It's a little less than a month before primary day, when he hopes to earn the Democratic nomination for Congress, and here is Shaun McNally talking about the West African nation of Liberia and a portrait of John F. Kennedy
An International Spin For Local Politics
By TED MANN
Day Staff Writer
Published on 8/1/2004
It's a little less than a month before primary day, when he hopes to earn the Democratic nomination for Congress, and here is Shaun McNally talking about the West African nation of Liberia and a portrait of John F. Kennedy.
It seems, well, a little off-topic.
But this is Shaun McNally, the former state representative and Peace Corps veteran running as an alternative to the party-endorsed favorite, Jim Sullivan, and conversations like this are at the center of his candidacy — one focused as much on foreign affairs and America's role in the world as it is on the challenges facing the 2nd District.
In an interview in mid-July at his modest State Street headquarters in New London, the reasons for this global reach are immediately apparent. His African experience, along with his years in state government, informs virtually every position he has taken.
And, he says, it is in a debate about our policies abroad that Rep. Rob Simmons, the Republican incumbent, can be beaten.
“I think the Achilles' heel for these guys is foreign policy,” McNally says.
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Like his primary opponent, McNally grew up in Norwich, the son of a state food safety inspector and a nurse, the grandson of a Norwich cop.
McNally attended public school, graduating from Norwich Free Academy, and worked his way through the University of Connecticut, where he earned a degree in political science. He later received a master's in public administration from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.
The 46-year-old lives in Deep River, with his wife, Dr. Madeline Wilson, a physician on the faculty of Yale Medical School, and a daughter, Kate.
Even at UConn, McNally was enmeshed in state politics, interning for then-Rep. Christopher J. Dodd, and working on Dodd's successful run for the U.S. Senate in 1980.
After Dodd's victory, McNally went to work for his successor, Rep. Sam Gejdenson, a Bozrah Democrat who held the 2nd District seat for 20 years before being upset by Simmons in 2000.
In 1982, McNally went abroad, fulfilling what he said was a lifelong goal of joining the Peace Corps. He stayed for two years in Liberia, directing agricultural improvements and seeing that any foreign aid that did flow into the impoverished country was put to its best use.
That experience, he said, deeply informed the fiscal conservatism he brought to the state legislature, where he sparred at times with party leaders over what he saw as wasteful spending.
It was also in Liberia that, while he prepared for a meeting in a village in “the middle of nowhere,” McNally was invited into the home of a local official, a building with only the barest amenities, whose walls contained a single decoration: a portrait of Kennedy, the cold warrior who also founded the Peace Corps.
It was an object lesson in the country's potential to effect great change without engendering animosity, McNally said, and stands in stark contrast to the report of friends recently returned from Niger, who said the hottest consumer item in that modernizing country item these days is a watch bearing the portrait of Osama bin Laden.
McNally blames the failure of the Kennedy tradition — one of military might balanced by active altruism — on the current administration, and on Simmons, his would-be opponent, whose military service included a stint as a CIA agent in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.
“The use of diplomatic, economic and foreign aid, in addition to the military, is how America has historically gained the position it has in the world,” he said. “And these guys only see the world through military eyes, and miss the boat on other stuff.”
The candidate says he would love to pit “Peace Corps values against CIA values,” in the general election, running directly at Simmons on his intelligence credentials.
That strategy has taken some getting used to, he said, but has grown stronger amid more general questions about the country's purpose and progress in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Six, nine months ago, I was talking about how Peace Corps values need to be a part of the debate of foreign policy,” McNally said, gesturing around the cluttered office, “and even in here, people would say, ‘What are you, nuts?'
“Talk about it now,” he said, “folks are yearning. They understand it. They understand that what the world respects and loves about America is our tolerance, our generosity, our toughness when we need to be, but only when we need to be, that we don't flex our muscles gratuitously.”
Laying out the arguments he would put to Simmons, McNally displays a professor's ardor for his subject, so much that it is easy to forget a salient fact: Asked to choose which Democratic candidate should make this case in November, most Democrats chose somebody else.
•••
McNally attributes the endorsement of Sullivan by state lawmakers and delegates mainly to party loyalty, and a feeling that Sullivan earned his candidacy this year because he deferred to Joseph D. Courtney, the Vernon attorney who was the party's candidate two years ago.
