Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Politics, particularly during a campaign season, is the sometime ungentle art of fooling all the people some of the time.Fooling all the people all the time, Abe Lincoln tells us, is not possible in a constitutional republic operating side by side with a vibrant and watchful media. But fooling all the people all the time is hardly necessary when appointment to office depends upon garnering 51 percent of the vote. In the struggle for votes, we all know, incumbents have a huge money and status advantage over challengers and, despite mythical views of a free press unattached to the reigning power, incumbents usually are able effortlessly to round up what we might call the media vote as well.Fooling all the people some of the time would not be possible in the absence of 1) a bewitching populist message, 2) a convincing ritualistic denunciation of a clamorous minority opposition, and 3) an adulatory media “glad to be of use” in T. S. Eliot’s memorable phrase, “to start a scene or two.”“No!…

A Hartford paper points out the brutal irony:Connecticut has averaged 366 new cases a day over the past week or about 10.3 per 100,000 residents, just above the threshold at which states are added to the travel advisory. The advisory, which currently includes 38 states and territories, is updated each Tuesday in conjunction with New York and New Jersey. It requires travelers arriving from those states to either produce a negative coronavirus test result or quarantine for 14 days...Lamont said Thursday he’s considering a dramatic overhaul to the advisory, saying “It’d be a little ironic if we were on our own quarantine list.”Connecticut’s list of quarantined states has grown by leaps and bounds, very likely because the parameters initially were set too low. The gods of irony will not be mocked. Cronus is now eating his own children.It is nearly impossible to determine definitively who set the parameters, but we do know that Governor Ned Lamont has been borrowing his Coronavirus defense…

The title of the news report was, “Sen. Richard Blumenthal makes last-ditch effort to delay Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court, but Republicans prevail on party-line vote.”Blumenthal’s last stand occurred following the termination of the Senate public hearing convened to pass on Amy Coney Barrett’s fitness to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Barrett’s elevation to the high court is a virtual certainty, since Democrats in the Senate do not have the votes to block her admission to the court.Unlike Custer’s last stand, Blumenthal’s occurred on an empty battlefield. And Barrett, who already had been through Blumenthal’s drill, certainly will not respond publicly in the pages of the Hartford paper to issues Blumenthal had previously raised in the public Senate hearing, exhaustively covered by the anti-Barrett media.During her public hearing, Barrett was peppered with questions from Blumenthal and others that she wisely chose not to answer.At one point in the public hearing…

It is always difficult during an election year to separate the wheat from the tares until the elections have been concluded, at which point most information is stale and useless to politicians on the make.One important datum in the 2020 elections, as in all elections, concerns base turnout and negative campaigning. What turns people off often turns them out. That is why so called “negative political ads” excite and alarm politicians and media adepts.It is generally assumed that President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden both have unbudgable base support, that early campaign polling is reliable, that election messaging must appeal beyond the base to unaffiliated voters whose political preferences have not been sufficiently probed by Harvard and Yale political scientists, that state politics is less important than federal politics, and that political results in elections are determined bypersonalities rather than policies, which might explain why most debates are short o…

A lede in a story covering Senator Dick Blumenthal’s second day questioning of Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Barrett correctly reports that the senator “spent most of his allotted half hour Tuesday questioning Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett about her support for an organization that says life begins at fertilization and on her controversial dissent in a gun case.”At the beginning of his questioning, Blumenthal assured Barrett that her Catholic faith was not on the questioning chopping block. But it was. Blumenthal is a master of insinuation, and pro-abortion-at-any-stage-of-pregnancy-Democrats such as Blumenthal, a regulator-in-chief Attorney General in Connecticut who unaccountably has opposed all and every attempt to regulate the abortion industry, is clearly combative in the presence of Catholics. The anti-Barrett forces, who are legion, have questioned feverishly Barrett’s association with a Catholic group regarded as a cult by many progressive ascendant elements in the…

U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, before interrogating Supreme Court nominee Amy Barrett on day two of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Hearings, laid before Barrett, according to a story in The Hill, a non-negotiable demand. “Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), The Hill reported, “on Monday urged Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett to recuse herself from any case involving the election that comes before the Supreme Court, as Democrats prepare to push her for such a commitment as part of her confirmation hearings.”In a prepared remark, Blumenthal intoned, “Your participation, let me be very blunt, in any case involving Donald Trump's election would immediately do explosive, enduring harm to the court's legitimacy and to your own credibility. You must recuse yourself. The American people are afraid and they're angry, and for good reason. It's a break the glass moment."The quotable Blumenthal was at one time an editor of the Harvard Crimson, and his brief stint as a reporter…