Opinion: No place for fringe candidates Dean and Whitnum in ’14 race

Susan Bigelow is an award-winning columnist and the founder of CTLocalPolitics. She lives in Enfield with her wife and their cats.

The Martha Dean moment is already over.

Dean only just announced her intention to run for governor, but her impact on the race will never be larger than it is now. That sound you hear is Republicans breathing a sigh of relief.

Dean is an attorney and gun rights activist from Avon who ran for attorney general in 2002 and again in 2010. Her most notable claims to fame before jumping into the governor’s race were suing her 2010 opponents and posting a link to a Newtown “truther” video on her Facebook page a month after the shootings.

But last week she burst back onto the scene with an announcement on the website of the Connecticut Citizens’ Defense League, a pro-gun group, that she was planning on seeking the Republican nomination for governor. On Wednesday, she officially entered the race with what has to be described as a strange, rambling, hour-long speech to a handful of supporters at the Old State House. Really. She described in vivid detail a dream she had about Ronald Reagan in which he visited her carrying a canary, said she believed she’d been sent by God to be a “true blessing” on our benighted little state, and described the media as “vermin” and “snakes.”

Nice.

See the complete story at CT News Junkie.