You can learn a lot from one largely overlooked confirmation hearing. And WWE mogul Linda McMahon’s confirmation hearing Tuesday morning—she’s been selected to run the Small Business Administration—was nothing if not largely overlooked. The SBA, founded in the 1950s, is a federal agency tasked with helping small American businesses grow. Along with her husband Vince, McMahon grew a small business into the professional wrestling empire World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc.
She’s perfect for the job, her former political enemies heartily agreed.
McMahon ran for Senate twice, unsuccessfully, as a Republican in her home state of Connecticut—against 20-year incumbent Attorney General Richard Blumenthal in 2010 and then-Congressman Chris Murphy in 2012. On Tuesday morning, the two men who tromped her testified in support of her confirmation to President Trump’s cabinet. “She is a tireless leader—and a tenacious fighter,” Blumenthal said during his testimony. “I saw firsthand the fight Linda brings to any endeavor she takes on,” Murphy echoed, sweetly, during his.
Other Small Business Committee members advocated for their states’ interests and asked McMahon about specific SBA programs. Senators Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, and Tim Scott, South Carolina Republican—two of the Senate’s youngest, the faces of the future—also both offered bipartisan appreciation for professional wrestling. Scott confessed his WWE fandom and called out McMahon’s son-in-law Paul Levesque, former WWE wrestler, by his stage name “Triple H.” After Scott broke the seal, Booker couldn’t help himself. He challenged Triple H to a competitive workout sesh: “Paul’s letting himself slip a little bit, so after this maybe we should go to the Senate gym so I can give Triple H some triple help in getting back in shape.”
Senators also commended their colleagues from Connecticut for their magnanimous testimonies, despite two knock-down-drag-out campaigns.
Professional (political) wrestling.
All that bipartisan harmony on display raises the question: Was the enmity just for show?
Was what looked like sparring actually, to borrow from the WWE idiom, “entertainment”?
Well, the McMahon campaigns had drama to spare. Blumenthal won his Senate seat, one Democrats dearly needed, in 2010 despite the revelation that he repeatedly lied about serving in Vietnam.
And McMahon’s former communications director—the guy who reportedly tipped off the Times that Blumenthal lied about ‘Nam—was sitting behind the recently reelected Senator Blumenthal during Tuesday’s hearing. It’s subtler than President Trump shaving Vince McMahon’s head at Wrestlemania XXIII’s “Battle of the Billionaires”—but their two faces in parallel profile made a darkly amusing picture.
Everyone knows the taste wars are over.
In both races, critics called out WWE for sexism, and its business practices, standard for a corporation of its size, came under relentless fire. The fact that WWE accepted tax credits from the state of Connecticut became, somehow, cause for alarm. In the eyes of one former McMahon campaign official, “The Connecticut press corps almost made the [Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee] seem friendly.”
What played out in the press also played out over family dinners across the state. It was not so much a Trumpian class war pitting deplorable WWE fans against the rarefied clubby set with its diminishing influence. No, it was a taste war.
As if to confirm tackiness her ultimate and only legitimate offense, the name of McMahon’s boat (the “Sexy B*tch”) became a target of columnists’ criticism. In parts of the country other than the Connecticut coast—and, actually, there too—good people give their boats hideously tacky names. They just do.
Despite protestations from folks back home—one who sniffed, “Apparently this kind of stuff now just makes Chris Murphy smile”—these trumped-up indecencies seem particularly meaningless in the elevated context of McMahon’s cabinet appointment, in which she is supported by her former opponents.
Besides, the ultimate taste war has come and gone. And the sniffling snobs lost.
In the end, no one likes overregulation.
Partisans agree small businesses are better off unimpeded by government. Ranking member Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat of New Hampshire, acknowledged the struggle of “navigating regulations” hobbles small businesses. And as SBC Chairman James Risch, Idaho Republican, put it—a guy “fixing lawnmowers in his garage” shouldn’t have to handle, unaided, the same volumes of paperwork and red tape as the General Electric Corporation.
In this one arena of federal influence, Democrats and Republicans see more or less eye-to-eye. The more small American businesses grow into big American businesses, the better off we’ll be. Yes, even if those businesses capitalize on our base interest in watching bodybuilders pretend to fight each other—an interest shared by at least two United States Senators, mind you.
