Who are these guys, anyway?

Connecticut’s U.S. Senate election is setting up to be a contest of unprecedented calculation, cliche and posing between two candidates who seem incapable of candor — Republican Linda McMahon, the wrestling entrepreneur, who is lost without the campaign playbook that is contriving a political identity for her, and Democrat Richard Blumenthal, who, after 20 years as attorney general, knows most issues cold but isn’t always sure what is safe to say and who lately has allowed his handlers to leash him as tightly as McMahon’s have leashed her.

Even before he got caught hallucinating that his service in a safe Marine Reserve unit in Washington, D.C., had taken him to war in Vietnam, Blumenthal was famous for speaking with slow precision lest more than the bare minimum of substance be conveyed. Now that he can be ambushed at any time with tedious questions about how he “misspoke� to ingratiate himself with military-oriented audiences, the once-ubiquitous attorney general is only warily returning to public forums.

It’s hard to blame Blumenthal for suffering shell shock as bad as any he might have suffered had he really been at Khe Sanh, what with McMahon bombarding the state with mailings and television and radio commercials disparaging him.

A recent McMahon mailer declares, “Dick Blumenthal dishonored our veterans by lying about serving in Vietnam,� and then depicts seven veterans with quotations expressing outrage. The Connecticut Post’s Brian Lockhart quickly determined that at least four of those seven supposedly outraged veterans are Republican town committee members.

Now a McMahon commercial is accusing Blumenthal of lying about not accepting campaign contributions from political action committees. McMahon’s commercial is itself a lie, as the Blumenthal comment it replays was made in January and referred to his previous campaigns, while his acceptance of a PAC contribution occurred only a few weeks ago after McMahon announced her readiness to spend an unprecedented $50 million to buy the election.

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Meanwhile, McMahon’s ads boast that she won’t accept donations greater than $100 — not counting donations from herself, of course. She apparently expects voters not to notice the irony of claiming such virtue just for being rich. But it was an old conceit even in Chesterton’s time. He wrote: “You will hear everlastingly, in all discussions about newspapers, companies, aristocracies or party politics, this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man  is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man.â€�

Apparently McMahon also does not expect voters to note the irony that someone who has performed no public service at all, someone who until recently hardly even voted, is presuming to disparage someone who has given many years of public service, good or bad, by which he may at least be judged.

Who is the real Linda McMahon? Who is the real Dick Blumenthal? Are there real people there, or just a nouveau riche opportunist who has run out of things to buy and a political careerist who has spent so long hunting for the main chance that mere compulsion has replaced any underlying purpose?

If there is something real behind the cynical facades, will either of them ever dare to trust Connecticut with an unscripted, genuine moment? And would such a candidate astound and win, or appall and lose?

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.