Two New Takes on Linda McMahon: The $$$ Analyst and the Frother

[posted 6/22/10 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]


The Connecticut Mirror’s Deirdre Shesgreen has combed the personal financial disclosures of Linda McMahon, Richard Blumenthal, and Peter Schiff, and concluded: “No matter who wins this race, any of these candidates would likely rank among the top ten richest lawmakers in Congress in terms of household wealth.” See “U.S. Senate candidates disclose assets,” http://www.ctmirror.org/story/6515/blumenthalmcmahonfinances.

All good info. What is missed here, and probably not intended, is a question above and beyond whether super-rich politicians can relate to average voters. The Linda McMahon challenge involves whether a self-funded candidate is performing an act of civic hygiene, or simply of personal vanity, when she uses her wealth to short-circuit conventional means of building a campaign and claiming a constituency.

Meanwhile, an online publication called American Thinker has published a loopy essay headlined “Linda McMahon and the Triple-Damn Stinger Splash.” See http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/06/linda_mcmahon_and_the_tripleda_1.html.

The author, Stuart Schwartz, teaches in the School of Communication at Jerry Falwell-founded Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. The school’s website describes its mission as striving “to educate competent, committed Christians in the art, theory and technology of communication.”

Professor Schwartz’s piece is best described as the sort of thing the Hartford Courant’s Kevin “Don’t Call Linda McMahon My Mouthpiece” Rennie might have turned out during a night of debauchery with Timothy Leary. “Triple Damn Stinger Splash”? It’s hard to top an aging born-again hipster. Linda, apparently, woke up one morning and spontaneously realized that she had both a precise vision of what ails the nation and the precise skills to fix it. And any deviation from this tidy narrative is elitist. If nothing else, the money-grubbing kitsch queen of Campaign 2010 may have found her Teddy White.


Irv Muchnick