World Wrestling Entertainment, a company the McMahons transformed into a sort of Disney for the age of postindustrial American anger.
The typist goes on to bemoan (Or something, who can tell w/ the objective nostalgiast?) that Connecticut is not what it was, especially in his parents' day, as illustrated by that vulgar Linda "Ball Buster" McMahon, illustrated here busting someone "in the groin area."
Onstage, a tableau of supporters carefully constructed for television in the way of modern campaigns — nonwhite faces up front, directly behind the candidate — stood assembled under a banner that read, blandly, “It’s Time for Something Different.” Just behind the lectern, alongside other family members, loomed McMahon’s ponytailed, R.V.-size son-in-law, the wrestler known as Triple H. Then a state senator, Len Fasano, delivered one of the more bizarre political orations I had ever heard, getting himself so worked up that he apparently forgot which state he served and introduced the crowd to “the next U.S. senator from the great state of New York!”
The 61-year-old candidate herself walked onstage in a pink suit and pearls, looking for all the world like the president of the Fairfield P.T.A., and proceeded to deliver a victory speech that was sort of amazing for its amalgamation of clichés and a complete, almost defiant, lack of substance.
“I had a great fear that the American dream was in the greatest jeopardy that it has ever been in our lifetime, and I didn’t want to lose that opportunity for the American dream for our children and our grandchildren.”
“The great communicator Ronald Reagan had it right, but this president and this Congress have it wrong!”
“This campaign has never been about the political pundits or the establishment. This campaign is about you!”
And so on. Then McMahon strode off the stage to Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.”
Such a spectacle might not seem out of place in a state like California, where millionaires and celebrities are always jumping into the fray, or in one like Minnesota, where popular revolt seems to come in waves. But this is Connecticut, my home state, where the business of campaigns and governance used to be a predictable, serious affair, the province of mostly estimable public servants who worked their way up through town councils or local party machines. Sometimes called the Land of Steady Habits, Connecticut was never a place for garish campaigns and outsize characters with bank statements to match.
Until recently, the closest thing Connecticut experienced to an overturning of the political order, at least in modern times, was the revolt over a state income tax in the early 1990s. So incensed were the voters then that they replaced their moderate governor, the former longtime senator Lowell Weicker, with a more conservative career politician, a three-term congressman named John Rowland . Take that, status quo!
That, however, was before Rowland and a small cadre of other Connecticut officeholders were hauled away to prison on corruption charges; before Democrats ousted Joe Lieberman from the party only six years after they nominated him for the vice presidency; before the politicians in Hartford blew a hole the size of Long Island Sound in the state budget. As I watched McMahon’s hopeful supporters file out of the ballroom clutching their tote bags, I found myself wondering: when, exactly, did genteel Connecticut become Louisiana? And if politics could get this weird here, then what did that mean for the rest of the country?
Not a bad question. If anyone reads far enough to figure it out, let us know.
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