The Murphy Walk-Talk

Connecticut U.S. Senator Chris Murphy’s campaign walk-talk is 9 years old, according to the Hartford Courant.

Murphy’s walk across Connecticut is supposed to be a listening tour. It should surprise no one that Murphy, while talking to potential voters on his tour, hears what he has been telling reporters so instantly ever since President Donald Trump defeated Vice President Kamal Harris during the latest presidential campaign.

Here is Murphy telling his reportorial Boswell what he has heard while wandering through Connecticut: “I have run into a number of people who have been scared, feeling a little powerless. A number of people stop me to ask what they should be doing to try to stop him [Trump] from trampling our democracy with (young adults) that worry that democracy won’t be around for their kids. It is a real, intense worry that I hear and I believe that we are going to survive this moment but it does require everybody to stand up and join the movement.”

Of course, Murphy is not the first politician on record to have been entangled in a junk-in-junk-out psychosis. Politicians the world over have trained themselves to hear from their constituents precisely what they have been telling their constituents ad nauseam during their rise to political eminence. Stopping Trump from trampling our democracy into the dust so that it will not be available for our bereft children has become a commonplace meme among Democrats who have not yet bathed in self-reflection.

This is the overarching theme of a new book by Jake Tapper and, Alex Thompson – Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again -- that taunts Democrats for having studiously avoided noticing during the late Joe Biden administration that Biden was, to put it charitably, infirm.

If Murphy has remarked on the book, his thoughts remain unshared with Connecticut’s media and the many common folk he met during his walkathon.

The answer to fear and loneliness on the campaign trail, Murphy often tells reporters, is to join the movement spearheaded by Murphy and other neo-progressive politicians.

“In April, the senator warned on the Senate floor that attacks on journalists, universities, lawyers and the business community are eroding the institutions that hold leaders accountable,” the Courant tells us. “The senator has emerged as a prominent voice in the Democratic party, joining town halls with U.S. Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Florida in Warren, Michigan; Saxapahaw, North Carolina; Chesterfield, Missouri; and Sarasota, Florida to mobilize people nationally in a movement to counter Trump and his policies. Murphy said mobilization is key, explaining that it is not rocket science.”

During his vote gathering trek through Connecticut that included a Town Hall meeting in New Milford, Murphy visited a gaming store, Nutmeg Games, and struck up a conversation with an employee, the Courant tells us, “about how the store hosts events to connect people through gaming.”

Murphy, now separated from his wife of 17 years, told the employee, “I think a lot and write a lot about loneliness and the sort of disconnection from people right now. This [frequenting the gaming parlor] is one of the ways that people connect.”

Yes indeed, politicians who surrender tried and true verities -- family, faith and fidelity to the truth – will find themselves alone in crowds, because nothing is more impermanent than political fads. The loneliest man in Russia from 1924 through 1953 was Joseph Stalin, beloved by the crowds. In Edna St. Vincent Millay’s play Aria Da Capo, Pierrot, a quick change clown, tells the ever faithful Columbine, “Don't stand so near me! I am become a socialist. I love Humanity; but I hate people.”

There is a message in that play for aspiring politicians suffering from second childhoods.

Murphy says he wants to mobilize the opposition. “Murphy said mobilization is key, explaining that it is not rocket science. ‘These protests that are happening in Hartford, and Danbury and other places around the state,’ he said. ‘They matter. Eventually we need to go through a handful of Republicans that are willing to stand up to this corruption,” spawned by Trump.

Chairman of the Connecticut Republican Party Ben Proto, the Courant tells us, “disputed Murphy’s assertions.” Proto responded, “I think Senator Murphy is fear mongering. Quite frankly I talk to a lot of people around the state. That has never come up.”

The quasi-socialist policy positions of Democrats having been rejected stunningly in the recently concluded presidential election, Democrats like Murphy find themselves in the awkward position of mobilizing a vocal minority by revisiting endlessly failed programs that enhance the already awesome powers of the state.

Good luck with all that.