The junior senator from Connecticut is Democrat Richard Blumenthal, the former state attorney general who won an open-seat contest against tea party-backed Republican Linda McMahon in 2010. He succeeded retiring Sen. Christopher Dodd, also a Democrat. Read More

The junior senator from Connecticut is Democrat Richard Blumenthal, the former state attorney general who won an open-seat contest against tea party-backed Republican Linda McMahon in 2010. He succeeded retiring Sen. Christopher Dodd, also a Democrat.

Blumenthal was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., to Jane and Martin Blumenthal. His father fled Nazi Germany in 1935 and became wealthy by trading commodities in his adopted country. He sent his son to Harvard, where Blumenthal earned a bachelor’s degree in political science, and to Yale Law School, where he edited the Yale Law Journal. Blumenthal’s post-college list of employers reads like a Who’s Who of the Washington elite in the 1970s: He worked at The Washington Post for longtime publisher Katharine Graham; he was a staff assistant to Daniel Patrick Moynihan when Moynihan was a top adviser in the Nixon White House; and he clerked for Supreme Court Justice William Brennan. Blumenthal’s résumé impressed President Carter, who appointed him U.S. attorney in Connecticut in 1977.

Blumenthal went on to do some legal work for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund while in private practice in the early 1980s, where he gained wider fame by dismantling the case against an innocent prisoner on Connecticut’s death row. A stay was granted just 15 hours before Joseph Brown’s scheduled execution in 1983, and he was later released. Blumenthal went on to win election to the Connecticut Assembly in 1984 and to the state Senate in 1987 before his successful run for attorney general in 1990. As the state’s top lawyer, Blumenthal actively pursued consumer protection lawsuits, including cases against tobacco companies, polluters, health insurers, and banks charging automatic teller fees. The lawsuits won Blumenthal increased popularity with Connecticut Democrats—and earned him the nickname “Sue ’Em All Blumenthal” from his detractors. He had long been considered a candidate for higher office, but other figures, notably independent Sen. Joe Lieberman, who remained on Connecticut’s Senate ballot in 2000 while also running for vice president, long stood in his way. He was elected and re-elected state attorney general five times since 1990, never with less than 59% of the vote.

He finally got his shot to run for the Senate in 2010 after Dodd, first elected to the Senate in 1980, announced he was retiring after five terms. But it was also the year when the tea party took flight, and what should have been a stroll in the park for Blumenthal, given his popularity in blue Connecticut, turned into a bruising fight against McMahon, the former head of World Wrestling Entertainment. The Republican nominee harnessed an upswing in GOP voter energy to make it a real contest, one that was monitored nationally as a possible gauge of the strength of the fledgling tea party movement.

The first sign things were not going to be easy for Blumenthal was his apparent exaggeration of his military service. A member of the Marine Corps Reserve from 1970 to 1975, Blumenthal claimed on several occasions to have served in Vietnam, though he never in fact deployed. The McMahon campaign attacked him for distorting his record, putting a chink in his best asset: his long record of public service compared to McMahon’s recent embrace of politics as a second career. Blumenthal apologized, but the episode sparked a nasty back-and-forth campaign. Blumenthal’s camp went after McMahon for the sexism and use of steroids in professional wrestling, where McMahon earned her wealth as WWE president. He chided her for heavy personal spending on her campaign, saying voters deserved “an election, not an auction.”

Though Blumenthal enjoyed a wide lead over McMahon at the beginning of the race, it tightened considerably in the wake of the Marine Reserve flap. In the fall, Blumenthal attacked McMahon for what he called her support of lowering or abolishing the hourly minimum wage. In a bad year for Democrats, Blumenthal stressed his independence from the national party on a handful of issues, including his opposition to the financial industry rescue. He also said that unlike McMahon, he would support letting the Bush-era tax cuts expire for households earning over $250,000 a year; she supported making them permanent for all income levels. Still, by late September, Blumenthal was ahead by just 3 percentage points.

McMahon emphasized her business savvy as a CEO who created jobs, and talked about her middle-class upbringing by two civil service workers in North Carolina. To appeal to Democrats and independents, she billed herself as a centrist Republican who supported abortion rights and the prerogative of states to decide the same-sex marriage issue. Her readiness for the job was called into question with revelations that she had failed to even vote in elections in 2006 and 2008. But McMahon proved to be a tireless campaigner with an easy manner in the endless meet-and-greet aspects of the role.

Still, she could not overcome Connecticut’s Democratic tilt even in 2010’s poor climate for President Obama and his party. The Hartford Courant noted that “she had persistent trouble winning over women voters, despite the fact she would have become the first female senator in the state’s history. Some women were turned off by some of the racier images of WWE; others didn’t like her aggressive advertising strategy.” Blumenthal won with 55% of the vote to 43% for McMahon. When the results were in, the Courant summed things up this way: “In the beginning, Richard Blumenthal looked unbeatable. At the end, he was. In between, there was quite a battle.”

In the Senate, Blumenthal has spent a lot of time on public health and consumer issues. In March 2011, Blumenthal sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office asking for an investigation into drug shortages in hospitals. He sent a request in April 2011 to the Food and Drug Administration asking for the agency to ban the sale of menthol cigarettes, pointing out high usage rates among young people and minorities. In July 2011, he sponsored a bill aimed at increasing the federal government’s ability to combat Lyme disease, which was named after a town in Connecticut where a number of early cases of the disease were identified in the 1970s.

During the debate over banning insider trading in Congress, Blumenthal co-sponsored an amendment with Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill. to eliminate pensions for members of Congress convicted of felonies while in office. Blumenthal noted that a National Taxpayer Union study found that former members of Congress convicted on charges of public corruption are drawing some $800,000 per year in taxpayer-funded pensions. The Blumenthal-Kirk measure was adopted by the Senate in February 2012.

Blumenthal has a seat on the Senate Armed Services Committee and has maintained an interest in national security and veterans' issues. His son, Matthew, is a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps Reserve and is currently serving in Afghanistan.