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Debated to Death Chris Shays and Diane Farrell are inflicting a thousand tiny cuts on each other in thier debates. So where's the death blow? By Lorraine Gengo October 19 2006 In the high-profile contest for Connecticut’s Fourth Congressional District seat, if you turn off the volume on all the talk—and God knows, with 11 scheduled debates, the talking goes on and on and on—this is what you see: an attractive, well-dressed and well-coiffed blonde who’s almost always smiling and appears energetic and enthusiastic yet calm and confident; and a lean, balding, white-haired gentleman whose face in repose wears a scowl of palpable irritation and annoyance, and whose shoulders seem oppressed by some great, invisible weight. The message isn’t always in the words you hear. The body language in the Chris Shays v. Diane Farrell debates is far more eloquent and telling than all the rhetoric being spouted. Shays, the Republican incumbent with 19 years under his beltway, has the aura of the underdog about him in recent bouts with his Democratic challenger. It’s a weird place for Shays to find himself, given his track record of landslide re-elections up until two years ago, when Farrell first ran against him and lost by only 4 percentage points. Now the former Westport First Selectwoman, one of the Democrat’s A-list candidates for national office who’s expected to raise close to $3 million with the help of Sen. Hillary Clinton and others, is again within striking distance of unseating Shays, trailing him by a mere four points—with 16 percent of voters still claiming they’re undecided this late in the game. Debating a popular incumbent this many times has been a boon to Farrell, who has proven herself a good debater; she’s smart, focused and stays on message. The message has been condensed into a soundbite, in the form of three questions she poses to audiences: 1) Where Shays has agreed with the president, has it been good for the country? (think: Iraq War, the Patriot Act); 2) Where he’s disagreed with the president, has it made a difference? (think: stem-cell research, the environment); and 3) Is it time for a change in the leadership of Congress? (think: the 15 House seats the Dems need to win in November to re-claim the majority in the House). On the other hand, staying on point is something Shays seems to be having trouble doing. Which raises the question: Why did he agree to so many debates? “Chris wants the opportunity to convince everybody,” says a former Shays insider who did not want to be identified. “Agreeing to 11 debates will earn him some credit that he’s a genuine guy.” Shays’ position on just about everything—but especially his reasons for supporting the Iraq War and his subsequent decision to call for a timetable for withdrawing troops—isn’t easily reduced to a punchy, one-two hit to offset his opponent’s mantra that the war is costing “$250 million a day” that could be spent solving education and health-care woes at home. Or at least he won’t allow his message to be chiseled down. Instead, he brandishes a 53-page booklet of his accomplishments, sometimes with frustrated emphasis, as he did at the Housatonic Community College debate in Bridgeport last Tuesday morning, other times half-heartedly, as if he knows in his heart of hearts that nobody but his mother will take the time to read what’s in it. But that doesn’t stop Shays from trying, for in the end this battle comes down to one thing, and one thing only, for Chris Shays: saving his precious credibility. “My only concern is my own credibility,” Shays told Washtingon Post correspondent David Broder and a passel of reporters during a press breakfast in mid-September. “By the end of an hour,” Broder wrote, “it was clear to everyone that the war has reduced this 60-year-old, nine-term veteran of the House to a complete head case—consumed by the convoluted efforts to square the circle of his own conflicting impulses.” There’s no doubt that Shays has thought long and hard about both wars waged by the Bush clan against Iraq. A conscientious objector during the Vietnam War who chose to join the Peace Corps instead of fight, Shays says that he seriously considered resigning his seat in 1991 when Congress voted on whether to expel Iraq from Kuwait. During a brief conversation after the HCC debate, Shays says he had to come to terms with the idea that 10,000 American lives could have been lost in that war. He ultimately decided that toll was acceptable, and he voted in support of Bush 41’s war. And, he has been a staunch supporter of Bush 43’s war, which up until very recently he’s called “a noble mission.” Shays has made 14 “fact-finding” trips to Iraq since the war began in March 2003, which infuriated the Pentagon, as well as, I’m sure, his campaign staff, given that the most recent trip was in August, in the middle of a tough race. There’s no question that