$22 million to get less than 50% of the Republican Vote. That would be, um, as of today’s 95% poll results, 58,206 voters divided by $22 million equals = $377.96 per voters cost of acquisition.

In the business world, this would be judged as wasteful spending, bad strategy and an unsustainable burn rate. If you want to campaign on bsuiness expertise, you might want to show some business acumen. Just sayin’…

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I’ve got my answer somewhere still in my brain. But Margaret Carlson whipped out the perfect opinion piece, which I’ll post here:

Men in Tights Stimulate Family Values Party: Margaret Carlson

By Margaret Carlson – Aug 10, 2010

Bloomberg Opinion

Time was, simulating the sexual assault of a scantily clad wrestler on TV might get you hauled before the U.S. Senate, not elected to it.

Welcome to the times we live in, when the further you are from doing anything in the public interest, the greater the chance you will win a Republican primary.

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With Peter Schiff on the ballot, and Rob Simmons running the best “I’m running by not campaigning and I’m still on the ballot” campaign, Linda McMahon may find herself on the losing end of her quixotic quest to join the 100 club.

Linda McMahon Examining Hubby

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This morning’s inbox was full of poll press releases. “We gained,” said Malloy’s team. “We’re ahead,” said Lamont’s team. We irrelevant said the missing GOP press releases from Foley’s team. So until the Democratic deathmatch primary occurs in August, or until Mike Fedele figures out he has to er, campaign more visibly, this race is all Lamont promising to be about as effective as Rell has been in creating jobs in Connecticut (really think about it what was that tech company he ran) and Malloy promising to be a different type of candidate.

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Rob Simmons must feel like many WWE “b” list wrestlers. The match is over, his campaign on the ropes, and his opponent is making the victory lap around the ring. The off season will be an introspective one for Simmons, his campaign for the Republican party nomination was largely negative. McMahon showed she’d take the fight to Blumenthal. Simmons never did, and thus McMahon won the nomination.

The Courant reports:

Late Monday, the Simmons campaign sent out a press release alerting reporters to the press conference at the Radisson Hotel in New London, but declined to provide any additional details.

“If that’s the decision he’s made, I know it was a difficult decision,” said state Sen. John Kissel of Enfield, a longtime Simmons supporter. “I’m proud of Rob if he’s come to that conclusion. I don’t have any specific information…it would be right for the party and right for Rob.”

McMahon, a political outsider who has never held elective office, has enormous resources. She said she would spend up to $50 million of her vast fortune on the campaign.

Why is it so hard to focus on the real issues that this state faces? Kevin Rennie writes a good story about how Linda McMahon waylaid Rob Simmons on her path to the Republican nomination and then just can’t help himself by going back to the Blumenthal story:

Everyone thought they knew the ubiquitous Blumenthal, but they discovered last week that they did not. That, too, happened with a push from McMahon. Her research team found evidence of Blumenthal’s serial embellishments of his military record and kindly tipped off The New York Times that he had claimed at times to have served in Vietnam. He did not. He was in the Marine Corps Reserves, stationed inWashington, D.C., and New Haven.

Really who can show that Blumenthal embellished his service record? Apparently, after a week, no one. The Daily Howler digs into the main stream media’s inability to deliver facts instead of the New York Times version of Chris Shay’s recollections of what Blumenthal has said. The Stamford Advocate turns up another speech in which Blumenthal was speaking about returning vets, again in 2008, and said, “I wore the uniform in Vietnam and many came back to all kinds of disrespect. Whatever we think of war, we owe the men and women of the armed forces our unconditional support.”

Let’s just keep ignoring the subject of all these speeches. Blumenthal has been talking about supporting veterans. He cites may instances when we, as in the government and we, as in the people, have failed to treat the people who serve in the military well. It’s not just a vietnam era thing, look at how we treat disabled vets now.

The Joints Chief of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen:

In his April 26th address to The Council on Foundations, Adm. Mullen said veterans returning home today need help with education, training, medical care, substance abuse and mental health, saying community non-profits groups are the answer to meeting veterans needs.  ”I am not arguing in any way, shape or form that this should be the purview of our government because what I would like to see happen is community outreach to [servicemembers] and the government just be out of it,” Mullen said.

