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Senator Chris Murphy has once again put on a baseball cap and ventured into the Connecticut wilderness to remind everyone what an extraordinary person he is.
Tuesday morning marked the beginning of Murphy’s tenth annual walk across the state, a weeklong publicity hike during which Connecticut’s junior senator dresses like a normal person, points a camera at himself and explains how much he enjoys listening to people.
“This is my favorite week of the year,” Murphy announced in his opening video.
Of course it is. For an entire week, Murphy gets to walk around Connecticut while residents, reporters and social-media followers are treated to a continuing documentary about Chris Murphy walking around Connecticut.
This year’s journey begins in Colebrook near the Massachusetts border and will eventually carry him to the shoreline. There will be rain, sore feet and endless reminders that nobody admires Chris Murphy more than Chris Murphy.
But Murphy’s explanation of the walk was even more insufferable than the walk itself.
“Most of these people don’t watch MSNBC or Fox News, don’t pay attention to politics,” Murphy said. “But when they see their United States senator in a baseball cap or T-shirt or a rain jacket, they’re really eager to talk to me about what they want from Washington, how I can make their life better.”
In his telling, Connecticut is populated by politically oblivious villagers who pay no attention to the world around them. Then, one glorious morning, they look down the road and see a lanky United States senator approaching in the ceremonial clothing of the common man.
A baseball cap. A T-shirt. Perhaps even a rain jacket.
Suddenly, the previously disengaged masses become “really eager” to speak. At last, help has arrived. Chris Murphy has descended from Washington, and he is dressed just like someone who might mow his own lawn.
The clouds part. The townspeople gather. A woman offers him her last loaf of bread. Somewhere in the distance, a church bell rings.
“What can you do to make our lives better, Senator Murphy?” they cry.
Notice how Murphy describes these conversations. The people he encounters apparently do not tell him what government should stop doing to them. They do not suggest that Washington might be making their lives more expensive, complicated or miserable. They simply wait for Murphy to come along and explain how he can make everything better.
What would Connecticut do without him?
This is the particular genius of Murphy’s annual hike. It transforms the most ordinary responsibility of an elected official, speaking with constituents, into a heroic act of personal sacrifice.
The walk might be less irritating if Murphy spent the rest of the year primarily focused on Connecticut. Instead, he has become one of the country’s most relentless national political commentators, seemingly available at any hour to discuss Donald Trump, the Republican Party, the fate of democracy or whatever else might earn him another television appearance.
Then, once a year, he leaves the cable-news studios to take his narcissism directly to the peasants.
Murphy says he learns “something new every single year” he completes the walk. After more than two decades in elected office, that may not be the reassuring statement he thinks it is.
Still, there is something touching about the tradition. Once a year, Chris Murphy returns to Connecticut to reenact the role of a senator who represents Connecticut.
He dresses the way he imagines normal people dress, listens to problems he apparently cannot hear from his office and makes sure a camera records every grueling act of humility.
By the time he reaches the shoreline, the peasants will have been heard, the ego will have been fed and the baseball cap can go back into storage. And the people of Connecticut will somehow have to carry on until he walks among us next year.
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