Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Be The Storm I’d like to thank Mary Ann Turner, the Chairman of the Enfield Republican Town Committee, for inviting me here today. It’s a pleasure to be with you. Enfield, everyone in the room may know, was the place where prominent theologian Jonathan Edwards delivered his “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” sermon. The sermon provided one of the sparks that lit the spiritual conflagration later called “The Great Awakening” and was  so fearful and effective a sermon that people in the pews broke out in tears. I think I can assure everyone in the room that my keynote may not have a similar effect. Republicans have just been through a bruising election. I’d like to touch very gently on a few sore topics, but we don’t want to end up at a funeral here. Mark Twain, asked if he had attended the funeral of a man he intensely disliked, replied – No, I didn’t. But I sent along a message to the grief stricken that I heartily approved of the ceremony.

A few weeks ago, Democrats and their sounding boards in the increasingly irrelevant media fired a shot across Republican Presidential candidate Mario Rubio’s “yacht,” hoping to sink his candidacy. It turned out the yacht was a fishing boat; but, no matter, Democrats had made a point. Republicans are rich – therefore insensitive to the vast yachtless middle class. Republican candidate for Governor Tom Foley suffered the same scrutiny -- with this difference: Foley really was rich, and his yacht did not resemble the creaky boats used by Mr. Rubio’s Cuban forbearers to escape the remorseless tyranny of the Castro brothers, both communists who long ago had declared war on yacht owners and political opponents and gays and others who opposed their brutal autocratic regime. Fidel Castro had a yacht. (See the picture above showing uber-rich Lowell Weicker canoodling with Fidel on his yacht.) Mr. Weicker, Maverick U.S. Senator and Governor of Connecticut, also had a yacht. The Castro ...

At some point in the not too distant future, possibly in his budget message on February 18, Governor Dannel Malloy will repent of his campaign promise not to raise taxes. In the journalism business, we call this “eating crow.” One reporter could not help but note in his story that Mr. Malloy had for four years assured “cities and towns they would be spared from the state budget axe.” That was then. Now, before a Connecticut Council of Small Towns (COST) gathering in Cromwell, Mr. Malloy hastened to add a codicil to his previous no tax increase pledge, iterated repeatedly on the stump during his successful re-election campaign: “We have to wrestle with the budget. I hope that we’ll have a budget that we can all live and prosper with.” However, Mr. Malloy added ominously, “I’m doing my best, but no promises.”

"The esthete stands in the same relation to beauty as the pornographer stands to love, and the politician stands to life” – Karl Kraus. It’s a great puzzle for those who think seriously about getting and spending. During his second winning campaign for governor, Dannel Malloy took tax increases – but not increases in borrowing, the last refuge of spending scoundrels -- off the table. Echoing George H.W. Bush’s boast at the 1988 Republican National Convention, Mr. Malloy invited Connecticut voters in so many words to read his lips: NO NEW TAXES. And yet, even Mr. Malloy’s own Office of Policy Management guru, Ben Barnes, has told us that we shall have to get used to sluggish tax receipts, at least for the foreseeable future. Mr. Malloy has pledged to hold Connecticut’s Municipalities harmless, and so it will be difficult for him to pass the state’s budget woes to towns by reducing their revenue allotments. He has pledged not to renegotiate state ...

Girolamo Grumpi, obviously not his real name, is a retired journalist who lives north of Hartford and who wishes to remain anonymous. Q: It appears that the skeletons came out of the closet a few days after the election. Ben Barnes, the Head of Governor Malloy’s Office of Policy Management, said that Connecticut should perhaps expect chronic deficits in the future, and this thunderclap caught the notice of some papers. GG: Yes, Barnes may have been, if only for a moment, the Jonathan Gruber of Connecticut. Gruber, an MIT Don dripping with ivy and one of the architects of (President Barack) Obama’s Health Care initiatives, is on record as having said in various venues that Obamacare was intentionally deceiving, and necessarily so because most Americans, who are far less bright than MIT professors, would have rejected Obamacare had its architects been more honest than either Gruber or Obama. It’s true that Henry Mencken once said no one ever lost money by underestimating t...

Thanks Jeff Cohen “People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an election” – Otto Von Bismarck “I am a porcupine” – Dannel Malloy The endorsements of Governor Dannel Malloy prior to Vote Day (VD) were not full throated. In fact, many Malloy endorsements made by editorial boards the members of which could not bring themselves to recommend as governor a guy who owned a yacht named "Odalisque" were so hedged about with thorns that the rose was barely visible among them. A Hartford paper’s editorial endorsement was typical of most. The paper mentioned some minuses and pluses, added up the sums and endorsed the incumbent governor. Over the years, the paper had fallen into the bad habit of reflexively endorsing incumbents, and in Connecticut all the leading positions in government – the governor’s office, the constitutional offices, the members of the U.S. Congressional delegation and the leadership of the state’s General Assembly – are ...

