Today, let’s play Political Kingmaker.

Pretend you’re the Republican leadership in a smallish state with an open United States Senate seat. The opposition is running a popular, longtime officeholder whose sense of inevitability was shaken by recent revelations that he had referred to himself as a Vietnam War veteran when he isn’t one.

Your own options are:

A) A well regarded former congressman who is a decorated Vietnam War veteran.

B) A political novice who made her fortune building up an entertainment business that specialized in blood, seminaked women and scripted subplots featuring rape, adultery and familial violence. In which the candidate, her husband and children played themselves. Also, the family yacht is named Sexy Bitch.

Well, obviously, you go for the yacht owner.

Yes, this week the Connecticut Republican Party chose Linda McMahon, the former C.E.O. of World Wrestling Entertainment, to be their Senate candidate. Her main opponent, the former Representative Rob Simmons, packed up his war medals and went home.

“You can’t argue with arithmetic,” he told The New London Day.

The math in question is $50 million, the amount McMahon claimed she was prepared to spend on her campaign. Connecticut has just under two million registered voters, so maybe she’ll just invite everybody in the state to a nice dinner at Red Lobster.