The Smackdown Candidate

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Although there's been some scaremongering, research has linked steroid use by athletes to liver, cardiac, musculoskeletal, and reproductive system damage, as well as psychiatric effects. When I asked Linda McMahon about the issue, however, she said she shared her husband's doubts. "There's some evidence sometimes of muscle disease, or cardiac disease, but it's really hard to know because you didn't know the condition of the performer's heart, or whatever, prior to," she told me. "So I still don't think we know the long-term effects of steroids. They are continuing to study it more and more, but I don't believe there are a lot of studies out there today that are conclusive."

For all their on-camera posturing against the elites, the McMahons have long been engaged in a flirtation with the forces of respectability. Over the years the WWE has tried to translate its brand to mainstream ventures like a football league and a Times Square theme restaurant. Both were expensive debacles. The company is currently expanding into movie- making, signing up former Oscar nominees like Ed Harris and Patricia Clarkson to star alongside wrestlers. The films are part of a broader push to tone down the WWE's attitude. After years of defending the company over its racy content, which once prompted advertisers like Coca-Cola (KO) to pull its ads, it was apparently Linda and Stephanie who decided it was time for less misogyny and gore. Revenues have been hit by the recession, as well as by competition from the authentic blood sport of mixed martial arts, and the McMahons calculated that audiences and advertisers want something more family friendly.

The McMahons own an $11 million Greenwich estate and have become accepted members of Connecticut society. Lowell P. Weicker, a former GOP senator and governor, is a member of WWE's board. The current governor, Jodi M. Rell, paved the way for McMahon's entry into politics by appointing her in early 2009 to the state board of education, over the objections of some in the legislature who questioned her wrestling background. McMahon told me that brief experience gave her a taste for public service, which matured into a desire to run for the Senate as she watched President Barack Obama enact policies that encumbered entrepreneurs with taxes, regulations, and obligations to provide health-care benefits. "It was just one thing after the other, after the other," she said. "We need, I believe, more representative senators and congressmen and women who are more in tune to the people who sent them to Washington." She's pro-choice, against repealing President Bush's tax cuts, and skeptical of the bill sponsored by Senator Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) that would place new rules on the banking industry and create a consumer protection agency, which she calls "just another added layer of bureaucracy."

Although the WWE has sponsored voter registration drives, and McMahon appeared alongside The Rock at the 2000 GOP convention, people who know her say her interest in the Senate came as a surprise. "No, I didn't ever sense that this is the direction that she wanted to go in," says Weicker, an admirer who is nonetheless unsure if McMahon's prepared for the harsh business of campaigning. "She's already seen enough to know that she's got a rough road ahead."

In her short time in politics, however, McMahon has shown herself to be a formidable combatant. When she launched her campaign last September, her initial target was Dodd, a Democrat who was expected to run again for his seat. She aired a series of commercials attacking the senator as an out-of-touch incumbent who was beholden to special interests. Facing declining poll numbers and the prospect of a free-spending opponent, Dodd dropped out of the race in January, making way for a far more popular Democratic candidate, Richard Blumenthal, the state's long-serving Attorney General.

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