Merrick Alpert brushes off obstacles to getting Senate nod
The Day - Sunday, January 24, 2010
Author: Ted Mann


Article pulled from The Day archives.

Ashford - Merrick Reed Alpert, in blue suit and grin, is among the first guests at the party, and he will pledge, ask him or not, that he will be among the last to leave.

"I won't be going anywhere else tonight," says the Democratic Senate challenger, when it is his turn to speak at the candidates' forum of the Quiet Corner Democrats, minutes after his formidable rival, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, has finished speaking, and departed for elsewhere.

"I'm going to stay here and meet with as many of you as I can," says Merrick Alpert, working away from the microphone, down on the floor, at his request, "even if I have to fold the chairs at the end."

It is an icy mid-January night and early dark. Candidates for constitutional office greet each other stiffly in the crowded old town hall. Sweaters predominate, silver hairs outnumber black and brown. Between every other person in the back row, it seems, a small video camera blinks away on its tripod.

Across the border in Massachusetts, the Democrats are losing a race they can't afford to lose, likely dooming health care reform as a Republican upstart sweeps aside a popular attorney general in the race to fill Sen. Edward Kennedy's seat.

It is a handy thing for Alpert that his stump speech is structured much like the famous quip of Adm. James B. Stockdale: He explains with a flourish who he is, and what he's doing here.

"I am running for the United States Senate because I want a progressive Democrat to hold this seat," Alpert declares, "and I don't want Linda McMahon from World Wrestling to buy it."\

Alpert routinely leaves out some of the other obstacles between himself and his goal, not just Blumenthal but also Republican financier Peter Schiff, and former three-term Rep. Rob Simmons, the Stonington Republican locked in a tough nomination battle with the political neophyte McMahon.

Alpert's run began as a challenge to Sen. Chris Dodd, who withdrew from the race earlier this month after falling behind his Republican challengers - but not Alpert - in opinion polls. It continues now as a campaign against Blumenthal, owner of the highest approval ratings ever measured by Quinnipiac University's polling center for a state official.

For his part, Alpert has never been elected to a public office, is scarcely known outside Democratic party circles, and has yet to file a quarterly campaign financing report, let alone raise the kind of war chest he would need for this year's hotly contested races.

To hear Alpert tell it, this is not a problem.

"It's magical, it's just magical," Alpert says of his nearly nightly visits to Democratic town committees across the state. "When you go into these places, often you walk in the room, and an hour later when you walk out, people are circling around you, they're patting you on the back."

And his description of the challenge to Blumenthal sounds downright cozy by the standards of a Senate primary. Asked how he will differentiate himself from the popular attorney general, Alpert says, "You step in and say, 'Here's who I am, here's my life journey.'"

But how, he is asked, will he persuade people he's the better candidate? "What I won't do," he says, "is speak negatively of him."

But he doesn't let Blumenthal off the hook entirely. Describing his method for warming up Democratic committee members, he volunteers this advice: "You don't breeze in and breeze out. You don't tell them, 'Hey, I've got somewhere else to be.' People do not cotton to that."

This will seem prescient moments later, when an emcee at the forum announces that Blumenthal has another appointment across the state and will not be able to stay for the whole program. Still, the attorney general both enters and leaves to applause and smiles.

And Alpert has one clear difference in policy so far: Blumenthal supports the Obama administration's escalation of the war in Afghanistan; Alpert marched 117 miles across Connecticut this year to protest it.

Hitting the right buttons

Clearly, there are signs that Alpert and Blumenthal are not going to be held to the same yardstick. The attorney general takes the stage to loud, boisterous applause and whoops, holds his audience rapt, and leaves to handshakes and warm back-pats without being asked a question.

As Alpert's turn to speak approaches, a time-keeper stands and says, "Richard Blumenthal was given a little bit of extra time because he wasn't going to be answering questions," though Blumenthal had asked for questions. "We'll hold Mr. Alpert to the time."

At this, Alpert turns with a comic shrug to the crowd and intones, "Thank you, Tim."

