I know, I know. There are so many wealthy candidates running for office in Connecticut this year it's hard to keep them all straight.

But I don't think that's the only reason why Warren Mosler, financier, hedge fund manager and maker of some of the world's fastest race cars, has gone virtually unnoticed in his bid for Connecticut's Democratic nomination for Senate.

Having chatted a little with him this week about his political ambitions, I can say Mosler is a decidedly quirky candidate.

First of all, he admits he has little chance of winning, and while he's prepared to spend some of his own money and raise some more, he has no plans for matching's Linda McMahon's big spending spree.

"Her dream job is to be a U.S. senator," Mosler said of McMahon's self-funded campaign. "I am doing this as a matter of conscience.

"If my ideas get traction, I could raise the money it takes. But it has to make sense."

Mosler is also a bit of a carpetbagger.

He grew up here, in Manchester, and earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Connecticut. He also owns a 40 percent share in BioSafe Systems - he stumbled a bit on the name of the company, as if he'd almost forgotten he owned it - that is based in East Hartford.

But he's been living in recent years in St. Croix, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, because of U.S. tax laws that offer steep tax discounts to people who live and run businesses there.

When I asked him whether voters might view this as simple tax dodge, he agreed some might.

But he countered that he has been participating in a legitimate program aimed at improving the economy of the islands. He said it's a little like getting extra combat pay, if you volunteer to go to Afghanistan.

I'd like to see him take that argument to the next debate.

Mosler said he started to run for president, but some friends convinced him to run for Chris Dodd's Connecticut Senate seat instead, and it made sense because of his Connecticut roots. He moved here this spring and rented a house in Guilford, but he still owns houses in St. Croix and in Florida, where he lived before officially moving to the islands.

His car company, which has made the Mosler name famous in the car racing world, is based in Florida. Filmmaker George Lucas three years ago took delivery of the first street-legal Mosler MT900S, a 435-horsepower carbon-fiber and Kevlar supercar.

This is not Mosler's first bid for office. He ran twice, unsuccessfully, for the job of nonvoting U.S. Virgin Islands delegate to Congress.

Mosler sighed when I asked him about his family, what I thought was a typical candidate question.

He said he is divorced, has two children in their mid-20s and is not running to be a moral example to anyone.

Mostly he wanted to talk about his economic theories, which he says makes him uniquely qualified for the job, at a time when the country needs an economic rescue.

Mosler also has a website on his economic theories, moslereconomics.com, where the site banner, which declares St. Croix the Center of the Universe, includes Mosler's Law: "There is no financial crisis so deep that a sufficiently large tax cut or spending increase cannot deal with it."

Mosler argues that the only constraint on U.S. spending is the long-term danger of inflation. The notion that the government could run out of money or that budget surpluses are good, he says, is nonsense.

This philosophy, he claims, also makes him a Tea Party Democrat, which I think some in the Tea Party movement might challenge.

His three-part economic campaign platform is pretty simple.

He says there should be a full-payroll tax holiday for U.S. workers, that the federal government should give states a $500 per capita distribution, about $1.75 billion for Connecticut, and that the federal government should hire anyone willing and able to work, at $8 an hour.

"Unemployment is Connecticut's major problem. It affects everything we do," he said.

Mosler said he would be happy lose, as long as someone else, be it Linda McMahon or Richard Blumenthal, adopts some of his economic policies.

Now that's quirky.

"All I can do is make my good faith effort," he told me. "And if it doesn't work out, I'll go back to the Virgin Islands."

This is the opinion of David Collins.