Shays has willfully embraced the Iraq issue as his own, and to label him a blind supporter of the Bush administration’s war is patently unfair. So, it’s understandable why it gets under Shays’ skin when Farrell paints his views on the war in black and white. And it clearly pisses him off when she says his decision to support a withdrawal was politically motivated, once he saw Ned Lamont defeat Joe Lieberman in the Aug. 8 primary on an anti-war platform. That’s an easy story for Farrell to tell, and it has the effect of obscuring and negating all the agonizing that Shays has put himself through regarding what to do about Iraq. Shays maintains that he arrived at his decision for a timetable for withdrawal after his Aug. 17 trip to Baghdad and Suleimaniyah, when he realized that the new Iraqi government lacked the political will to carry through with their attempt at democracy; the threat of pulling out U.S. troops might give them the impetus they needed to get their act together, he reasoned. It’s a bit odd, then, that shortly before leaving for his 14th trip to Iraq, Shays told the Norwalk Hour that he might consider a “timeframe for withdrawing U.S. troops.” Earlier this month, he told a reporter from the same newspaper that the statement was made “to prepare you” for his plan, but it sounds suspiciously like politicking. Farrell hasn’t been completely transparent about her war views, either, as was illuminated by Libertarian candidate Phil Maymin at the fourth debate, hosted by the Jewish Center for Community Services at the Congregational B’nai Israel in Bridgeport on Oct. 11. When Farrell claimed that she never would have voted for the war had she been a freshman in Congress in 2002, it was Maymin who reminded everyone that back then Farrell had said that she would have voted for the Spratt Amendment, which authorized the use of force against Iraq, providing the U.N. Security Council sanctioned it. Farrell took issue with Maymin’s characterization of her position, saying she would have supported “taking a breath before rushing to war with Iraq.” If Shays was alternately grouchy and sullen the day before at the HCC debate, he opened the JCC event in a jocular mood, prefacing his answer to the first question—how do we restore America’s moral image in the world in the wake of Abu Ghraib and accusations of torture?—by jokingly asking the audience if they knew “how difficult it is to be in a debate with your mother watching and she’s given you a note saying don’t boast.” He abandoned his oddly misplaced attempts at humor toward the end of the 90-minute town hall meeting, where questions taken from the audience ranged from how to fix the deficit to how can a U.S. congressman best defend Israel, a question that seemed tailormade for Shays. (His answer, in part, was to defend his reasons for going so many times to the Middle East. “I go there because of Israel. I go there because that’s where two-thirds of the world’s oil is,” he said, righteous indignation tightening his throat. “I get criticized by my opponent for going to the Middle East all the time.”) Shays’ latent bellicosity finally bubbled to the surface in his closing statement, when he claimed that Farrell would never have been re-elected as First Selectwoman (a position she easily won re-election to by 71 percent of the vote the second time she ran) had she run a third time, given that the election coincided with property tax assessments in Westport. Shays loves to harp on the fact that Westport now has some of the highest property taxes in the county, thanks to Farrell. This supposition elicited a groan of disapproval from the packed house, many of whom Shays could reasonably assume were his supporters. The reflexive oooooouuuuuuuu from the audience (much like the sound you’d hear in a city schoolyard that precedes one person being called out by another), clearly wasn’t what Shays anticipated. But his staff, sitting on folding chairs outside the hall, was up for a fight (one of them blurted some approximation of “right on”). They were pleased that their boy had finally broken out the rhetorical nunchucks. In a race where the two major-party candidates have to work to exercise their differences on the issues, the battle for the Fourth may well be determined by personality and voter fatigue. As one Democratic Party regular noted at a party held for Farrell’s rank and file campaign workers at Fat Cat Joe in Norwalk last week, the election may come down to who’s got the energy and the will to push for change. “We liked Chris when he first went to Washington,” she said. “But he’s tired. He’s been doing it for too long.” Of course, if Farrell loses, she will know who to blame. It won’t be because Shays ran a great race. Rather, Shays will be able to thank his good friend Joe Lieberman for delivering Republicans to the polls on Nov. 7. lgengo@fairfieldweekly.com Copyright © 2006, Fairfield County Weekly |