So, the elections are over -- for a too brief interlude.
The grumps who have been complaining all along that there is
no longer a breathing space between elections are right. Forward! as they say
in the progressive Beltway. In our time, politics itself has become a form of
electioneering. That’s what is wrong with it. President John Kennedy governed;
President Barack Obama campaigns.
Campaign finance reform was supposed to settle some of these
problems.
Karl Kraus, a great German critic and a contemporary of
Sigmund Freud, use to say that psychoanalysis WAS the disease it purported to
cure; so with campaign finance reform and other political bromides. There are
only two ways to shorten the political season. The first is borrowed
from Shakespeare, with an important revision: “First thing we do is shoot all
the lawyers,” Shakespeare’s Dick the Butcher said. A modern Butcher might be
inclined to say the same of politicians, a good number of whom are lawyers. The
second less dramatic solution is to term-limit politicians.
While this more practical measure may not eliminate political corruption –
neither does campaign finance reform, by the way – it will distribute political
corruption more fairly among yet uncorrupted new political recruits and weaken
the stranglehold incumbents have on political office.
One reporter wrote in a story about Mitt Romney’s failed
campaign that the campaign for governor of Connecticut begins the day after
Romney’s concession speech. And so it has. Governor Dannel Malloy has claimed
that Obama’s victory in some sense vindicates his own political program.
That is a weak argument. In Connecticut, there was little to
no turn-over in the General Assembly following the election, although
Republicans in the state made some of Malloy’s questionable initiatives the
center piece of their own campaigns. Actually, Republicans have been too
cautious in their criticisms, and programs are vindicated, ultimately, by their
consequences.
Mike Lawlor’s early
release program, for instance, is a ticking time bomb. Once a prosecutor for
the State's Attorney Office in New Haven and later co-chairman of the General Assembly's Judiciary
Committee from 1995 to 2011, Lawlor is Malloy’s undersecretary for criminal
justice policy and the chief architect of Connecticut’s early release Earned Risk Reduction Credits program.
It’s only a matter of days, weeks and months before another
violent criminal let loose early under Lawlor’s ill-conceived program murders
another store clerk: So far, that has happened twice since the program was launched,
ineptly and without proper political vetting. Republicans are right to insist that
early release should apply only to non-violent criminals. But Malloyalists
operating under a one party regime tend to be hard-headed about their
palliatives. Like most politicians, they are effectively reproved only after the
plane has crashed into the mountain.
Some parallels may legitimately be drawn between Malloy and
Obama.
Both are chief executives; both are progressive Democrats.
During the early part of Obama’s first term, Democrats controlled the White
House and both Houses of Congress. Malloy, the first Democrat elected governor
in more than twenty years, presides over a General Assembly controlled by
Democrats. Obama has yet to produce a budget, and this has alarmed some people
who believe that state and national budgets define both political programs and
the nation’s destiny. Malloy stiffed Republicans
during his first budget negotiations, as did Obama, and hammered out a budget
in collusion with SEBAC, the union organization charged with negotiating
contract terms with the governor and Connecticut’s ex officio third party. Malloy, the Malloyalists, the Democratic
dominated General Assembly and union representatives pushed through a “fair
share” budget that relied – unfairly, say its critics – on the largest tax
increase in state history, following close on the heels of the second largest
tax increase in state history, the Lowell Weicker income tax. Obama is
promising a “fair share” budget as well. So far, he has not been able to pass any
budget. Both in Connecticut and in the nation, recent elections have not
substantially changed political configurations. These are the obvious
parallels.
There are important differences as well.
Here and there, one glimpses hints, foggy intimations, that
Malloy is not willing to surrender the WHOLE of Connecticut’s government to
progressive sans culottes who favor the despoliation of the rich, the one
percent of those in the state who believe in a kind of egalitarianism that
differs only in degree from that of Sylvain Marechal, the utopian socialist who
declared in his Manifeste des Égaux (Manifesto of Equals, 1801) "Let
the arts perish if needs be. But let us have real equality!" Antoine
Lavoisier, the "father of modern chemistry," was executed during the
French Revolution in 1794. The revolutionary judge who sentenced Lavoisier to
death proclaimed, "The Republic has no need of chemists." Such was
the purity of egalitarianism, a modern construct, at its headwaters.
Here in Connecticut, we yet tremble before such perfection.
Hope and change beckons.
Comments
The perpetual campaign cannot be pinned on one party or another,so one must look to see who benefits from the purpetual campaign.It is clear that the political consultant class of both parties have absolutely no interest in shorter campaigns as their largesse depends on long campaigns.These "consultants" during the campaign also moonlight as lobbyists in the off campaign season and influence the laws to make it logical to have a state of a "purpetual campaign" to further their own interests.
As an after thought,if you have term limits then the power within the governing class will tend to shift to the unelected beaucrats,which would be worse then having an elected elite that is in theory accountable to the voters.