Merrick Interviewed by Mystic River Press

Senate hopeful Alpert turns up heat
Mystic River Press - Thursday January 21, 2010
Author: Elizabeth Yerkes

MYSTIC- Merrick Alpert, a Mystic resident and progressive Democratic U.S. Senate hopeful heads into the midterm campaign season confident and clear eyed but with a fraction of the funding raised by Republican rivals Linda McMahon, Rob Simmons and stockbroker Peter Schiff.

Alpert's name recognition barely registers compared with media darling and fellow Democratic hopeful, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, according to the Jan 15 Quinnipiac University Polls.

"But I'm not a guy who's been in blue suit, chained to a desk for 30 years coveting his next office," said Alpert.

"I'm a guy who started poor, in a single parent home, who went to school in Connecticut, who enlisted in the U.S. military and served on the ground in a hostile fire zone in a Muslim nation. I came back and put a successful business together. I am married with three children and live in town. Take a look at the candidates: who do you want fighting for Connecticut? Look at them. Do they live in the rarified air or are they real?" asked Alpert.

To win the election, Alpert said the first gate he has to pass is World Wrestling Entertainment CEO McMahon.

"She's clearly out there trying to buy the office, publicly stating that she'll spend $50 million in this election. But if you watch her ads, they're glossy, slick and impressive but say nothing. Republicans are so hungry to win a senate seat they'll do anything. Democrats cannot underestimate this."

"Fake is her business. And now she wants to fake her way into the U.S. senate. I would laugh if it weren't so scary. But the problem is, I want to get out of Afghanistan, Linda McMahon would be in Afghanistan forever; I want to invest in small businesses in Main St., Linda McMahon's is a publicly traded company and Wall Street is where she made her fortune."

Alpert cited Democrat's fundamental sense of fairness as a liability in this Senate race. Democrats "think the folks on the other side of the table will have a sense of fairness, but they don't. They capitalize on the fact that you're going to play by the Marquess Queensberry's rules but for them, it's a no-holds barred bloody cage match."

Democrats in the state, said Alpert, are "wildly underestimating" what's about to happen in Connecticut politics. From his eight months of campaigning, Alpert said he's found the level of anger from state residents palpable, with a sense that the rich and powerful have brought the outcomes they want from Washington.

"For the first time in my life I'm seeing white collar anger from white suburbanites," Alpert said.

Alpert said Afghanistan is "the only issue I disagree with Obama on, it's the one where I think he is fundamentally wrong. As someone who is going to build a base of support in the U.S. Senate I think I'm ahead of the curve on the issue, not everybody is with me in saying we need to get out of there."

From a national security and economic perspective, Alpert said, the Afghanistan policy is just not sustainable.

"Those billions of dollars can be spent here on creating American jobs, investing in American education and infrastructure and paying down the debt," he added.

Alpert said he walked the 117 miles across Connecticut to the New York border earlier this month carrying an American flag to express his opposition to the war in Afghanistan. He said he saw newly boarded-up storefronts and crumbling roads, bridges and schools.

"When I crested the hill in New Haven, I looked out and saw a city where 50 percent of the African American kids don't graduate from high school. I don't see a lot of optimism or hope that Hartford or Washington is fighting for them," he said.

On China being the largest debt holder of U.S. Treasury bills, Alpert said, "Politicians won't openly admit that all the goofy spending they've engaged in over the years has created this situation. The Chinese were smart enough to realize 'not only can we make money out of this, but we can absolutely control these people vis-à-vis the policy toward China; military, human rights policy, currency or environmental policy.' When you have a foreign nation that literally is the biggest debt holder out there, you've given them the keys," he said.

Alpert used China as an example of a situation to gather progressive Democrats and Republicans, "to show them this is not in our national security interest."

Alpert's message is one of creating private sector jobs, cleaning up government which means publicly financed federal elections, term limits, "meaningful reform of the banking industry...and getting out of Afghanistan." He also believes women have a right to control their bodies, for which he has been taken to task on a recent call-in radio show.

For the southeastern corner of Connecticut, Alpert said access to the credit market needs to be opened through the Small Business Association.

We already have a Senator from Connecticut on the Small Business and Entrepreneurial committee - Joe Lieberman. Have you ever once heard anything regarding small business in Southeastern Connecticut from that committee?"

Alpert said he'd bore into those committees and "do the hard work to get millions of dollars of credit support... We've bailed out companies that are too big to fail, but we need to look at businesses that are too small to ignore - the small businesses that live on credit to make cash flow work."

Alpert's desire to clean up government might signal political naiveté to some, but hope for the future to others.

"The value is the people in the room. If you want clean government you have the power, its just that people in this state feel so beaten down, so forgotten and so disconnected from the outcomes that you constantly hear people say 'what difference can I make?' and I say 'all the difference in the world.'"

On The Road With Merrick

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