But it also stems, he said, from a sense of “hierarchy and order” that he believes he threatened during his three terms in the General Assembly by sometimes breaking ranks with Democrats.
“There are many Democrats who respect the principled positions I've taken during my terms in the legislature and beyond,” McNally said. “There are other Democrats who see standing up for principle being a measure of disloyalty to the party.”
McNally was one of nine Democrats who helped orchestrate the overthrow of House Speaker Irving J. Stolberg, a liberal Democrat, in 1989, and angered some voters and colleagues when he led arguments against the imposition of the state income tax in 1991, then voted in favor of it.
Playing the maverick has won him support in some quarters, including from former Gov. Lowell P. Weicker Jr., who had backed the income tax, and who has graced the McNally campaign with a public endorsement and a $500 contribution.
Many former colleagues have said they remember him with respect, despite some policy disagreements.
“When I came up here, he was one of the hardest-working, more intelligent legislators we had,” Rep. James Amann, D-Milford, said recently. “... Fiscally, he's conservative and pro-business, and socially, he's moderate to liberal, and I think that's a good balance.”
But McNally's business bona fides, particularly his eight years working for the Connecticut Business & Industry Association, may have cost him support among Democrats with close ties to organized labor, which have seen the CBIA as a lobbyist and protector for business owners, not workers.
“He's entitled to his politics, which makes the world go 'round, but they are not usually aligned with mine,” said veteran state Sen. Melodie Peters, D-Old Lyme, a former lobbyist for nurses and healthcare workers, citing McNally's time at CBIA.
For his part, the candidate discounts such talk as misleading. McNally was not a lobbyist, he said, but charged instead with bringing together business owners and state officials in an attempt to assess their common ground.
As a state legislator, he “became committed to the importance of manufacturing” and was “known as a strong champion of incentives to try to keep manufacturing jobs in this state.”
Retaining blue-collar manufacturing jobs remains a priority, he said: “You can't sustain the economy of southeastern Connecticut on Pfizer research jobs.”
Amann sees such talk as McNally's strength, his ability to argue forcefully that the stereotype of Democrats as pro-labor and anti-business is inaccurate. But he acknowledged that the candidate's bluntness, and his frosty relations with some traditional Democratic constituencies, like unions, has cost him party support.
“He's one that never holds back on what he feels,” Amann said. “Citizens like that, but sometimes that tends to irritate political people somewhat.”
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So, if he is to make it to Congress, McNally will have to do what he did at the beginning, when the Norwich Democratic Town Committee wouldn't back his candidacy for the state House.
Then, as now, McNally forced a primary.
Then, in 1986, he won.
Now, the campaign has used small house-party fund-raisers and old-school handshake appearances on street corners and at country fairs to try to drum up the support McNally has not received from donors and interest groups. McNally has taken in only $116,306 since he officially became a candidate, trailing not only Simmons ($1.3 million) but also Sullivan ($353,000).
Fundraising is complicated, McNally said, by his decision not to accept any contributions from political groups representing special interests, including unions. Those constituencies have largely sided with Sullivan.
McNally does not want to seem beholden to special interests, he said, reciting a line that has become a refrain: “My mother always told me you can't sell just a little piece of your soul.”
The Sullivan campaign dismisses that as an empty gesture.
“Someone who worked at the CBIA for eight years saying they're not going to take contributions from organized labor is like me saying I would not accept an offer of marriage from (the actress) Jacqueline Bisset,” said Michael Winters, Sullivan's press secretary. “In neither case is the offer forthcoming, so it doesn't matter.”
McNally is undeterred, and talks up his credentials while laying into Sullivan as a candidate without a chance of winning, one he says has nothing but “platitudes from the Democratic congressional campaign playbook” to toss at Simmons.
He also seems to revel in the challenger's fierce optimism at being the underdog.
“There is a wonderful bandwagon effect that happens in politics,” he said with a smile. “Train's leaving, get on the winning side. You don't want to be there with the guy who comes up short. But you know, we've talked to thousands of other Democrats who like what I stand for, and think our side's going to do just fine on August 10.”
