Chris Murphy's big night

Monday night was a big moment for Chris Murphy.

The fifth district Democrats nominated Murphy as the Democratic challenger to Republican Congresswoman Nancy Johnson at their state convention held at Crosby High School in Waterbury.


Addressing an audience of over 300 people, Murphy pledged to run a positive campaign against Johnson focusing on issues that are important to people in the fifth district such as health care and education. For the most part, Murphy's speech was very positive as he let the other speakers rip Johnson apart (don't let it be said that Democrats can't throw out the red-meat).

Murphy wants to keep on a positive note distancing himself from the negative attacks that have been launched against Johnson in the media. Although I don't see a problem highlighting the hyprocisy of Johnson nor do I have a problem attakcing politicians (it's pretty obvious), one must respect the way Murphy is running his campaign and hopefully voters will notice this as well during as the election season heats up.

I arrived several minutes late (I’m not familiar with Waterbury) but I was able to videotape all the speeches as well as meet with several readers of my site (sorry I didn’t get a chance to talk in more detail. I hope you all understand that running around video taping and taking photographs takes a great deal of energy and if I don’t stay focused, I’ll miss something). Although I was unable to get an interview with Murphy, I was very pleased with what I saw from the young challenger and I’m looking forward to covering his campaign as he travels across the district over the next few months.

Sadly, the mainstream media wasn't present to witness Murphy do his thing. Even the Waterbury-Republican skipped out on the event and the convention was held in Waterbury. As far as I can tell, I was the only "media" person on hand which is a shame since there are several newspapers in the area that could of sent a reporter to the scene instead of being lazy and picking up the story from the AP wire (look here, and here).

It’s funny how newspaper editors and publishers wonder why their circulation is decreasing. Here's a hint: maybe if you cover the news instead of writing endless feature stories, fluff pieces, and AP stories (which you can read anywhere), and focus on hard news and stories that mean something to your readers, people might buy your paper(s) again.
(UPDATE: I was wrong, the Waterbury Republican did cover the convention. My appoligies to the paper).



Due to events today and tomorrow, I not going to post all the highlights from the convention now but here is the video of Murphy's acceptance speech. Due to the large file size, the video was broken into four parts (if you experience any playback problems, hit the pause button and give you computer a couple of minutes to download the file). I’ll add the video from the other speakers at a later time.

Murphy acceptance speech part 1:

Murphy acceptance speech part 2:

Murphy acceptance speech part 3:

Murphy acceptance speech part 4: