Chris Murphy Wants to Make America a Little Less Lonely

Chris Murphy had barely taken his seat at the head of the table when he was hit with a little history. “That’s Bobby Kennedy touring the Delta, and later he toured Appalachia,” Tim Nolan, a nurse practitioner on the front lines of the opioid epidemic in North Carolina, said as the senator looked down at the photo. Those trips in 1967 and 1968, Nolan said, sparked a “conversion,” awakening Kennedy to the crisis of poverty in America. “I hope your tour,” he told Murphy, “is as rich.”

It was a cool day in early August. Murphy—wearing striped socks, dark jeans, and a slate sport coat—seemed slightly uncomfortable with the comparison. He looked up to Kennedy. But he was not surveying shotgun shacks in Mississippi; he was sitting in an unassuming community center conference room on the outskirts of Boone, North Carolina, a college town about 100 miles northwest of Charlotte and a short drive from the Tennessee border. “I don’t think I could ever hold a candle to the work that he and others were doing,” he told me afterward. But for an ambitious New England Democrat in Appalachia, perhaps it was difficult to avoid the parallel. What, exactly, was the junior senator from Connecticut—best known for the decade-long gun safety crusade he launched after the Sandy Hook shooting—doing at this roundtable 400 miles from Washington and 700 from his home state, asking questions about opioids, struggling factory towns, loneliness, and the ills of social media?…