Opinion

Connecticut is ready to rumble

Of this season’s crazy, contentious, wide-open Senate races — in Ohio, Florida, California, Arizona, Nevada — none is as wild as what’s going on in Connecticut. In one corner: Democrat Richard Blumenthal, 64, state attorney general since 1991 and favored to win, up by over 40 points in the polls until this spring, when he was caught lying about having served in Vietnam. In the opposing corner: Republican Linda McMahon, 61, until last fall the CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), billionaire and political neophyte.

Since spending $22 million of her fortune, McMahon beat out GOP contenders Peter Schiff (campaign slogan: “Schiff Happens” — seriously) and former congressman and decorated Vietnam vet Rob Simmons, who’d been drafted by the party to run. Ultimately, he lost the party’s backing — to McMahon — for the primary. Simmons suspended his cash-poor campaign in May, then re-entered a few weeks ago, showing up at Connecticut commuter hubs and passing out potholders, a sadly literal example that, for him, there was no issue “too hot to handle.”

McMahon won Tuesday’s primary with 49% of the vote and has since shrunk Blumenthal’s formerly capacious lead to 7 points. She spent three hours on Wednesday morning, beginning at 6 a.m., sitting in front of a camera, doing interviews via satellite with outlets nationwide. She has suddenly become a political supernova, one to watch, and she has done it by positioning herself as the quintessential outsider, sick of politics as usual, quid-pro-quos, the ever-expanding reach of the federal government.

And mailers. Lots of mailers.

“I got interested after getting 20 or 30 of them,” says Rick Wagner, a middle-aged independent. He and his wife Carole, a Republican, have come to hear McMahon address a small group of voters and businesspeople at the Chamber of Commerce in Simsbury, a suburb of West Hartford in which everything — from law offices to Starbucks — is housed in gut-renovated, centuries-old white clapboard houses. Except for a vagrant by the side of the road asking drivers to “pull over to impeach Obama!” everything is eerily orderly. The men are well-moisturized, the women well-manicured, the 50-something hostess in a headband and “Mad Men”-style sundress. Yet the 12 or so people in this basement office — stuffy despite two softly whirring fans on the floor — are very concerned.

What does Linda think about health-care reform? “I’d like to repeal it,” she says.

Illegal immigration? “I don’t believe in amnesty, but you can’t deport everyone,” she says. She’d like to see stricter fines and penalties for employers, maybe make illegals carry electronic key cards with them everywhere.

What’s the key difference between her and Blumenthal? “He’s clearly liberal big-government,” she says. “I’m clearly conservative small-government. It’s a real clear choice in that regard.”

On what committees would she like to serve? “Health, education,” she says. But what she’d really like is “to be involved with defense.”

She stands in the center of the room for nearly 40 minutes, in her sleeveless green watercolor-print dress, gold metallic flats, chunky stone necklace and expensively highlighted hair. She does not perspire, politely declines repeated offers of a glass of water. She is on-message.

“I hate the old, ‘I’ll do you a favor, you do me a favor,’ ” she tells the rapt group. “It should really be about: What’s the right thing to do?”

Linda McMahon and her husband, WWE founder Vince McMahon, live in Greenwich. Born and raised in North Carolina (she still speaks with a southern drawl), she met Vince when she was just 13; he was 16. By the time she was 18, they were married. Vince went to work with his father, a wrestling promoter, in Maryland, and Linda worked as a receptionist in a law firm. They had a son, Shane, in 1970. In 1976, when Linda was pregnant with daughter Stephanie, the McMahons filed for bankruptcy.

“We were just starting our wrestling promotion business,” she says today. “Our house was auctioned off. I used food stamps for one week. I said, ‘I’ll find some other work.’ We rented a house and had a couple of friends who loaned us their credit cards. We just sucked it up. It built character. It taught us lessons that we never forgot.”

More than 30 years later, she is said to be buying herself a Senate seat.

“When I’m being outspent 9 to 1, it’s out of control,” says her former challenger Rob Simmons, a few days after the primary. “We’re only 3 million people in Connecticut. Spending $24 million to get to the primary — nobody has ever spent that amount of money on any race here.”

Simmons raised $3 million in all, and says he was told by party bosses that they were backing “self-funders” such as McMahon because “they didn’t want to overtax their voters” for contributions. Connecticut hasn’t had a Republican in the Senate since 1988, and Chris Dodd’s announcement that he was retiring, coupled with Blumenthal’s Vietnam blunder, suddenly put the seat in play. “I’ve always felt the primary qualification for the Senate,” Simmons says of his ex-opponent’s abilities, “is to get elected.”

There is much in common between McMahon and Blumenthal: personal wealth, political connections, the attempt to come across as a renegade operating outside the system, ready to make entrenched pols on the Hill hear the American people and heed their demands.

Yet Blumenthal began working in DC in 1969 for the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He later clerked for Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun. His wife comes from wealth that rivals McMahon’s, her family has real estate holdings that include the Empire State Building. As of this week, however, he said that he would not be using personal money to fund his campaign.

