Lock the Gates at Conyers Farm

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal will have wanted to bar The New York Times delivery van from gliding through the security gates of exclusive Conyers Farm in Greenwich.  The Times roughs up the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate this morning by quoting him.  Blumenthal’s neighbors in “one of America’s premier gated residential” neighborhoods will be astounded to read that the attorney general didn’t know if he’d expressed an opinion on TARP, the government’s $750 billion bailout of the financial industry. Three hours after a confusing exchange with reporter David M. Halbfinger, Blumenthal’s office declared he would have voted against the 2008 legislation.

“Gaunt” Blumenthal often sounds like he’s channeling Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz in his timid responses to straightforward questions.  The Times compresses a lot of storm clouds into one article.  It raises the nettlesome January jury verdict that whacked the State of Connecticut for $18 million in a case claiming “Mr. Blumenthal had unfairly destroyed her business through false accusations.”   The article highlights the $50 million that Republican Linda McMahon pledges to spend on her bid for the Senate.  Some serious chunk of that will go to the dark art of opposition research, which may unearth all sorts of nuggets from Blumenthal’s long public career.  Only recently has the 5-term attorney general been reluctant to talk about issues and other things.  There’s a political gold out there, and McMahon’s got a battle-tested brigade sniffing it out and sifting though it.

The Times shows Blumenthal some mercy by making no mention of his painful, schizophrenic answer to a simple question posed by Connecticut Public Radio’s John Dankowsky in a January interview.  Would Blumenthal vote to confirm Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke?  He’s done great things, replied the attorney general, and I would vote against him.

The alarm bells will be ringing this morning in Democratic fundraising circles.  They don’t want to add the cost of a competitive race against McMahon to their estimates of what they’ll need to keep control of the Senate.  That could mean raising the kind of dough it takes to buy a manse in bucolic Conyers Farm.