Republican Senate hopeful Linda McMahon talks with Arthur Norton following Wednesday's meeting of the Republican Town Committee of Greenwich.
Linda McMahon projected a touchy feely side very much in the mold of Ann Romney in front of a highly sympathetic audience Wednesday night at the monthly meeting of the Greenwich Republican Town Committee.
The two-time Republican Senate hopeful delivered what amounted to a closing argument to prospective delegates to next month’s state party conventon, some of whom are said to be privately on the fence despite being from McMahon’s hometown.
McMahon underscored her humble roots as the only child of a shop foreman and budget analyst at Cherry Point Air Base near New Bern, N.C.
“Even though I ran last time, I really found that my story about my life and where I came from never really came out very much,” McMahon said.
“When I was first born, for about the first three to four years of my life, we lived in low income housing outside the base. My parents worked very hard, saved their money. Then my dad, as he liked to say, bought a little piece of land up the road and built the house that I grew up in. We never bought a new car. It was new to us.”
McMahon, who is trying to allay concerns about her electability, said she first met her husband Vince when she was 13 and he was 16. They married right out of high school.
“We had no job, no money, no insurance, but we were having a baby,” McMahon said. “So I know what that’s like. I know what it’s like to walk in a lot of the shoes of the folks here in Connecticut who faced some of those early challenges.”
McMahon made a brief reference to the couple’s decision to file for bankruptcy in 1976.
“We made an investment that wasn’t so great and it turned out that wasn’t a business that we really didn’t know anything about,” McMahon said. “We eventually, through a lot of different circumstances, some beyond our control, had declared bankruptcy. We lost everything. We lost our home, our cars, we didn’t have any credit.”