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