Start for Big Name in Conn. Senate Race
HARTFORD — Richard Blumenthal’s campaign for the Senate was supposed to be a glide. Nothing and no one could stop him.
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Richard Blumenthal is in the race to succeed Senator Christopher J. Dodd.
As the Connecticut attorney general, Mr. Blumenthal, a Democrat, had been sticking up for consumers and middle-class families for 20 years, with widely embraced crusades against easily demonized foes: pedophiles, used-car dealers, utility companies and, even here in the insurance capital of the world, insurers.
No politician in the state had anything close to Mr. Blumenthal’s popularity. So when he jumped into the race to succeed Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrats in Washington immediately crossed the seat off their list of ones to worry about.
But signs of trouble have quickly emerged.
Mr. Blumenthal flopped in his first televised debate against an obscure primary opponent, and he is ruling out any possibility of a rematch.
He appears almost incapable of offering concise answers to even the most predictable questions, like why he is running for the Senate.
And his reliance on prosecutorial parlance and legal arcana has raised unflattering comparisons to another attorney general in a Senate race who seemed a sure winner only to lose in spectacular fashion. Some Democrats are calling him “Martha Coakley in pants,” referring to the candidate who lost the Massachusetts Senate election in January.
“He’s getting into very much unscripted territory, which is not something he’s used to,” said Peter G. Kelly, a Hartford lawyer and Democratic elder statesman who once was the party’s national finance chairman.
Mr. Kelly said years of one-sided news conferences had left the attorney general unaccustomed to challenge.
“He’s got to be able to take attacks, deal with them appropriately and hand them back,” Mr. Kelly said. “He’s not really been tested at that.”
Nationally, Democrats still express confidence about holding on to the seat, and polls show that Mr. Blumenthal, 64, has a prohibitive lead against all comers.
But the Democrats admit to some nervousness, in part because of the Republican he is most likely to confront next fall: the professional-wrestling impresario Linda McMahon. She promises a campaign much like her brand of entertainment, with blunt, in-your-face, emotional appeals and attacks.
And Ms. McMahon has vowed to spend as much as $50 million, about five times what Mr. Blumenthal can muster.
Mr. Blumenthal’s combat readiness has been questioned before. In 2005, Gov. M. Jodi Rell’s advisers let it be known that she would relish a challenge from the attorney general, who they said had a “glass jaw.”
Still, his halting style as he pursues the Senate seat is striking.
In an interview last week, Mr. Blumenthal took nearly 10 minutes to answer a question about why, aside from personal ambition, he wanted to be a senator, using much of that time to say why the job of attorney general had been a “perfect fit” for his skill set and passions. He eventually got across that he hoped to advance in the Senate the causes he has pursued as attorney general by changing federal law.
“But this is kind of a long-winded answer and not a terribly cogent one,” he acknowledged, unprompted.
His biggest blunder at the debate, on March 1, occurred when his opponent for the Democratic nomination, Merrick Alpert, rhetorically asked Mr. Blumenthal how many jobs his office’s lawsuits had created. Mr. Blumenthal took the bait. “Our lawsuits, our legal actions, actually create jobs,” he said, smiling earnestly. “Because businesses actually welcome competition and a level playing field.”
Jobs are the biggest issue in Connecticut, as nearly everywhere else this election cycle. But Connecticut is one of only two states — the other is Michigan — where employment has fallen in the decades since Mr. Blumenthal took office. His critics argue that his attacks on corporations have helped cement the state’s image as unfriendly to business.
And in January, a jury bolstered that argument, handing an $18 million verdict to a woman who said Mr. Blumenthal had unfairly destroyed her business through false accusations. (His office is seeking to have the verdict overturned.)
Scalded by the criticism of his early campaign performance, Mr. Blumenthal this week announced the hiring of an experienced campaign manager, Mindy Myers, who ran the Obama campaign in New Hampshire and served as chief of staff for Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island.
In the interview, Mr. Blumenthal acknowledged that he was rusty but said that he would raise his game. “I may not be perfect at the outset,” he said, “but I’m certainly going to be tougher and smarter and better at each of these challenges.”
He insisted that he had been tested before and had always come through. “When I first ran for attorney general, I figured, ‘Harvard, Yale, United States attorney, state legislator and all the credentials — I’m there,’ ” he said. “And I had a lot of work to do. And I did it.”
Mr. Blumenthal could be forgiven for having been impressed with himself back then. After Harvard, he worked for Daniel Patrick Moynihan at the White House under President Richard M. Nixon. At 24, he made the front page of The New York Times when he rejected Nixon’s offer to have him lead Vista, the domestic version of the Peace Corps, because he opposed Nixon’s policies. Yale Law, a Supreme Court clerkship and a job with Senator Abraham A. Ribicoff followed, before the senator recommended him for United States attorney in 1977. He was all of 31.
The race for attorney general in 1990, when Mr. Blumenthal was a state senator, was indeed a close contest, in which he edged out a popular colleague, Jay B. Levin.
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