One news publication
apparently has an ear for a political pitch:
“In
the first-term Democratic governor’s recent speeches, echoes can be heard of
the broad themes that President Obama successfully used in 2012 to make a case
for his second term, despite stubbornly high unemployment and a tepid economic
recovery, the same conditions confronting Malloy.
“Like
Obama, Malloy is asking for more time to overcome fiscal challenges left by a
Republican predecessor, rattling off statistics that point to progress and
ignoring those that do not. And like the president, the governor acknowledges
the electorate’s fears and frustrations about the pace of recovery.”
The publication notes that
Governor Dannel Malloy has not yet formally announced his candidacy. His on the
stump remarks are styled by the publication as a “soft opening of Gov. Dannel
P. Malloy’s unannounced re-election campaign.” Pause for a moment over the
oxymoronic expression “soft opening of an unannounced campaign.” It is not modesty
but rather political calculation that so far has prevented Mr. Malloy from
shouting his candidacy for governor from Connecticut rooftops.
But suppose – just to
suppose – that the state’s recovery from the national recession, always
painfully slow in Connecticut, has been impeded by measures adopted by Mr.
Obama to spur the recovery? In that case, would Mr. Malloy be willing to detach
his political program from the usual made-in-Washington campaign script and
head out, to vary a term use by Huckleberry Finn, “for the territories?” For
Huck, “the territories” were potential states in which slavery had not yet had
a chance to put down roots, an important consideration for his friend Jim, over
whom the possibility of enslavement hung
pendulously like a damoclean sword.
It is true that a progressive
script disclaiming responsibility for a lackluster economy did work well for
Mr. Obama, even though he had occupied the presidential office for the
preceding four years. A few months into his second term, however, Mr. Obama’s
inauthentic campaign “reality” crashed into real reality. The Benghazi
imposture, the raid by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on the constitutional
privacy rights of much derided and inoffensive conservative organizations, the
defection of Edward Snowden to Russia and the consequent drip, drip of previously
closely guarded spying methods of the American spook machine, the abject
surrender of Mr. Obama’s Middle East policy to President Vladimir Putin of
Russia, the stressful – some would say fatal -- architectural fault lines in Obamacare, and a continuing lack luster economy, all this and more has rubbed
raw the trust Americans place, almost as a matter of course, in their president.
The principal features of the Obama-Malloy script are a ganglion of
suppositions, many of them untrue or doubtful.
No doubt new presidents and
governors “inherit” problems from their predecessors. However, along with the manageable
difficulties come certain benefits. Both Mr. Obama and Mr. Malloy did pledge to
overcome the difficulties of their predecessors, and both inherited, along with
a weakened economy, a constitutional framework they did not have to invent from
whole cloth, business enterprises they did not have to establish from the
ground up, and traditional economic configurations they did not have to
configure from scratch – on the whole, a rich, even an enviable patrimony. As
for the “inherited problems,” both chief executives were swept into office on
pledges that they would settle them; and if the problems remain unsettled or
grow more severe during their time in office, one always hopes voters will have
the good sense to throw the bums out. Grousing about predecessors after one has
had years to implement plans offered in campaigns to solve such problems
borders on whining.
During the soft opening of
his thus far unannounced political campaign, Mr. Malloy, borrowing a page from
the Obama campaign, boasted that jobs in Connecticut were on the uptick,
presaging a recovery flowing from Mr. Malloy’s sagacious political programs. That
soap bubble burst when it collided with a less politically campaign oriented
report issued by UConn economists.
The report noted
"Connecticut has not created and sustained net new jobs in 25
years. The extraordinary persistence of weak job creation argues powerfully for
profound structural weaknesses in the state's economy, weaknesses that surely
predates (sic) the devastating recession that hammered the state economy at
the opening of the 1990s or the financial crisis in 2007-2008." The report
did not stress that the “profound structural weaknesses” began in the state
with the imposition of the Lowell Weicker income tax, that it took ten years
for the state to recover the job losses incurred during the Weicker recession,
or that Mr. Malloy’s “solution” to the budget deficits left to him by his
predecessors, the largest tax increase in state history, was eerily similar to
Mr. Wicker’s false solution. With considerable chutzpah, the UConn economists
suggested that job losses in the state could be stemmed, if only temporarily, as
soon as Mr. Malloy begins to spend bonded money already allocated for capital
expenditures – perhaps by adding a few more buildings or professorships to
UConn. Demands of this kind should be made discreetly.
The real solutions to years
of anemic economic growth lie outside Mr. Malloy’s progressive fantasy world.
Stop borrowing money, except for justifiable state-wide capital projects; this
year, the Malloy administration borrowed nearly a billion dollars to finance a
change in state accounting processes. Reduce municipal mandates, thus relieving
the pressure on town officials to increase property taxes. Cut business taxes
across the board, and end the crony capitalism that transfers taxes from the
dwindling savings accounts of hard
pressed taxpayers to the budging pockets of tax gobbling CEOs of multi-billion dollar corporations. Cut spending. Establish term limits; more elections more
often are a corrective for voter apathy. Tell the unions in Connecticut that no
one has a right to strike against the public safety, anytime, anywhere, for any
purpose. Govern wisely, parsimoniously
and well. And try as much as possible to keep your grubby hands off people’s
bibles, their wallets and their guns.
These steps on the road to
recovery would mark a promising beginning.
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