Skip to main content

The Machine vs The Man

Very likely the most exciting race in Connecticut next year will be in Bridgeport, where the man, Rep. Chris Caruso, will face the machine.

Bridgeport, like most of Connecticut, is a one horse town. The Democrat Party has run it ever since Caruso’s Great Granddaddy was knee high to a toadstool.

The machine’s choices recently have been rather unfortunate.

Federal prosecutors, using RICO statutes, bagged two Bridgeport worthies in recent years: former Mayor Joe Gannim and former state senator Ernest Newton, both now cooling their heels in jail. Someone from the Bridgeport machine probably told Bridgeport's current mayor, John Fabrizi to take a hike after his recent admissions of drug and alcohol abuse. Caruso, the White Knight of Bridgeport, has been openly contemptuous of Bridgeport's shakers and movers, calling them "clowns" and applying to them other sobriquets not designed to win him friends among party regulars.

With the backing of Bridgeport's kingmakers, the Connecticut Post now is reporting, State Senator William Finch "is seen as the establishment candidate for the nomination against state Rep. Christopher Caruso, D-Bridgeport, who has long been at odds with party leaders. Caruso, who lost the nomination to Fabrizi in a primary four years ago, vows to run an outsider campaign again this year."

Connecticut politicians in the know are betting on the machine. The people Caruso dismiss as clowns may behave from time to time like the Keystone Cops, but Bridgeporters appear, at the moment anyway, not to have had their fill of clownishness, and there is after all something praiseworthy in a town that so frequently sends its politicians up the river, a precedent that towns unexamined by federal snoops should follow.

Comments

mccommas said…
So that hysterical fool is running for local office?

Glad to hear it. I am all for it. Where do I send the check?

Let him continue to run that poor city into the ground. I am just happy to see him leave the legislature. I have had enough of his *reform*.

I would rather see a Republican knock him off though. I think someone like him can be beaten even in a Democrat district. He can't be very popular.
Don Pesci said…
The sad truth is that in a democracy we deserve the kind of government we get."Poor city" is right.
Anonymous said…
The White Knight of Bridgeport is a former DTC Chairman put in by political boss Mario Testa's cousin...then-Mayor Tom Bucci. It cost the mayor almost a dozen patronage jobs at the time to accomodate Caruso. He was Bucci's campaign manager. He was Ganim's campaign manager. He became a reformer when Ganim was on his way out. Otherwise, he sat silent.

Popular posts from this blog

Donna

I am writing this for members of my family, and for others who may be interested.   My twin sister Donna died a few hours ago of stage three lung cancer. The end came quickly and somewhat unexpectedly.   She was preceded in death by Lisa Pesci, my brother’s daughter, a woman of great courage who died still full of years, and my sister’s husband Craig Tobey Senior, who left her at a young age with a great gift: her accomplished son, Craig Tobey Jr.   My sister was a woman of great strength, persistence and humor. To the end, she loved life and those who loved her.   Her son Craig, a mere sapling when his father died, has grown up strong and straight. There is no crookedness in him. Thanks to Donna’s persistence and his own native talents, he graduated from Yale, taught school in Japan, there married Miyuki, a blessing from God. They moved to California – when that state, I may add, was yet full of opportunity – and both began to carve a living for them...

The Murphy Thingy

It’s the New York Post , and so there are pictures. One shows Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy canoodling with “Courier Newsroom publisher Tara McGowan, 39, last Monday by the bar at the Red Hen, located just one mile north of Capitol Hill.”   The canoodle occurred one day or night prior to Murphy’s well-advertised absence from President Donald Trump’s recent Joint Address to Congress.   Murphy has said attendance at what was essentially a “campaign rally” involving the whole U.S. Congress – though Democrat congresspersons signaled their displeasure at the event by stonily sitting on their hands during the applause lines – was inconsistent with his dignity as a significant part of the permanent opposition to Trump.   Reaching for his moral Glock Murphy recently told the Hartford Courant that Democrat Party opposition to President Donald Trump should be unrelenting and unforgiving: “I think people won’t trust you if you run a campaign saying that if Donald Trump is ...

The PURA soap opera continues in Connecticut: Business eyeing the exit signs

The trouble at PURA and the two energy companies it oversees began – ages ago, it now seems – with the elevation of Marissa Gillett to the chairpersonship of Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulation Authority.   Connecticut Commentary has previously weighed in on the controversy: PURA Pulls The Plug on November 20, 2019; The High Cost of Energy, Three Strikes and You’re Out? on December 21, 2024; PURA Head Butts the Economic Marketplace on January 3, 2025; Lamont Surprised at Suit Brought Against PURA on February 3, 2025; and Lamont’s Pillow Talk on February 22, 2025:   The melodrama full of pratfalls continues to unfold awkwardly.   It should come as no surprise that Gillett has changed the nature and practice of the state agency. She has targeted two of Connecticut’s energy facilitators – Eversource and Avangrid -- as having in the past overcharged the state for services rendered. Thanks to the Democrat controlled General Assembly, Connecticut is no l...