This is my last column in the Register before next week’s elections. I was going to focus mostly on the governor’s race, as I usually do, but given events Tuesday and over the weekend, I thought it’d be better to write about a leitmotif among pundits: that all politics is national.
The events I’m talking about are the massacre of nearly a dozen elders praying in a Pittsburgh synagogue Saturday by a psychopath determined “to kill Jews”; and the sending Tuesday of an anti-Semitic mailer by the campaign of GOP state Senate candidate Ed Charamut that depicted his Democratic (and Jewish) opponent, Matt Lesser, as a greedy Jew eager to take your money.
This isn’t the first time anti-Semitism has had a cameo in Connecticut politics. I seriously doubt it will be the last. But it’s unlikely this mailer would have gotten any national attention if not for a president doing this best to inflame ethnic hatreds in the country; if not for a lone wolf turning Trump’s race baiting into action; and if all this were not the context for a bush-league politician willing to say anything to get attention in his quest to represent people living in Middletown, Connecticut.
As it is, Ed Charamut’s mailer got attention from the Washington Post, CNN and other national media. (I first learned about it on Twitter.) As it is, Charamut’s campaign denies interpretations of the mailer as having anything to…