Girolamo Grumpi, obviously not his real name, is a retired journalist who lives north of Hartford and who wishes to remain anonymous -- November 9, 2014 Q: By Sunday November 9, most journalist morticians in Connecticut and others had turned in their reports. Among them was Lowell Weicker, who left the Republican Party to run as an Independent for Governor in 1990. GG: The Weicker response to the current elections was a reprise of a column written by him and printed in the (Hartford) Courant last May. Even then, there were serious problems with the Weicker analysis. Weicker argued that the Republican Party has declined since he left it to run as governor. A careful historian may want to pause here to note that Weicker did not leave the parry of his own accord when he lost his seat to then Connecticut Attorney General Joe Lieberman. He was not able to garner a sufficient number of votes to win re-election, possibly because the Republican Party in his own state had grown t...

Girolamo Grumpi, obviously not his real name, is a retired journalist who lives north of Hartford and who wishes to remain anonymous. Q: It’s the day after the day after in Connecticut. On V-Day (Vote Day) everyone marched to the polls and reelected Dan Malloy governor. Since then, we’ve been pelted with the usual after the vote analyses, all suspiciously similar. I was hoping you might be able to offer a fresh light on the winners, almost all Democrats, and the losers. In Connecticut, very little has changed politically – not so in the nation.

Republican Gubernatorial nominee Tom Foley has been accused of plagiarism in an attack ad endorsed by Governor Dannel Malloy. Should there be an FBI investigation? Knowing the ways and means of powerful political incumbents, an investigation of some sort may be in the offing. Incumbents have a way of turning the great water cannons at their disposal against their, relatively speaking, inoffensive challengers. When Hartford Courant columnist Robert Thorson  protested that innocent plagiaristic-like slip-ups were common in this the era of “copy and paste,” he risked being set upon by the righteous forces supporting Mr. Malloy, who has not yet been accused of plagiarism, though in this regard he is guilty as Foley. Mr. Malloy’s recent Bibb ad, in which former workers at the Bibb factory step before the cameras to accuse Mr. Foley of snatching food from the mouths of their children, was plagiarized from an earlier assault on Mr. Foley produced by Jamestown Associates and end...

Juliana Simone, for nine years the host of the Barkhamsted Republican Town Committee's political interview show "Conservative Chat and Chairman of the BRTC since 2009," has invited me to make a few impromptu remarks during the town’s biannual fundraiser on September 30. If anyone following Connecticut Commentary attends the event, please coral me and say hello. I’ll be touching briefly on a few topics I’ve written about recently. There are some things I will not have time to address. Allow me to do so here.

Somewhere along the line, national and state Democrats discovered that most Americans do not cotton to extremists. For this reason, progressives in the state of Connecticut – nearly all politically active Democrats -- have taken to calling “extremists” those who oppose some of their more radical political positions. V. I. Lenin, an extremist of the first water, knew that if you effectively labeled an opponent or an idea, you did not have to argue with either. If you have successfully identified in the public mind as an extremist anyone who disagrees with you on a political or social point, you need not address his nuanced arguments. You need not bother to confront his arguments at all; the mud you throw – knowing full well that some of it will stick – will be sufficient to convince a majority of people that your position is superior to his, because you are superior to him: He is an extremist, and you are not. In cases such as these, arguments are won not through debate or the pr...

Jonathan Pelto, the once and future Democratic stalwart who had vigorously challenged Governor Dannel Malloy from the left, has closed up shop and is now considering shutting down his blog, Wait What? Mr. Pelto’s campaign for governor has ended with both a whimper and a bang.

Former Ambassador to Ireland Tom Foley ran a soft primary campaign. Indeed, during the Republican nominating convention, when it appeared certain that potential primary challenger John McKinney would not have sufficient votes to wage a primary, the Foley forces intervened and convinced enough nominating delegates to switch their votes so that Mr. McKinney might enlist in the primary. Concerning the delegate swap, there are two schools of thought.  According to the first, Mr. Foley was a gentleman and much too mild mannered to participate effectively in Connecticut’s political mosh pit. According to the second, the delegate swap gambit was a stroke of pure genius. In one bold move, Mr. Foley had split his primary opposition between Mr. McKinney and Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton who, unlike Mr. McKinney, had rounded up enough Republican delegates to force a primary.