Disabled American Veterans disagree:

“It is the exclusive responsibility of the federal government because it creates disabled veterans,” said DAV Washington Headquarters Executive Director David W. Gorman.  ”It is the government’s solemn duty to care for and treat all veterans who are wounded and disabled in America’s wars.  It is unfathomable that Adm. Mullen would suggest such a plan, asking charities to provide the care now given so compassionately by the VA.”

“The VA has been providing care for disabled veterans for more than 80 years and today offers the finest medical care in our nation,” Gorman said.  ”The VA doesn’t dismiss veterans who need care.  It cares for veterans the rest of their lives.  It makes one wonder if Adm. Mullen believes it is best to return to the days when disabled veterans sold pencils on street corners and relied on the support of charitable organizations.”

“Ignoring the professional care of the VA and the responsibility of the federal government to honor the promise to care for disabled veterans shows a great lack of understanding about the needs of our newest generation of veterans,” Gorman said.  ”Our veterans have a place to turn, and that’s the VA.  Veterans service organizations like the DAV lend its support to veterans, but no philanthropic organization, nor all of them united, could undertake the health care services of the VA, which are budgeted at almost $50 billion in fiscal year 2010.”

But why talk about the real veteran’s issues here when we can blithely prater on about what politicians have to say about their opponents.

From the DOD.

Community non-profit groups are the answer to meeting veterans’ needs after they’ve left the federal system, Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The Council on Foundations, a membership organization that supports the management of grant makers, during a visit to troops on Buckley Air Force Base in Colorado.

Reminders of the need to do more for veterans, Mullen said, are visible from his home here.

“Outside my window at night, I can look out on the streets of Washington and see my peers from Vietnam who are homeless and who are sleeping on the streets at night,” Mullen said. “We did not do a good job of addressing the problems of those veterans from Vietnam.”

Community organizations are in the best position to identify veterans in need and to use agility and innovation to help them, Mullen said.

Mullen said he is happy that the American public supports today’s war veterans in ways they didn’t during Vietnam.

Calling today’s veterans “an American treasure,” the admiral said they go off to war without questioning the decision, yet “come back as changed people.” And, their families, he said, also are “changed in ways they could not have imagined.” Military leaders are just beginning to understand today’s veterans’ common-signature injuries, such as post-traumatic stress, traumatic brain injuries, and amputations, he said.

“Yet to these families, their dreams haven’t changed one bit,” Mullen said. “They want to raise their families, they want to go to school; they want to own a piece of the rock.”

More than a million veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have returned to communities across America, and they need help with education, training, medical care, substance abuse and mental health, the admiral said.

The latest in the story about the story is this, Linda McMahon’s campaign is taking a bow, the whole video of the Norwalk event Blumenthal spoke at has him saying for the record he was a Marine Reserve and didn’t server in Vietnam, and the political reporters in Connecticut, according to Colin McEnroe, haven’t dug up anything that portrays Blumenthal as stating he was anything else but a Marine Reserve.

The biggest loser in this is likely Rob Simmons. It’s all McMahon and Blumenthal in the news, and his campaign is now buried under the media storm leading up to the crucial delegate influencing needed at the Republican State Convention. In fact, I’m pretty much going to call this as McMahon adds such a significant amount of delegates now, that his campaign is pretty much toast.

Today’s Connecticut media is atwitter with the NYTimes report that Dick Blumenthal, in their words: “record is the contrast between the many steps he took that allowed him to avoid Vietnam, and the misleading way he often speaks about that period of his life now, especially when he is speaking at veterans’ ceremonies or other patriotic events.”

Really? Whatever you want to say about Dick Blumenthal’s service as Attorney General, it hardly takes some hack New York Times reporter to discover that Blumenthal speaks about veterans issues and often compares the vietnam era’s problems as something not to repeat with veterans serving in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Earlier the NYTimes was first to say that Blumenthal was suffering from “early bumps” in his campaign. And just how is the Times doing its investigative research? Well according to the Daily Caller, they use Linda McMahon!

McMahon campaign is saying they gave the story to the New York Times, according to a blog post written by a former Republican state lawmaker that the campaign has posted on their website.

