Connecticut U.S. Senator Chris Murphy’s campaign walk-talk is 9 years old, according to the Hartford Courant.
Murphy’s
walk across Connecticut is supposed to be a listening tour. It should surprise
no one that Murphy, while talking to potential voters on his tour, hears what
he has been telling reporters so instantly ever since President Donald Trump defeated
Vice President Kamal Harris during the latest presidential campaign.
Here
is Murphy telling his reportorial Boswell what he has heard while wandering
through Connecticut: “I have run into a number of people who have been scared,
feeling a little powerless. A number of people stop me to ask what they should
be doing to try to stop him [Trump] from trampling our democracy with (young
adults) that worry that democracy won’t be around for their kids. It is a real,
intense worry that I hear and I believe that we are going to survive this
moment but it does require everybody to stand up and join the movement.”
Of
course, Murphy is not the first politician on record to have been entangled in a
junk-in-junk-out psychosis. Politicians the world over have trained themselves
to hear from their constituents precisely what they have been telling their
constituents ad nauseam during their
rise to political eminence. Stopping Trump from trampling our democracy into
the dust so that it will not be available for our bereft children has become a commonplace
meme among Democrats who have not yet
bathed in self-reflection.
This
is the overarching theme of a new book by Jake Tapper and, Alex Thompson – Original Sin: President
Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again -- that taunts Democrats
for having studiously avoided noticing during the late Joe Biden administration
that Biden was, to put it charitably, infirm.
If
Murphy has remarked on the book, his thoughts remain unshared with
Connecticut’s media and the many common folk he met during his walkathon.
The
answer to fear and loneliness on the campaign trail, Murphy often tells
reporters, is to join the movement spearheaded by Murphy and other
neo-progressive politicians.
“In
April, the senator warned on the Senate floor that attacks on journalists,
universities, lawyers and the business community are eroding the institutions
that hold leaders accountable,” the Courant tells us. “The senator has emerged
as a prominent voice in the Democratic party, joining town halls with U.S. Rep.
Maxwell Frost, D-Florida in Warren, Michigan; Saxapahaw, North Carolina;
Chesterfield, Missouri; and Sarasota, Florida to mobilize people nationally in
a movement to counter Trump and his policies. Murphy said mobilization is key,
explaining that it is not rocket science.”
During
his vote gathering trek through Connecticut that included a Town Hall meeting
in New Milford, Murphy visited a gaming store, Nutmeg Games, and struck up a
conversation with an employee, the Courant tells us, “about how the store hosts
events to connect people through gaming.”
Murphy,
now separated from his wife of 17 years, told the employee, “I think a lot and
write a lot about loneliness and the sort of disconnection from people right
now. This [frequenting the gaming parlor] is one of the ways that people
connect.”
Yes
indeed, politicians who surrender tried and true verities -- family, faith and fidelity to the truth –
will find themselves alone in crowds, because nothing is more impermanent than
political fads. The loneliest man in Russia from 1924 through 1953 was Joseph
Stalin, beloved by the crowds. In Edna St. Vincent Millay’s play Aria Da Capo, Pierrot, a quick change
clown, tells the ever faithful Columbine, “Don't stand so near me! I am become
a socialist. I love Humanity; but I hate people.”
There
is a message in that play for aspiring politicians suffering from second
childhoods.
Murphy
says he wants to mobilize the opposition. “Murphy said mobilization is key,
explaining that it is not rocket science. ‘These protests that are happening in
Hartford, and Danbury and other places around the state,’ he said. ‘They
matter. Eventually we need to go through a handful of Republicans that are
willing to stand up to this corruption,” spawned by Trump.
Chairman
of the Connecticut Republican Party Ben Proto, the Courant tells us, “disputed
Murphy’s assertions.” Proto responded, “I think Senator Murphy is fear
mongering. Quite frankly I talk to a lot of people around the state. That has
never come up.”
The
quasi-socialist policy positions of Democrats having been rejected stunningly
in the recently concluded presidential election, Democrats like Murphy find
themselves in the awkward position of mobilizing a vocal minority by revisiting
endlessly failed programs that enhance the already awesome powers of the state.
Good
luck with all that.
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