U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal

Background

Richard Blumenthal, the state's longest-serving attorney general and its most popular Democrat, repeatedly teased Connecticut with talk of making a run for governor, the only office of significance seemingly beyond the reach of the state's dominant Democratic Party. But it became increasingly clear over the years that his only higher ambition in politics was a seat in the U.S. Senate.

There are two ways get to the Senate. Be bold enough to challenge a senator, never an easy thing when the incumbent shares a party affiliation. Or be lucky enough and patient enough to be ready when a seat opens, say, every 30 years or so.

Blumenthal's patience was rewarded at noon on Jan. 6, when U.S. Sen. Christopher J. Dodd stepped outside his front door in East Haddam and announced he would not seek re-election after 30 years in the Senate, a concession to time and age, poor polling and an ill-tempered electorate. Two-and-a-half hours later, Blumenthal stepped to a microphone at Democratic headquarters in Hartford and declared himself in the race.

"Today is Senator Dodd's day," Blumenthal said. But then he grinned and said, "The United States Senate has been a public-service goal for me for a long time."

That goal appeared increasingly in jeopardy as the 2010 contest took several unexpected twists and turns. One blow was self-inflicted, stemming from questions about how Blumenthal had referred to his military record. Days before the Democratic state convention in May, The New York Times reported that Blumenthal, a stateside Marine Reservist during the Vietnam war, had on occasion referred to serving in Vietnam. He immediately tried to minimize the damage as an occasional misstatement, noting that in his official biography and in most speeches he never claimed to have served overseas.

This was not the case of a lifelong fabulist suddenly unmasked. Without embellishment, Blumenthal has repeatedly and accurately described his military service as a stateside Marine Reservist. Even one of his Republican opponents, Vietnam veteran Rob Simmons, said he never was under the misimpression that Blumenthal was a fellow vet. But on occasion he has unequivocally placed himself in Vietnam. On Veterans Day in 2008, he was quoted by The Advocate of Stamford as telling a crowd, "I wore the uniform in Vietnam."

Other than saying he "misspoke," Blumenthal offered no explanation of how he could make such a mistake. A Quinnipiac poll conducted May 25 and 26 found a majority of voters accepting that his statements were a mistake, not a lie. That early poll showed him with a 25-point lead.

But as his race against Republican Linda McMahon wore on, that edge narrowed considerably. By late September, they appeared to be locked in a dead heat; A Quinnipiac survey showed Blumenthal at 49 percent, and McMahon at 46.

With considerable help from the national party in the final weeks of the race, Blumenthal ramped up his attacks on McMahon, focusing on her tenure at the helm of WWE. Democrats raised sharp questions about the company's treatment of its workers, its portrayal of women, and its policy toward steroid use by performers. As McMahon continued to saturate the airwaves with TV ads, some independent voters were turned off by her profligate spending. And she never made a deep enough inroad with women voters, a key swing bloc. In the end, she lost by a considerable margin despite pouring nearly $50 million into the race.

As Blumenthal steps into his new role as a freshman senator in Washington, he has promised to focus on many of the same issues that drove his work in the Attorney General's office for the last two decades-fighting for the "little guy" through consumer protection measures and attacks on corporate malfeasance.

Blumenthal was in the mold of the activist state attorneys general who came to prominence during the 1980s, taking on anti-trust and other cases that Ronald Reagan's Justice Department declined and providing regulatory bite in an otherwise laissez-faire era. A predecessor in the office, Joseph I. Lieberman, used such cases as a launching pad to the U.S. Senate in 1988.

For much of his tenure, it was as if Blumenthal had to apologize for still being state attorney general. He has that kind of resume. Wrote for The Crimson at Harvard. Edited the Law Journal at Yale, followed by clerking for Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun. He was an aide to Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the Nixon White House, an aide to Abraham Ribicoff in the Senate and then the youngest U.S. attorney in the nation at age 31.

The onetime wunderkind turned 65 on Feb. 13, 2011.

As Slate noted 10 years ago in a profile about his inability to leverage a remarkable resume into higher office, "Blumenthal is blessed with every political virtue except recklessness and luck."

His luck finally turned when Dodd decided to retire.

Blumenthal is married and has four children. He lives in Greenwich.

Financial Disclosure

Blumenthal's net worth is between $599,000 and $1.36 million, according to Senate disclosure forms. His wife, Cynthia, is much wealthier, listing assets of between $55 million to $107 million.  Cynthia is the daughter of Peter Malkin, a New York real estate magnate whose family controls about 10 million square feet of commercial space in New York, including the Empire State Building. His disclosure form reports that his wife has a partnership interest in many of her family's real estate holdings, including Empire State Building Associates, LLC.