The post, written by Kevin Rennie, who writes for the Hartford Courant and RealClearPolitics in addition to on his blog, says the Times story was “fed to the paper by the Linda McMahon Senate campaign.”

“The Blumenthal Bombshell comes at the end of more than 2 months of deep, persistent research by Republican Linda McMahon’s Senate campaign. It gave the explosive Norwalk video recording to The Times. This is what comes of $16 million, a crack opposition research operation and an opponent who … gave them the sword,” Rennie wrote late Monday.

Rennie confirmed in an e-mail to the Daily Caller Tuesday that he had written the post and that the McMahon campaign had told him they gave the story to the Times.

Now let’s cut to the chase. Who cares? Really, if this is the best issue this race can come up with then Connecticut is just doomed. I don’t care what Dick Blumenthal’s military service was. I do care that the next Senator from Connecticut will actually pay attention to the fact that Connecticut is getting shafted by the feds at every turn. Let’s see some stimulus dollars going to our crumbling infrastructure, oh wait. Or enlightened Hartford political flunkies think stimulus dollars should be used to balance the budget. They’ve already spent next years too. The grass on our state highways now tops two feet in Fairfield County. Yeah, I guess kicking up a fuss over 40 year old stories is more important than covering that.

If you were feeling disappointed with the the story line on the Senate race this year – if for you it lacked a certain kind of looniness that you find de riguer for a political season that aspires to hold your interest – help has arrived in the form of lower Fairfield County’s answer to Lyndon LaRouche.

Lee Whitnum has declared her intent to replace Chris Dodd. As evidence of her qualifications for the job, she cites a picture taken of her with Senator Dodd, and the fact that she found him very disappointing to talk to.

I have some pictures of myself with Chris Dodd, and they are much nicer than Lee’s. In a couple, it is just me and Chris Dodd. Therefore I am announcing my intention to seek the seat for United States Senator. My campaign will commence as soon as I can locate my signature zany hat.
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There is a lot in the press about Linda McMahon the last couple days. McMahon’s campaign has, relative to what one can meaningfully spend on a statewide political campaign in Connecticut (about five million dollars will do the job, and its maybe eight million dollars tops), an unlimited amount of money. Her fortune comes from the family business, the very definition of stage-managed storytelling media companies, World Wrestling Entertainment. People tend to go with what they know and, sure enough, McMahon’s pursuit of the Senate seat vacated by Chris Dodd is a tightly controlled marketing campaign, with the star act’s every move – and everything in her vicinity – meticulously attended to by her handlers.

But McMahon and her campaign are not escaping scrutiny. From the cutting edge of online local media right here in Connecticut, to the original innovator that brought us the 24-hour news cycle, Linda2010 is generating controversy.

Start with the local: Valley Independent Sentinel reporter Joe Cole attempted to ask McMahon a coupla questions at a public appearance in Seymour last week, and McMahon “press wrangler” Suzan Bibisi reportedly shut it down. The campaign followed up with a boiler-plate email response to the reporter’s question; followed by a ham-handed attempt to intimidate the local guys with a press release, quoted in a report by veteran investigative journalist Paul Bass of the New Haven Independent:

“Valley Independent Sentinel Report Involved in Head-On Collision with Reality, the Facts,” the release’s headline read.
“The Valley Independent Sentinel’s claim is demonstrably false, contradicted by scores of interviews Linda has given, including more than a dozen hour-long interviews with reporters and editorial boards nationally and in Connecticut,” the release stated, listing selected interviews her campaign has arranged.

The skinny: Gilded Senate Campaign – 0, Gritty Local Reporters – 2.

Then, CNN‘s Anderson Cooper 360 launched its new series on campaign spending – Cost of Entry – with an expose’ on none other than Linda McMahon. Have a peek:

The Center for Responsive Politics says 40 out of 51 Congressional candidates that spent half a million dollars or more on their 2008 campaigns lost, or quit. Proof, perhaps, that even the richest person in the world needs a message voters believe, not just a good act.

Meanwhile, note that former CT02 Congressman and contender for the GOP nomination Rob Simmons got some nice “earned media” in the CNN piece.
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