How much should you read into Chris Shays’ nod at American history in yesterday’s debate?
It might have been the most interesting answer anybody gave, depending on how much he meant by it.
Asked for his favorite Connecticut senator, Shays was ready with the answer William Samuel Johnson.
Johnson was around for the original Tea Party, and — although he was a authentic participant in the birth of the nation — he was pretty much the opposite of a dyed-in-the-wool Son of Liberty. He kept looking for compromise and rapprochement, even at the risk of arrest. So in an era of real tea parties, he was emphatically not a teabagger. WSJ is the perfect symbol of the kind of moderate Republicanism that characterized both 
the party in Connecticut and Shays’ early career.
Whigs not Republicans. Just perfect. The last Whig before Lincoln in the new Republican Party was Millard Fillmore. Talk about turning the clock back — sheesh! I can see the bumper sticker now: Vote Shays, the real moderate Whig.
Isn’t Shays a Carpetbagger? The first thing CT Carpetbaggers do is collect their state pension and move to either a low tax, high growth state or the DC/NYC axis.
When I see CT carpetbaggers retiring within spitting distance of the Gold Dome of Xanadu in downtown Hartford then we know they are willing to eat their own cooking.
This would be an interesting stat: political retirees and their destination states.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/02/meet-the-senates-carpetbaggers/
WSJ is the perfect symbol of the kind of moderate Republicanism
I’m emphatically a “tea-bagger,” i.e., the type waving a flag up at the Capitol on tax day, in favor of constitutionally limited government, less debt-funding social justice programs that emphatically haven’t, don’t, and never will work. I’m inclined to favor Shays. He’s not a conservative, but he’d be an improvement over Joe L. on fiscal/healthcare matters. He appears to me, and especially in his run against Himes, appeared to me, to be a statesman. And, I think he’d stand a reasonable shot at beating the immoderate Murphy.