Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

In Dan Carter, who is challenging Dick Blumenthal for a seat in the U.S. Senate, the State Republican Party may have found its “happy warrior,” a title the Democratic Party once bestowed on Hubert Humphrey. Looks and presence in politics are not everything, but they are not nothing. U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, whether he is debating or attending a garage sale, manages to look like the Old Man of the Mountain before the slide. Stiff, foreboding, resolute, unbudgeable – most especially on the matter of partial birth abortion, parental notification and the selling of baby parts, all issues that place him very far from his Connecticut constituents. And he is preachy, the very image of a Harvard-Yale educated aggressive Attorney General on the hunt for delinquent business owners, thought abortion in its grosser forms is the one profitable business in the United States that Blumenthal adamantly refuses to regulate.