one or in small groups with everyday citizens than she has fielding questions from the press pack.
Sunday morning found her at Varick AME Zion Church on Dixwell Avenue, a one-time stop on the Underground Railroad during slavery. McMahon got a chance to address the hundreds of parishioners present. Pastor Eldren D. Morrison delivered a sermon on the theme “Keep on Running” — and the service kept going, for hours.
McMahon had planned to hit the Athenian Diner on Whalley Avenue by 9 or 9:15 to meet with black Democratic aldermen assembled by her top local supporter, West Rock Alderman Darnell Goldson. But the Varick visit kept her occupied until after 10, at which point she headed straight to Bethel AME on Goffe Street, a congregation founded in 1837.
Bethel administrative aide Tasha Hunt greeted McMahon to the church and ushered her to the sanctuary.
She let Rev. Hooper know in advance she needed to duck out sooner from the Bethel service. Still, she spent the better part of a half hour swaying and singing in a second-row pew, clearly enjoying herself; then delivering a low-key pitch that lasted under 10 minutes.
White politicians who speak at New Haven African-American church events sometimes try to mimic the cadences or rising-voice spiritual calls of their black hosts — with unconvincing results. McMahon spoke like McMahon, not like a wannabe black preacher. She nevertheless presented herself, a Republican Greenwich multi-millionaire, as someone whose life experiences offer common ground with the congregation’s. Speaking without notes, relaxed, she came across as comfortable in her own skin.
The accent helped. McMahon spoke of growing up in a family of modest means in New Bern, North Carolina. And she still sounds like it; she retains an unmistakable trace of a southern accent. As do many older members of black families in New Haven who moved here from North Carolina in the mid-20th century for jobs in once-thriving Winchester rifle and Sargent hardware factories.
McMahon downplayed politics, and played up her personal story. She spoke of living for her first few years in “low-to-moderate-income housing” near the army base where her dad worked as a shop foreman and her mom as a budget analyst. She told of how her dad “bought a little piece of land” and got help building “the little three bedroom house I grew up in sharing with my paternal grandmother.”
(Click on the play arrow at the top of the story to watch parts of her talk.)
“There was no mortgage. [Her father] had saved,” McMahon recalled. “That was the essence that I grew up with. He had never had a car payments. He never had a new car. But he always had a good car. I learned that kind of work ethic growing up.”
She said she met her future husband and World Wrestling Entertainment partner Vince McMahon while she was singing in a Baptist Church choir. She was 13. He was 16. “He walked in, and I thought he was kind of cute,” McMahon said. “… And if truth be told, I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to the sermon that day.”
That drew sympathetic laughter, as McMahon proceeded to describe Vince living in a trailer park and his parents divorcing. She spoke of their marriage, their business failures, including a bankruptcy, losing homes and cars and credit.
“We were able to come back,” she declared. “And you know what? It never got us down. We never felt defeated. It’s like Martin Luther King Jr. said, ‘Faith is taking that first step when you can’t see the whole staircase.’”
Throughout, McMahon subtly responded to the attacks on her leveled by Democrats: her overseeing a company that indirectly outsources jobs, that stages sex and violence-themed programs that show women being attacked. “We built an industry from a traveling road show to today a very responsible corporate citizen” traded on the New York Stock Exchange, she said.
McMahon didn’t even formally ask people to vote for her. She urged them to vote, period, for the candidate they believe will do the best job.
What will the visit buy her on Nov. 2? Blumenthal needs to excite the kind of audiences she — and not he — was meeting in New Haven Sunday. If she can not only suppress his base but pick off a few percentage points’ worth of new voters, the race could tighten.
Alderman Gerald Antunes gives up at the Athenian.
She may not pick up any more Democratic aldermen besides her prize recruit, Darnell Goldson.
Goldson convinced some fellow members of the Board of Aldermen’s Black and Hispanic Caucus to have breakfast with McMahon at the Athenian. The table was set at 9 a.m. Two of the aldermen failed to show after word got out that a reporter would be present. Only Gerald Antunes, who represents the Bishop Woods neighborhood, arrived. He nursed a cup of tea for an hour, then paid his bill at 10 and left.
The waiting table was never filled.
Antunes said it was unlikely he would have supported McMahon, anyway. He said he agreed to come because he wanted to hear what she had to say. He praised Blumenthal for “holding off on that negative stuff” until he had no choice but to respond to a barrage of negative ads from the McMahon camp. “I really like the work he has done as attorney general,” including his fight against tobacco companies, Antunes said.
He noted that Blumenthal, too, stiffed a group of black aldermen this week when they gathered for a planned meeting Thursday night at a Congress Avenue restaurant. He said the meeting is being rescheduled for this coming week.