Freshman Sen. Chris Murphy tries to figure out how to play up his youth without looking phony. “I'm very careful not to try to use lingo that's above my coolness pay grade.”
Image by Dave Collins / AP
WASHINGTON — Last week, Sen. Chris Murphy couldn't get the new will.i.am and Britney Spears song "Scream & Shout" out of his head.
So, the freshman Democrat from Connecticut took the only action that made sense: He tweeted about it.
It's the kind of thing a mom, reaching for common ground, might say to a carpool of middle-school girls. But even if Murphy isn't that cool, he has little choice but to keep trying.
As the youngest member of the United States Senate — an institution whose average member is, at 61, more than 20 years Murphy's senior — Murphy, 39, often seems to be juggling authenticity and professionalism with a certain expectation of hipness. Having recently joined what he calls a "new, young nucleus" of rap-quoting, basketball-playing Senate Gen-Xers, he faces the daily challenge of fitting his admittedly dorky persona into the new mold of the Capitol Hill cool-kids club.
"I care deeply about juvenile justice reform, and gun policy, and health care delivery system reform," he said in an interview with BuzzFeed. "But I also really care about the Boston Red Sox, and good pizza, and —" Murphy paused and looked up at the ceiling as he tried to settle on an appropriate musical artist. "I'm trying to pick which — I'm not going to say Nick Lachey." He giggled, seemingly in on the joke, then relented. "And Nick Lachey as a legitimate mainstream pop artist."
Name-dropping Nick Lachey might be a bit off-trend, but it is the manifestation of a belief Murphy shares with his younger colleagues that Senators are "not supposed to be robots who care only about detailed policy debates."
"We're supposed to be representative of the public, and one of the ways that we show that we are truly representative of what people think is we care about important policy, but we also care about the mundane subjects of life," Murphy said. "If regular people are talking about food and parenting and music and sports, then I think it's appropriate but also probably important that their elected officials talk about the same things too."
On a recent day, that philosophy was evident in a tweet about pizza: