Blumenthal speaks

I see Sen. Blumenthal made his maiden speech the other day to remind us he’s still fighting for us. Don’t you wish he’d stop with the fighting?Blumenthal started fighting for us in his Senate campaign when his opponent’s reluctance to speak to real issues let him get away with it, but he’s continued to use that very tired refrain as a senator.He’s used the line so often, The Connecticut Mirror kept count in the maiden speech and reported that he vowed 10 — count ’em — 10 times to “fight for Connecticut voters and the state’s interests.” That’s a lot of fighting in a 12-minute speech. History kindly forgets most maiden Senate speeches, and Blumenthal’s will not be an exception as it was uncomfortably similar to the stump speeches he made in the campaign.As a result, the junior senator’s maiden effort didn’t get much coverage — Blumenthal fighting for us isn’t news, maybe he should try fighting against us — so here are some of the combative highlights.He got right to the point in his opening sentence when he told the C-Span camera, “The people of Connecticut sent me here to fight for their interests” and proceeded to note the highly controversial interests he was especially devoted to fighting for — “good jobs in a growing economy, responsible, smart cuts in spending to reduce our debt and deficit.” Then, in case anyone had forgotten, he said the people back in Connecticut want to know “their leaders are fighting for them.”At about the same time, Blumenthal was fighting for TV viewers who don’t have cable. He wanted CBS to let WFSB-TV carry the UConn-Bucknell game, which was one of the NCAA tournament games slotted for cable. Hope you got to see the game on TNT.There is nothing new about politicians fighting for us or saying they are. Robert La Follette Sr., whom the Senate voted one of its five greatest along with Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Robert Taft and John C. Calhoun, was known throughout his career as “Fighting Bob.” But fighting for us really exploded in the 2000 presidential campaign when a consultant for Al Gore decided the low-key Gore should come out fighting, and he did, vowing to fight for us in the way Blumenthal would 10 years later. In fact, Gore fought so hard for us, he won the popular vote and lost the election.To be fair, there was hardly anything said that resembled Webster or the other great Senate orators in the maiden speeches by Blumenthal’s freshman colleagues, either. Sen. Rob Portman said he’d work toward job creation and economic recovery in Ohio, and Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran was humbled to be following in the footsteps of Sam Brownback, which is one way of lowering expectations. A surprising exception was Rand Paul, the Kentuckian who noted he occupied the desk of Henry Clay, the Great Compromiser, and noted that compromise today “must be conservatives acknowledging we can cut military spending and liberals acknowledging we can cut domestic spending.”One maiden speech still remembered is Ted Kennedy’s in April 1964, more than a year after his election and in an era when freshman, as Kennedy said,“should be seen, not heard; should learn, not teach.” The brother of the recently slain president spoke in support of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, saying his brother’s “heart and his soul are in this bill. If his life and death had a meaning, it was that we should not hate.” The bill was passed after similar civil rights bills had been defeated 11 times by Southern filibusters.The seen-and-not-heard tradition was first broken with a bang in 1920 by Sen. Robert La Follette Jr. of Wisconsin, the son and heir of the aforementioned Fighting Bob. La Follette waited just three months to speak, “an astoundingly brief period by the standards of the day,” according to the official Senate history. That history tells us La Follette’s few colleagues in the chamber walked out as he began to speak, but he continued and continued — for eight hours over three days. It led to a fervent revival of freshmen being seen but not heard. Simsbury resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. E-mail him at dahles@hotmail.com.