With polls showing that Linda McMahon is well within striking distance of Attorney General Richard Blumenthal in the U.S. Senate race, I see now that it is entirely possible that Connecticut really will be represented in Congress by someone with a boat named Sexy Bitch.

I must admit that McMahon's pledge early on, to spend $50 million of her own money to get elected to the Senate, seemed almost more comical than serious, especially from a political novice who sometimes didn't even bother turning up to vote in local elections.

After all, the buy-a-Senate-seat plan was hatched by someone who made a fortune creating and acting out wacky and improbable story lines for adoring audiences. Could politics be so different?

I am a little surprised that Connecticut voters, at least as they are represented in the polls, seem so tone deaf to the larger issues at stake, so prone to falling into place in the story line.

Is the Connecticut electorate really ready to send to Washington someone who is obviously soft on defending the existing minimum wage, never mind ever raising it? She admitted last week she doesn't even know what it is.

Do Connecticut voters really want someone clearly more interested in lowering taxes for the wealthy than protecting the interests of the middle class?

Could McMahon's pledge to spend $50 million even turn out to be a smart personal investment, if she manages to get elected and preserve lower taxes on income, dividends and estates?

Aren't voters wary when McMahon promises to cut the budget but refuses to get specific, saying that specifics become "political footballs" in an election year? Of course they do. That's the point of elections.

It will be interesting to see if Blumenthal, in the first of his televised debates with McMahon, scheduled to go off Monday, will manage to hack through the hype of the McMahon candidacy.

Can he successfully write himself back into the story line?

It seems to me that, with election day fast approaching, Blumenthal must either expose McMahon as too far out of the mainstream of Connecticut political thinking, or give up. Either he is obviously the more experienced and reliable statesman or not, and that should be crystal clear to voters by the end of the debate, or not.

I wouldn't expect to hear much from Blumenthal about the McMahon negatives that have surfaced in the campaign, the steroid and dead wrestler controversies that have hovered around her wrestling entertainment empire.

I doubt he'll mention that she has a boat named Sexy Bitch, either.

Rob Simmons also didn't bring up the sleaze factor of the wrestling business against McMahon in his debate with her. And, of course, in the end he lost to her the Republican nomination, something that at one time seemed as safe to him as the Senate election did to Blumenthal.

Simmons, who heartily endorsed the lightweight who is running as the Republican candidate for his old Second District Congressional seat - he even did an embarrassing burlesque style dance with candidate Janet Peckinpaugh that you can search for with "Rob Janet" on YouTube, if you dare - has not yet publicly endorsed McMahon.

Simmons' fellow Republicans in Stonington have also not been quick to endorse. At least the town's Republican Committee doesn't appear on McMahon's official list of endorsements.

Curiously, Independent Sen. Joseph Lieberman, who coyly refused to endorse McMahon when someone asked him this summer, didn't rule it out.

Lieberman, Connecticut's self-anointed moralist, has been highly critical in the past of McMahon's wrestling programming, which at the very least can be called violent and sexist.

"She's running for Senate now, so I am not going to hold her accountable for anything she did in the past," Lieberman said earlier this year, when asked about endorsing McMahon. Really?

So one of Connecticut's senators is not interested in holding her accountable.

We'll see Monday whether Connecticut's other would-be senator feels differently.

This is the opinion of David Collins.