Hildegarde

I am embarked, at the moment, on a long series of revisions for a book, longer than the ones I’m usually asked to do.  We won’t go into that.

But since I’m not usually asked for anything this extensive, I hadn’t (until today) checked out the possibility of listening to music while I worked.

I know I can’t listen to music, even classical instrumental music, when I write for real.  Revising on this level seems to be to be halfway between writing and something else. 

Well, this morning I tried it, with Mozart’s Posthorn Serenade–okay, I have no idea if I’m spelling that correctly–and it turns out that all is well.  I can in fact revise with music.

So I’m a fairly happy camper at the moment.

Except, you know, for my usual neuroses and paranoia.

I am also finding myself in a rather odd position in terms of the coming election.

Let’s forget Romney and Obama for the moment.  I never took Romney seriously as a candidate.  I never thought he could win the election, no matter what he did.  He’s the ultimate dinosaur, extinct even if he doesn’t know it.  He’s a vision out of the Republican past and that past is not coming back. 

Look at it this way.  The membership of the Republican Party is now thoroughly split between the people who wanted to bail out the banks and the people who didn’t want to and did want to see a lot of bankers bankrupted and jailed.  That last group includes the Tea Party, the Evangelicals and the libertarians. 

I never did believe the line about how people only voted Republican because they were being hoodwinked by the capitalists.  And right now, there’s a good demonstration of why that line was never accurate.

But it’s not the Presidential race I want to talk about here. It’s the race for the Senate in my own state.

There’s a Senate seat open in Connecticut because Joe Lieberman–the guy who ran for VP with Gore–has decided to retire.  The Democrats have put up a guy named Chris Murphy.  Murphy happens to be my own Congressman.  The Republicans had a primary race, and ended up nominating a woman named Linda McMahon.

This was depressing from off, because there was a guy I would have been interested in voting for in the Republican field.  That was Chris Shays, who had also been a Congressman from Connecticut until redistricting plowed him under.

Shays was plowed under a second time by McMahon’s money machine, and she had lots of money–her own.  McMahon is the female half of the couple that made professional wrestling a cash machine, and she put mostly her own funds into the race and hammered until she got the nomination.

It was, in fact, the second time she’d done that.  She also ran against Richard Blumenthal for the open seat after Chris Dodd retired.

And she got creamed. 

At the time Blumenthal ran, he was probably the most popular State Attorney General in Connecticut’s history.  His constituent service was outstanding.  He had a clear record and he ran on it.

This time, something very odd is going on.

Murphy has been a Congressman for a while now, so I’ve got to assume he has a record somewhere. 

But his ads have said nothing at all about that record, one way or the other.

They have been, virtually exclusively, attacks on McMahon.

And in every single case in which I know the basis for the attack, they have been either outright lies, or misleading to the point where they might as well be outright lies.

There is, for instance, the story of the ads that accused McMahon of “not paying social security” for her “employees,” and denying them “health care coverage and disability benefits.”

This was so absurd–and so easily disproved by the public record–that those ads disappeared after a while, to be replaced by nearly identical ones that claimed all the same things but about her “wrestlers.”

The problem?

Professional wrestlers are actors.  And like other arts workers–writers, musicians, illustrators–they are not usually classified as “employees” but as “freelancers.”  Even long term standard contracts for most of these people do not result in the guy buying your services paying half your social security taxes or giving you health care or other benefits.

This has been the standard in arts professions for decades–a lot of decades.

There is a case to be made that this is not how the arts industries should operate.  And in some cases particular arrangements have been made to get arts workers one or another of the benefits involved.

But the fact is that McMahon was not only doing nothing wrong by paying her wrestlers in the way she did, she was following standard industry practice.

And the ad relies on the assumption that most of the people listening to it will be bone ignorant of that practice. 

Then there is the ad–filmed oddly in black and white, with only women speaking–that declares that Linda McMahon’s business “demeans women” and that she forced violent images on children and sold violent toys to them.

In other words:  that Linda McMahon was one of the founders and owners of the world’s largest professional wrestling companies. 

As if they think their viewers will not know what professional wrestling is.

This is also the ad that includes the statement that McMahon wants to abolish the Department of Education, which would wipe out “early childhood education” funding and Pell Grants.

But that’s simply not true.  Abolishing the Department would not necessarily abolish any program.  Pell Grants existed before the Department existed.  The Department didn’t establish them.  It just administers them.

I won’t go into the rest of this nonsense–Linda McMahon supports a “radical Republican” proposal that would allow employers to deny women coverage for contraception!

Yes, she does, and so do I.  It’s not radical at all.  It’s the free exercise of religion, and the Constitution guarantees it. 

And this, too, is based on the assumption of voter ignorance.  The voters these ads are going after mostly approve of the religious exemption to the contraception mandate, and Murphy’s people must know it.

But the biggest and most bewildering aspect of all this is the fact that Murphy’s ads consistently call her “CEO Linda McMahon.”

I mean, really?

The woman started a successful company and ran it.   I think that’s the good news.  Does Murphy honestly think that voters will reject a candidate solely because she’s been a success?  They’re not coming out w ith any wrongdoing, or with scandals, or anything else.  Linda McMahon and her company pulled themselves up out of bankruptcy and founded a successful company.  In my book, that’s a good thing.

McMahon’s ads have, of course, also slammed Murphy for various things.  The difference is that the charges they make against Murphy are entirely verifiable–that he took campaign cash from a bank and then voted (from his seat on the banking committee) to hand that bank a bailout, and the bank later gave him a great rate on a new mortgage, in spite of the fact that his last mortgage company had to sue him for nonpayment; that he missed something like two thirds of his committee meetings.

Whenever McMahon’s people put out one of these ads, Murphy’s throw out ads about how she’s “lying.”  Then the local press–newspapers and even the local NPR station–check into it and verify her facts, and she puts out an ad quoting them.

And McMahon also puts out ads that outline what she wants to do and what her political philosophy his. 

After a while, the skew of the Murphy campaign became so bizarre that the press began to comment on it.  The local NPR station  did a story where they tried to figure out why Murphy wasn’t running on his record–why there hadn’t been any mention of that record, or of his political philosophy, for all the months the campaign had been ongoing.

Murphy responded with what I think of as a “kittens and puppies” ad–lots of fuzzy happy children and small things and an urgent message to preserve the future for them, without anything like the details of how Murphy expected to do that.

Those ads correspond to the very first one the Murphy campaign put out, where he and his wife are shown walking through a grocery store and his wife talks about  how they can’t stop because constituents always have so much to say to them.

There was, in those ads, once again nothing about what in particular Chris Murphy has done or intends to do.

The only think that makes sense to me in all this is that the Murphy campaign must be completely and utterly panicked that he’s going to lose the election.

But I can’t understand why.

This is Connecticut.  It’s one of the bluest states in the Union.  We don’t usually vote Republican.

And this is Connecticut in another way, too.  Ann Coulter put it crudely when she was opposing McMahon in the primary–this is prep school and Ivy League central.  Connecticut voters are not going to get behind somebody whose claim to fame is as low rent as professional wrestling.

Chris Murphy may do what nobody else could. 

The ads are so bad and so relentlessly dishonest, he’s probably doing McMahon more good than her own campaign could even if it always ran on optimal.