Peter Schiff, the the brash money manager and talking head from Weston who lost a three-way Republican Senate primary to Linda McMahon in 2010, has a long memory.
A frequent guest on CNBC and Fox Business Network who runs the Westport-based brokerage firm Euro Pacific Capital, Schiff has taped an infomercial for McMahon foe Christopher Shays.
In it, Schiff predicts that Republicans are doomed to go down the same path as they did two years ago if they back McMahon at the May 18 state party convention in Hartford.
“It appears to me that Republicans in Connecticut are about to make the same mistake twice,” Schiff says in the 5:28 video, which is posted on the Shays campaign website.
Schiff knocks McMahon’s for her expenditure of $50 million of her wrestling fortune on her 2010 campaign, which ended with her defeat by Democrat Richard Blumenthal by 11 points.
“Connecticut voters did not want to put that Senate seat up for sale and sell it to the highest bidder,” Schiff says. “The perception that Linda was trying to buy that seat caused her negatives to rise.”
Schiff fears that wrestling will once again become the dominant storyline if the party embraces McMahon.
“I did not want that election to be a referendum on wrestling, which is what happened,” Schiff says.
Schiff spends part of the video disputing the notion that Shays is a squish.
“Now some of you might say, ‘ Who cares he’s a RINO (Republican In Name Only)? What difference does it make if we put a RINO in the U.S. Senate?’ He is not a RINO. And he will not be RINO if we give him the opportunity to represent us in the U.S. Senate.”