“Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) is running for president” sounds like the title of a Tales from the Crypt episode. Of course, the senator denies he’s running, as you deny you were speeding, but then why is Murphy spending so much money on publicity?

A related question anyone following current events and national and elective politics should ask is: Does the Democrat Party have any bright lights? The easy answer is no, and it’s worth remembering that not all easy answers are wrong.

Ross Douthat of the New York Times spent an interminable amount of time—for which we can only hope he was well paid—interviewing Sen. Murphy, a partial transcript of which appeared in that paper. The result was distressing enough to make a reader wonder why Douthat bothered at all.

The answer to that question is presumably related to the report by NBC News that Murphy spent “more than $1 million on ads on Meta platforms in February alone,” more than “he has spent on the likes of Facebook and Instagram in the last five years combined.”

Murphy’s background would make one think that he would be more thoughtful about national and international affairs. He graduated with honors from Williams College, spent a year at Oxford, and then got a J.D. from the University of Connecticut Law School. That law degree may not make him Supreme Court material, or even Supreme Court clerk material, but even so, he could have imaginative ideas about how to fix what’s wrong with the country.

Part of his problem is that he is as complicit as the rest of the Democrat Party in propping up the failing, obviously mentally impaired, Joe Biden for years. During the 2024 election cycle, Murphy was a vocal supporter of Biden’s re-election campaign. How can the public trust a man who has deceived them for years?

But that’s not all: in October 2020, shortly after the New York Post published its story about the Hunter Biden laptop, Murphy tweeted, “Joe Biden—and all of us—SHOULD be furious that media outlets are spreading what is very likely Russian propaganda. I’ve seen the intel. The mainstreaming of misinformation is Russia’s 2020 goal.”

Douthat didn’t ask the obvious question: What intel had he seen? We now know there wasn’t any. We know the FBI had the laptop for months and knew it was genuine. Murphy was just playing the public for fools.

But it gets worse. Murphy said this:

“Trump, from Day 1, began to wage a very coordinated, thoughtful assault on the rule of law in order to enable the transfer of our government from democracy into some form of quasi-democracy to put his billionaire friends in charge. I just don’t know that the Democratic Party was ready. I think, even to this day, a lot of folks in the party still think this is politics as normal, still think that we’re really not at risk of losing our democracy, that we’re going to have an election in 2026…”

Murphy appears to be saying he actually thinks there may not be a presidential election in 2028. That is simply unhinged—or a first-class lie. Why would a man say such a thing? Perhaps because that’s just what he has been doing for years—lying and covering up the incompetence of Joe Biden. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment was designed specifically to solve the kind of problem Joe Biden presented, but Biden’s cabinet members failed to answer the call of duty to use that amendment to remove him. And there’s no record of Sen. Murphy suggesting they should.

In his interview, Murphy said, “Trump had openly advertised to the public that he was going to try to degrade our democracy… ” And “[The American people] didn’t believe him when he said he was going to be a dictator.”

But there was no reason they should have believed the “dictator” claim. Trump had been asked if he would “abuse power as retribution against anybody.” His oblique answer was, “Except for day one.” He said on the “day one” he referred to, he would use his presidential powers to close the southern border with Mexico and expand oil drilling. Murphy and dozens of Democrats have simply lost their credibility (if they ever had any) by twisting Trump’s figure of speech into a plot to become a dictator.

Murphy rails against Trump’s billionaire friends, but he himself is in favor of eliminating the $10,000 cap on federal deductions for state and local taxes (SALT), even though only 4.75 percent of Connecticut taxpayers (Murphy’s own billionaires?) are affected by the limitation.

Also, on the question of closing the border to illegal immigrants, Murphy either dissembled or displayed disqualifying ignorance on how to solve the problem: he toed the Democrat Party line, saying that legislation was necessary. As everyone now knows—and Democrats now have to admit—legislation was, obviously, not necessary.

But in addition to being mendacious, Murphy also appears to be weak, lacking in character. Douthat asked him, “Just in your own life, do you feel a sense of spiritual crisis or malaise or disconnection personally?”

Murphy: “For me, I mean, I have made tries—often unsuccessful, frankly—in the last couple of years to rejoin a religious life.” And “I do feel like I’ve lost something as I have strayed from structured religious life. And I will admit, I still have not found a church home as I have turned into my 50s, but I’ve been searching.”

Douthat: “Why has that been unsuccessful? I’m really curious.”

Murphy: “Part of it is a familiar story to a lot of other busy families out there: just time. The fact of the matter is, I’ve got two kids whose Sunday mornings are often dominated by travel sports. I am a politician, so I’m on the road many weekends, and I find myself having very few open Sunday mornings.”

The fact that travel sports are more important to him than God should disqualify him—or anyone—from running for president.

It’s still a long way to 2028, but it’s already clear that Murphy is not a bright light of the Democrat Party.

But it is unclear if there is anyone in the Democrat Party brighter than Murphy.

Daniel Oliver is Chairman Emeritus of the Board of the Education and Research Institute and a Director of the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy in San Francisco. In addition to serving as Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission under President Reagan, he was Executive Editor and subsequently Chairman of the Board of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review.

Email Daniel Oliver at Daniel.Oliver@TheCandidAmerican.com.