Nor is McMahon the outsider she proclaims to be. Along with her husband, she has donated to candidates of both parties, but their biggest donation, for $15,000, was to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Such donations, she says, were born “primarily of relationships you have with — for instance, part of my Democratic donations were to [White House Chief of Staff] Rahm Emanuel, whose brother Ari is the president of William Morris Endeavor Agency in California. He has represented the WWE for years and years and years. So Ari would call and say, ‘My brother’s running for office. Would you mind making a contribution?’ Fine. Or, ‘My brother’s going to be in town, would you sit down with him?’ So it was a personal, business relationship there.”

The McMahons’ closeness to various lawmakers came under scrutiny when the WWE was the subject of a congressional investigation after wrestler Chris Benoit killed his family, then himself, in 2007. The investigation focused on the use of steroids, drugs and on general safety practices within the organization, which is unregulated. Two years later, the committee said that the WWE hadn’t taken proper measures regarding steroid use, but there was no substantial fallout.

“Linda pats herself on the back for having deregulated the industry,” Mike Benoit, Chris’ father, told The Post. “The thing is, Linda’s the CEO of a company that’s got the worst health-care record in North America.”

“The relationships they built with Congress saved them,” says Chris Nowinski, a former WWE wrestler and friend of Benoit’s. It was Nowinski who convinced Mike Benoit to have his son’s brain tissue tested. The coroner found that Benoit had suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy — also common in boxers and football players, in which repeated head trauma results in progressive degeneration of the area of the brain that governs impulse control.

“Many other athletes who have been diagnosed with this disease have committed suicide or become violent,” Nowinski says. Those in the WWE, he says, are further jeopardized by the company’s employment practices: Every single wrestler, from the $500-a-week cub to a WrestleMania superstar, is hired as an independent contractor. That means no health insurance, no eligibility for unemployment or Medicaid or worker’s comp. The McMahons pay for in-the-ring injuries — they covered Nowinksi’s $20,000 operation to put his nose back together — but sick wrestlers often find themselves dropped from the organization.

“When I sat down with Linda — she’s a nice person,” Nowinski says. “But given the decisions they’ve made with workplace safety, it’s hard to believe that they care.”

As for culture-war stuff — the opposition going after the WWE for its admittedly salacious, sometimes offensive content — McMahon has the ultimate rejoinder: Even Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama campaigned on televised WWE events.

Campaign-wise, McMahon has learned from both Clinton and Obama. Just as Clinton did during her initial run for Senate, McMahon has embarked on what she calls her “listening tour,” popping into local shops and speaking at intimate events, soliciting the concerns and feedback of the electorate. Her website and its operations are nearly identical to Obama’s in 2008: she even has a URL, MyLinda2010.com, that echoes Obama’s MyBarackObama.com.

As Obama was, she is fond of saying her tour will allow voters to “kick the tires a little bit,” see what she’s about, and that this campaign will be won as a “grass-roots effort” with “boots on the ground” and volunteers going online, downloading scripts and voter phone numbers, making campaign calls from their homes.

Perhaps most like Obama, she is seen as a candidate whose ambitions outstrip her experience, who is buoyed by charisma and confidence, who is vague on the issues and needs to study up. She supported Obama’s policy in Afghanistan, she says, “but I don’t get the briefings. I’m still not sure.” She thinks the health-care bill should be repealed but also that “there is a group of people who don’t have access to health care, and we should look at how to provide that without totally recreating our health-care system.” McMahon remains a staunch supporter of off-shore drilling, but we should “make sure that safety measures are in place, make sure that companies are not going to be cutting any corners.”

McMahon says that she and Blumenthal have so far agreed to three debates, but that he has not yet responded to an invitation to appear with her on “Meet the Press.” The Connecticut Senate race is one of a handful that the venerable Sunday show would like to highlight, given its weird, tumultuous course. There is also the very real chance that the Connecticut race — like those in Nevada, California, Ohio, Florida and several others — turn control of the Senate back to the Republicans. (More likely, however, is the Republicans gaining control of the House — though loss of such key Senate seats and the ouster of majority leader Harry Reid would be a direct rebuke to the president and the Democratic Party.)

Though McMahon very likely could become the junior senator from Connecticut, it’s hard to discern what’s animating her decision to enter politics now. She doesn’t speak of political heroes, or moments of change or unrest that altered her political consciousness, or thinkers that she agrees or disagrees with, or a specific policy or injustice that she feels compelled to try and change. Her children are grown; her husband absent the night she won the primary, “in California producing his TV show, where he is every week.” Perhaps she is bored after decades running the WWE; perhaps she is running because, based on name-recognition and finances, she just can.

When McMahon first thought about running, she says, she never considered a state seat. Why not run first for, say, the House of Representatives, which will likely go to the Republicans this year anyway? “Well . . . I think that . . .” She pauses. “The Senate is where I want to be,” she says. “I’ve done business all over the country and several parts of the world. The Senate is the place I would prefer to be.”