But as he works the floor, with a hammy folksiness and tone that occasionally veers toward the terrain of televangelist or pitchman, Alpert is winning converts to his promise, if not to his current campaign.

He knows the buttons to hit: Even the minor one-liners at the expense of Sen. Joe Lieberman are a hit here, the junior senator having sunk to the level among Democratic audiences of Henny Youngman's wife, or Rodney Dangerfield's self-esteem.

Alpert skimps no detail of the biographical sketch laid out in his memoir, "Morning Sun," from absent father to hardworking single mother, to college, law school, U.S. Air Force service and the small medical software company that made him wealthy.

Describing his work for former Vice President Al Gore, in the course of which he met his wife, Alex, Alpert catches his audience off guard.

"I say I'm probably the only man in America today to look at Al Gore and think romantic thoughts," he says.

They explode in laughter.

It's Blumenthal's 'turn'

The warm reception is mainly a case of Democrats supporting their own, says Chris Pitts, a member of the Canterbury town committee and one of the organizers of the Quiet Corner forum.

"I think if you polled the room, Blumenthal probably has 96 percent of the support," Pitts says. "I don't doubt that for a second.

"I think if Dodd had stayed in the race and Dodd was up in the room with Merrick, there was some dissatisfaction with Dodd, and I think Merrick was a beneficiary of that, almost like Ned Lamont benefited from people being angry at Joe," he says. "Now, it's completely different. I mean Blumenthal, he's Blumenthal."

As for Alpert, "Well, he's pretty honest and forthright with his answers," says Pete Maddocks, a retired heavy equipment operator from Ashford. "It's too bad he wasn't running against Lieberman."

"Everybody in the room" thought the same way, says Maddocks, who perhaps is slightly off in his count, since the room also contains Ned Lamont, who ran unsuccessfully against Lieberman in 2006. "Yeah, we hate Lieberman."

But the enthusiasm for Al pert has its limits, says Maddocks, in the party's "chain of command," which dictates this is Blumenthal's turn.

"Blumenthal, we've all been waiting for him to do this," he says.

Critic of Afghan policy

Some of Alpert's less charitable observers say they're not surprised to see him unwilling to wait in line. Jonathan Pelto, a former state legislator for whom Alpert worked as an intern while in college, then later when Pelto was managing the gubernatorial campaign of former state Rep. William Cibes in 1990, says Alpert was planning a political career from the beginning.

"He set out to build himself a resume, and you've got to give it to him," Pelto says. "I remember him sitting around there (on the Cibes campaign) saying, 'I want to serve in the military so I can build credentials so I can go after conservative candidates.' He set out the things he needed to do to be the perfect candidate."

Alpert dismisses these observations curtly, noting that decades have passed since he worked with Pelto.

"I went into the military after I knew that fella, years after I knew that fella," Alpert says. "I find that to be a kind of curious comment from somebody who hasn't interacted with me in a substantive way in more than 20 years."

But the military experience as part of a peacekeeping force in Bosnia now figures prominently in his stump speech: Having served on the ground in a Muslim nation, Alpert says, he sees clearly that the U.S. policy in Afghanistan is folly.

Back in Ashford, Alpert is making the most of his moment, regaling the audience that started out giving him a moment of its time and now seems like it's hanging on his well-practiced sentences. To a group with no intention of nominating him now or tomorrow, Alpert gives the speech that sounds like a valedictory - more an acceptance than plea.

"I saw a lot of boarded-up buildings," Alpert says of this state. "I saw a lot of roads and bridges crumbling. I saw a lot of roads in need of repair. I didn't see a lot of people who had a lot of faith or optimism in Washington. I am more interested in rebuilding Connecticut than Kabul. I'm no one's man but yours. I will never ever be owned by anyone, except those of you in this room. My name is Merrick Alpert. I represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. I will be the best employee you ever had."

Promising him nothing, they furiously applaud.


Vol. 129, No. 207
Section: A: Front Page
Page: A01, 06
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