Is Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s ‘eternal’ reign finally over?
Blumenthal may be heading toward the end of his time in the Senate, but it depends on whether a Republican candidate will use his disapproval rating to their advantage.
Could Connecticut be tiring of its senior U.S. senator, Richard Blumenthal? That’s the implication of last week’s Quinnipiac University poll, which found the senator’s job performance approved by only 45% of respondents and disapproved by 43%. Connecticut’s junior senator, Chris Murphy, didn’t do so much better, winning approval by 45-37.
Blumenthal has held elective office in Connecticut for 37 years, ever since 1985, when Stamford sent him to the state House of Representatives and then the state Senate, whereupon he leapt to five elections for 20 years as state government’s top lawyer, where one of his young children understood him to be the “eternal general.” Now, at 76, older than Donald Trump, Blumenthal is nearing the end of his second six-year term in the Senate and seeking a third in this November’s election.
The phenomenon implied by the Quinnipiac poll is hardly new. The ancient Athenian statesman Aristides, who was exiled from the city he long had faithfully served, is said to have encountered an illiterate constituent who did not recognize him and so sought help in writing Aristides’ name on a ballot for banishment. Aristides asked: Had the man somehow been offended by Aristides? No, the man replied. He was just tired of hearing people speak about “Aristides the Just.” As requested and just to the last, Aristides wrote his name on the man’s banishment ballot and was sent into exile.
Blumenthal was hardly the first state attorney general to make a show of bringing suit against every supposed fraud or mistake in the state or national marketplace. As “eternal general,” he just carried on with it longer than most as he waited and waited for the Democratic nomination he prized to open up. He twice could have had his party’s nomination for governor, but governors have to do actual work and can’t always choose their issues, while being a senator is mainly posturing.
Indeed, for more than a decade as Blumenthal has waxed indignant almost every day about all sorts of little things without taking much notice of stupid imperial wars, the decline of the family and education, roaring inflation, and the conglomeration of the economy. He had political reasons to avoid the more important issues.
Those stupid wars sustain Connecticut’s big military contractors. The decline of the family and education sustains the Democratic Party’s army, the government employee unions, many of whose members minister expensively to family and education failure. Inflation is how government’s new extraordinary patronage is being financed without explicit taxes. And no one who has married into a fabulously wealthy family and thereby become the fifth richest senator can get too upset about the worsening concentration of wealth. Blumenthal says his strange participation last December in a Communist Party testimonial dinner in New Haven arose from a misunderstanding.
Lately, Blumenthal may be best known as the most vehement advocate of unrestricted abortion. In this, he has benefited greatly from journalism’s refusal to ask critical questions about late-term abortion and parental notification, letting the senator appeal to abortion fanatics while obscuring that his positions are contrary to the views of most of his constituents.
There are many potential issues for a campaign against Blumenthal, including his support for a president whose own approval rating in Connecticut, according to the Q poll, is negative 40-56.
But can a Republican challenger press these issues?
The candidate endorsed by the Republican State Convention, former state House Minority Leader Themis Klarides, has a moderate record and in a poll two weeks ago trailed Blumenthal by only 10 points, 50-40. But Klarides still has to win a primary election, has little campaign funding, can be as shrill as Blumenthal himself and, maybe most important, despite her shrillness has not had much of substance to say.
For the moment, the zinger of the Senate campaign belongs to Republican primary challenger Leora Levy, a member of the party’s national committee, whose radio commercial notes that the Democrats “closed the schools and opened the borders.”
But Levy poses as a fan of Donald Trump, which, while it may profit her in the primary, may disqualify her in the election and thereby help Blumenthal become the eternal senator.