A recent poll – Governor Dannel Malloy has called it, dismissively, a survey – shows Republican gubernatorial prospect Tom Folly leading Mr. Malloy by nine points. The poll by YouGov , a survey firm that has partnered with The New York Times and CBS News, is a bit different than the usual survey.  Unlike the more traditional Quinnipiac poll, YouGov derives its nonpartisan data from an online panel of more than 100,000 respondents nationwide. In Connecticut, the poll shows Republicans favoring Mr. Foley 81-5, while Democrats favor Malloy 72-12. But one of the most alarming takeaways from the poll is Mr. Foley’s 50 to 15 percent lead among Independents .  That gap is huge, and unaffiliated voters in the state outnumber both Republicans and Democrats. These figures should alarm Democrats. Further, the majority of respondents said that they disapprove of Malloy’s performance as Governor.

“What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures, to make manhood more noble, womanhood more beautiful, and childhood more happy and bright” – Samuel Gompers When asked what unions wanted, Samuel Gompers – who is to unions what George Washington, the flag and apple pie is to America --replied, “More.” However, it should be noted that Mr. Gompers – no socialist he -- also said about profits, “The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit.” Mr. Gompers disdained pacifists and Wobblies. Connecticut employee unions want more of what they have -- higher salaries and more benefits. The only open question among union members in the Nutmeg State is: Are they likely to reach the point of temporary satiation more quickly with Governor Dannel...

Do debates determine elections? On occasion, they do. Those defending the proposition that debates are determinative point to the Nixon-Kennedy contest of 1960. And of course the Lincoln-Douglas debates still are held up in the history books as demonstrating the political utility of vigorous debates. It is sometimes forgotten by those who urge the importance of debates that Stephen Douglas, not Abraham Lincoln, emerged the victor in their Senate contest. The Lincoln-Douglas debates later were assembled into a book by Lincoln. Widely distributed, the book helped him to win the presidential election of 1860. The format of the Lincoln-Douglas debates – a 60 minute opening statement from the first candidate, followed by an alternative 90 minute statement from the second candidate, followed by a 30 minute rejoinder  from the first candidate  -- became, with some adjustments, the template for most future political debates. The Lincoln-Douglas debates were moderated by L...

Tom Foley, who according to some polls will be Governor Dannel Malloy’s likely opponent in the upcoming gubernatorial race, ran into a string of barbed wire when he made an appearance at a recent AFL-CIO gathering, a watering hole for progressives seeking political office. Mr. Foley appeared unarmed with empty hands – largely because there is as yet no “there” in his campaign – and he was, as expected, rudely rebuffed. To approval and titters from the floor, Lee Saunders ,  president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees , warned, just before Mr. Foley stepped to the lectern, “ He will tell you anything and then he will try to kill you ... We are smarter than that, aren’t we Connecticut?”

Republican Mayor Boughton of Danbury has bowed out of the gubernatorial campaign, apparently because he could not raise sufficient funds in time to gain access to public financing. When John McKinney appeared in Hartford to debate other Republican candidates for governor, he found himself quite alone.   Mr. Boughton had withdrawn, and Republican Party nominee for governor Tom Foley has been assiduously avoiding debates with other Republican gubernatorial candidates. Odd-makers think it will be a Foley-Malloy gubernatorial race after the primary in August. Joe Visconti is still in the race. Assuming the odds-makers are right, how will Mr. Foley fare against Mr. Malloy? No one knows because, possibly for strategic reasons, Mr. Foley is playing his cards very close to his vest. Usually, part of a contestant’s hand is shown during primary debates. Before declaring he intended to run again for office, Mr. Malloy said he was delaying his announcement because he wanted to give Republ...

It was bound to happen sooner or later. In Hartford, Connecticut, a one party town for decades, political favoritism has raised its ugly head – not for the first or last time. Mayor of Hartford Pedro Segarra and Hartford school officials, we learn from a stinging editorial in a Hartford newspaper , “are dead right in asking city auditors to clear the air on whether city Treasurer Adam Cloud had a conflict of interest in allegedly moving a city insurance policy from one broker to another one, Hybrid Insurance Group.” The connections between Hartford’s Treasurer, Mr. Cloud, and the insurance group that was awarded a substantial account are, the paper finds, unsavory: “Hybrid is a tenant in a downtown Hartford building owned by Mr. Cloud and family members. Also, treasurer Cloud's brother, Christopher Cloud, is a lobbyist for Hybrid.” Hartford’s “sharp-eyed chief financial officer,” Paula Altieri, discovered that the insurance policy had been transferred from one bro...

There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works and days of hands That lift and drop a question on your plate; Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea -- T.S. Elliot Kevin Rennie, a Harford Courant columnist, is regarded by some in politics as the Torquemada of Connecticut commentators – especially in matters of what one might call political ethics. Many politicians have felt his bite and winced.