Murphy's Starting To Look Like Underdog

Thursday dawned gray and rainy for Democrats in Connecticut.

The previous night, a wooden replica of President Obama stood before the nation blinking helplessly while Mitt Romney became the life of the party.

And when their eyelids fluttered opened in the morning, awaiting them was a Q poll in which Linda McMahon had closed the tiny gap between herself and Chris Murphy.

It might be time to sit the kids down and say, "Jason and Apple, there's a possibility that our state may elect someone ridiculously unqualified to serve for six years in the Senate, someone whose sole contributions to humankind, heretofore, have been smut and moronic simulated violence, followed by a last minute — don't cry, Apple, we all have to be brave right now — a last-minute burnishing of her smudgy reputation with a blizzard of charitable contributions."

It could be worse. The seat has been occupied by a person whose behavior over time has closely approximated that of the devious Norse god Loki, a person whose deepening indifference to the state of Connecticut has been exceeded only by his preening vanity and his Brokebackian obsession with John McCain.

When you look at it that way, Linda's gonna be an upgrade.

Can Murphy punch his way out this soggy mess? In the words of Jim Lehrer, "Um, I think … uhhh … maybe."

His opportunity begins on this Sunday morning when he and McMahon square off in their first debate. McMahon will be expertly coached, and she's not stupid. And she's like a fighter who's ahead on all three cards in the late rounds. She doesn't need to knock Murphy out in the debates, while he has no choice but to stalk her around the ring, looking for the haymaker and thus exposing himself to further harm. (I've seen a lot of fighters get knocked out when they urgently needed to knock the other guy out.)

Murphy has several big, chronic problems.

1. He's got no true focus. Most successful politicians have one or two big things they're known for at a Rorschach level. Look up yonder to the Bay State. This is Elizabeth Warren's first race, but she's the brainy lady who saw the financial crisis coming and tried to do something about it. Closer to home, McMahon has spent three years and $65 million on a North Korean indoctrination program ramming one central point into our skulls. I don't know about you, but I think Linda is a job creator. Can I have my food pellet now? Murphy doesn't have that. He is what Bill Parcells would call a JAC (Just Another Congressman).

2. Even though it seems like tired and chewed-over material, it was a tactical mistake not to have in place a plan for making the WWE's record of trafficking in human abomination a big issue. What's especially baffling is that the Democrats do not have their own hardened-off video platform on which they can display the clips of the woman forced (by McMahon's husband) to strip to her underwear and walk around the ring on all fours barking like a dog and the clips of other women wrestling in bra and panties and the clip of the famous simulated necrophilia sequence and the multitudinous clips of hulking steroidal men beating the snot out of each other while the crowd hoots and bays like animals in heat. Some of that stuff should even be on TV in negative ads. Let the McMahon lawyers go to court over what constitutes "fair use" of their content to illustrate a point. (I think that's a winnable case for the Democrats, especially when the fair use is part of the highly privileged caste of free speech.) That the people unwise enough to work for her have been thrust into a hellish alternative actuarial table of poor health and early death is also an issue. Not a central issue but an issue.

3. Where is the help? Intervention from outside the state is a double-edged sword at best. Some of those people could screw up a one-car funeral on the Berlin Turnpike, but still: why is Warren a national project in a way that Murphy is not?

I blame Loki. His final revenge is this sleepy enchantment of his former party.


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