What in the world has happened to Christopher Shays?
Over the last three days, the veteran politician pretty much flew off the handle and completely lost his cool. This is a totally unexpected development considering how savvy and wily a campaigner Shays was in the past. His track record of winning tight races is pretty solid, almost impeccable.
But as long as this pattern of wild behavior on the campaign trail continues, Shays will go down hard.
Let's track the polling out of CT-4, a district which contains well-to-do Greenwich and Stamford and blue-collar Bridgeport. Until October 4, the only polling out of here gave Shays a 49-42 lead (Constituent Dynamics) and a 44-40 lead (Stamford Advocate). However, the wildly erratic Zogby poll gave Farrell her first lead of the race at 5 points (46-41), on 4 October.
At this point, Shays turned more loopy than Timothy Leary on LSD. That very day on Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, he called on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to resign. The problem for Shays here was that a month ago on the same show, Shays was noncommittal on Rumsfeld:
Well, you know what, I'm not his biggest fan, but I'm not sure that, with two less years left in the administration, he should.
Shays essentially said between the lines that you can't get off the horse while you're midstream. Well if the horse is dead or diseased, you better get off, or you're going to get caught with foot-in-mouth disease, something Shays didn't learn, as we'll see next.
At their debate in Stamford last Friday, Shays tried to make political hay out of the Foley scandal when he asked Farrell whether Democrats should be investigated. Farrell electrified the audience with her response that her daughter was a page and all the Foley business made her sick at heart.
The meltdown gets better. From the Hartford Courant, all the gory details about Shays calling out Ted Kennedy:
"I know the speaker didn't go over a bridge and leave a young person in the water, and then have a press conference the next day," said Shays, R-4th District, referring to the 1969 incident in which the Massachusetts Democrat drove a car that plunged into the water and a young campaign worker died.
"Dennis Hastert didn't kill anybody," he added.
Shays literally went off the deep end here. Ted Kennedy is a MUCH bigger fish in New England than Chris Shays. All this does is completely mobilize the Democratic base in that district and flip independents towards Farrell because only the hardcore R's in New England tend to hold Chappaquiddick against Teddy Kennedy. (A note of caution here: For Farrell to sink him on this, she needs to make an ad showing Shays supporting Hastert's Iraq policy which killed 2,700+ of our fine troops.)
Pretty soon after his explosive Ted Kennedy comments, Shays blew up again. In another debate with Farrell (they're holding 11, jeez!) Shays refused to call Abu Ghraib torture, instead equating it with a sex ring:
Now I've seen what happened in Abu Ghraib, and Abu Ghraib was not torture," Shays said according to a transcript provided by Democratic challenger Diane Farrell's campaign and confirmed by others who attended the debate. "It was outrageous, outrageous involvement of National Guard troops from (Maryland) who were involved in a sex ring and they took pictures of soldiers who were naked. And they did other things that were just outrageous. But it wasn't torture."
What planet is Shays on? Abu Ghraib was definitely a sex ring, but it was much more than that. Abu Ghraib was a classic case of torture involving undisciplined National Guard troops who took power into their own hands. To not call imprisonment of prisoners in dog collars, whipping prisoners, or attaching them to electrodes and shocking them torture is utterly insane.
Wait, it gets even better. Today, Shays' NRCC buddies, in an effort to bail him out, sent this blasphemous email, which claims Farrell would share coffee with the Taliban.
What we're seeing is a man who has equivocated and triangulated himself into insanity. Shays probably can't even pour a cup of coffee right now without spilling it, that's how nervous he is.