Muchnick on Brian Lockhart on ‘Teflon Linda’ McMahon

The thoughtful Brian Lockhart of Hearst reflects on the Linda McMahon surge in the polls – boomlet or historic boom? – in a blog headlined “Teflon Linda,” http://blog.ctnews.com/politicalcapitol/2010/09/28/teflon-linda/.

There is little to dispute about Lockhart’s review of the campaign to date. He gets especially high marks for listing the bullets of McMahon’s negatives in more or less the right order. I’m not sure living in a gated community and having a yacht called Sexy Bitch belongs at the top of the list – but the point is that the list as a whole involves mostly real McMahon scandals that have gotten scant play or, in the copout line, “failed to gain traction.”

However, Lockhart’s quotes at the end from analyst Ben Davol miss the mark, in my view.

Davol is correct in observing that the McMahon campaign anticipated anti-World Wrestling Entertainment sentiment and easily turned it to Linda’s populist advantage. But Davol is wrong is lumping every negative together under the category of attacks on a popular entertainment that were destined to backfire.

I see the flaw in the tactics of McMahon’s opponents – first Rob Simmons in the Republican primary and now Richard Blumenthal in the general election – a little differently. I think they played into the trap of defining these controversies in terms of values: raunchiness or degradation of women or the retarded. As soon as they targeted the content of the programming rather than the management practices and borderline-criminal activities of this mega-profitable corporation, they lost.

Since there’s no scientific control on any of this, I can’t prove that focusing from the get-go on death, occupational health and safety, independent contractor abuse, and obstruction or manipulation of government investigations would have been more successful. Maybe, at bottom, people truly don’t care about the unbelievable death toll of pro wrestlers, or they even think these things are funny, the same as a YouTube clip of a kick in the nuts. The fact that high-paid consultants for McMahon’s opponents, who had the most to gain from making the right call on this, went with the kitchen-sink approach to Linda negatives may suggest that I’m the one who’s wrong.

But I don’t think so. Vice plays counterintuitively in politics, but it plays. Let’s do the analogy game. If Linda McMahon ran a prostitution ring, the public (those who patronize prostitutes or who simply accept it as a fact of life) might not be drawn to stories of women who were beaten by pimps or otherwise abused and devalued. But scrutiny of how this sausage of popular entertainment got made in the sausage factory would not lead to a backlash of sympathy for the owner; it would still lead to a diminished inclination to vote for her.

Anyway, whether Davol is right or I am, we’re surely about to see some kind of reboot of Blumenthal strategy in the wake of poll numbers. It will be interesting to see what form that takes.

Irv Muchnick

Muchnick’s Free Lesson to Richard Blumenthal on How to Cut a ‘Heel Wrestling Promo’

Buoyed by the recent Supreme Court decision allowing corporate contributions to political campaigns, the board of directors of Wrestling Babylon Blog LLP has authorized our crack staff to begin making in-kind donations to Richard Blumenthal in the closing weeks of his campaign against Linda McMahon for the open U.S. Senate seat in Connecticut.

We start today with free advice to Blumenthal on how to sharpen his rhetoric.

According to scattered blogosphere reports, Blumenthal today is stepping up his attacks on McMahon. In the space of a few minutes, tweets of the Hartford Courant’s Capitol Watch reveal, Blumenthal keeps repeating the phrase “profits before people” – which is also the tag line of his anti-Linda ads. Blumenthal also is saying, “This is an election, not an auction.”

Now, Dick, I know nothing about attorney-generaling. Also, I’ve never been elected dogcatcher. But I do know a thing or two about the structure and cadence of pro wrestling promotional interviews. With Linda McMahon, the Mommy Warbucks of World Wrestling Entertainment, you’re up against an adversary who has both her personal chops down pat and the best technical machinery behind them that money can buy. So I know you’ll forgive me for presuming to offer a few pointers.

“Profits before people”? … “an election, not an auction”? That’s a nice start – but it’s only a start. As Linda well knows and as you seem to be just learning, the voters are not interested in stock phrases about how you are a career public-service do-gooder and your opponent is a meanie. Your supporters and, more importantly, the undecideds are hungry for the specifics that will demonstrate that you are willing to get a little dirt under your fingernails in order to take down the consummate dirty fighter across from you. In case you haven’t noticed, this is the Year of Red Meat.

How about something like this:

“Linda McMahon, this is an election, not an auction, and it’s about people, not profits. I can understand how these concepts might be foreign to you. A few weeks ago yet another one of your wrestlers, Lance Cade, died at the age of 29. You said you ‘might have met him once’; in fact, it is well known that, per company protocol, he went up to you and shook your hand at several dozens of meetings backstage and at the WWE offices in Stamford.

“We don’t yet know exactly how Lance Cade – like dozens of others of your performers (whose classification as ‘independent contractors’ rather than employees is now under investigation by the State of Connecticut) – died. But it couldn’t have helped when Lance was smashed over the head with a steel chair on ‘Raw’ in October 2008, a year after you and your husband Vince falsely told CNN you were banning chair shots to the head. Then two weeks later – and a week after Lance had a seizure on an airplane caused by an overdose of painkillers – you held an auction on your website of the chair Shawn Michaels had used to batter Lance on TV. I hope the $315 winning bid didn’t go toward the $50 million you are spending to try to buy this Senate election.

“People, not profits, Linda. An election, not an auction.

“See you next Monday at the Bushnell Theater in Hartford.”

There’s more advice where this comes from. Just in case half the Supreme Court dies tomorrow and the ban on corporate contributions to political campaigns gets reinstated, Wrestling Babylon Blog LLP will be keeping a careful log of the time spent on this matter by our crack staff.

Irv Muchnick

Only a Fox News Debate Stands Between Wrestling Mogul Linda McMahon and the U.S. Senate

It’s not exactly Lincoln-Douglas, but the defining moment of the current American condition may be the first of the debates between the candidates for the U.S. Senate seat in Connecticut that is being vacated by Chris Dodd.

On October 4, Democrat Richard Blumenthal, Dodd’s successor-in-waiting and the longtime state attorney general, and Republican Linda McMahon, the co-founder and erstwhile chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment, will square off in Hartford. The atmospherics heavily favor the latter: McMahon supporters snapped up almost all the public tickets for the live audience at the Bushnell Theater, and the debate moderator is Bret Baier of Fox News.

CONTINUED ON THE FRONT PAGE TODAY

AT BEYOND CHRON, THE SAN FRANCISCO ONLINE NEWSPAPER:

http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/Only_a_Fox_News_Debate_Stands_Between_Wrestling_Mogul_Linda_McMahon_and_the_U_S_Senate_8540.html