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An Irrelevant Republican Warns That His Former Party May Become Irrelevant


This may be the first time in Connecticut history that an irrelevant former Republican U.S. Senator of long standing has warned his former party that it faces irrelevancy.

The new crop of Republicans in Connecticut – young, brash, conservative and determined to remember but overcome their past – may have trouble recalling who former U.S. Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker was. The past tense is important because Mr. Weicker, who once dubbed himself “the turd in the Republican Party punchbowl,” scooted out the political door after he had, as an independent governor, imposed the second largest tax increases on young Republicans he now seductively courts in the op-ed pages of the Hartford Courant.


The First Prize in tax increases belongs to current Democratic Governor Dannel Malloy. When Mr. Malloy put the tax yoke around the shoulders of young Democrats, Republicans and Independents in Connecticut, someone, probably a left of center former Weickerite, corralled Mr. Weicker and pumped an opinion from him. Mr. Weicker said he quite understood the necessity of such a tax increase. The Democratic Party, after a long pregnancy, had finally given birth to a Weicker clone in Mr. Malloy: The two progressives were simpatico.

Throughout his career, both in the Senate and as Governor, Mr. Weicker has shown himself to be constitutionally unable of making a proper distinction between the state – i.e. all the people in Connecticut – and the state apparatus, or state government, which sometimes does and sometimes does not serve the interests of the people. The megalomaniacal politician will assume he is the state; it should not surprise serious students of history that democracy on occasion may produce a “Sun King” whose operative principle is "L'etat, c'est moi (I am the state)."

Mr. Weicker continues to defend his income tax as a boon to the state. And here lies the root of his confusion. The income tax was a boon to progressive politicians who would rather cut their own throats than cut taxes or trim spending. But such politicians are NOT the state.

Since the imposition of the Weicker tax, spending in Connecticut has increased threefold -- within the short space of four governors: Governor Weicker, an Independent, Republican Governors John Rowland and Jodi Rell, both moderate and far less vitriolic towards their own party than “Sun King” Weicker, and Dannel Malloy, a progressive.

The arc in Connecticut politics since Mr. Weicker was “booted from the GOP in 1988, when I lost my Senate election,” Mr. Weicker’s formulation in his Courant Op-Ed, has been from centrist politics to progressivism. Former Governor Ella Grasso, a moderate Democrat, fought tooth and claw against an income tax. The line of Democratic succession from Mrs. Grasso to Mr. Malloy is a movement from the kind of fiscal conservatism favored by William Buckley, Mr. Wicker’s nemeses, to the kind of progressivism once lauded by prairie populists and Woodrow Wilson progressives.

Where in Connecticut politics is the breaker that will prevent Connecticut from sliding absent-mindedly back – not forward – into the progressive era? Progressivism is the old, tried and failed thing; conservatism, at least that brand of it recommended by Mr. Buckley, is the new thing, and Mr. Weicker, who professes in his Op-Ed that he once took a lesson from Barry Goldwater, the Storm Petrel of the modern conservative party, HATES it, absolutely HATES it.

The reference to Mr. Goldwater in Mr. Weicker’s Op-Ed is precious: “I remember chatting with Barry Goldwater, R-Arizona, one day in the Senate cloakroom as he commented on a photograph in The Washington Post of my friend Sen. Bill Proxmire, D-Wisconsin, with his new hair transplant. In Barry's conservative words, ‘I don't mind what's on his head. I worry about what's in it!’ Well, so do I when it comes to the Republican hierarchy in Connecticut.”

One hardly knows where to begin in commenting upon Mr. Weicker’s comment on Mr. Goldwater, historically the red carpet to President Ronald Reagan and the author of “The Conscience of a Conservative,” said to be ghostwritten, at least in part, by Mr. Weicker’s chief Connecticut nemeses, Bill Buckley, who was partly responsible for booting Mr. Weicker from the GOP in 1988.

Mr. Goldwater, it will be recalled, was the guy who said about Mr. Weicker’s brand of left of center Republicanism as practiced in New England, “If you cut off New England and California, you’ve got a pretty good country.” But here in his Op-Ed, Mr. Weicker is appropriating Mr. Goldwater’s NAME only to give unction to Mr. Weicker’s deathless dream – the utter and absolute destruction of the Connecticut Republican Party that in 1988 gave Mr. Weicker the boot. In point of fact, it was Mr. Weicker who, during his long senatorial run in office, continually gave his state party the boot.

And in his latest advice to his cast off party in the current Courant Op-Ed, Mr. Weicker offers what he perceives to be a dying party a final and deadly sip of hemlock: The Republican Party should open its primaries to Independents. That proposal was first made by Mr. Weicker’s now diseased dear friend, Tom D’Amore, at a time when Mr. Weicker, the self-professed “turd in the Republican Party punchbowl” saw, if only in his imagination, the approach of a Democratic Party opponent who might spoil his game and succeed in booting him out of office. Enter Attorney General Joe Lieberman, and the rest, as the historians say, is history.


It may help the Connecticut Republican Party to remember that Mr. Weicker also is history, and that those who do not remember their history correctly are doomed to repeat its errors.

Comments

Anonymous said…
excellent history on CT GOP and state income tax! as a transplant to CT this helped me understand why the Republicans in CT is so conflicted.
peter brush said…
Every major office is held by the Democrats, who also control both houses of the General Assembly. How did this happen in what used to be a swing state … a state labeled The Land of Steady Habits?----------
When considering the Maverick, and his accomplishments on behalf of the Nutmeg State, it's important to recall that he not only did not run for Governor on a pro-income-tax platform, but he explicitly opposed the tax while he campaigned. Intellectual honesty is not his strongest suit.

I fail to understand what's mysterious here. We have a solidly Dem political apparatus at every level and in every direction vertical, horizontal, hither and yon because the electorate has moved to the left from where it was when the State's nickname may have been appropriate. The only habit our electorate steadily enjoys now involves an ever-expanding State government regardless of massive unfunded liability. Our radicalized, getting-things-done, Democratic Party is simply answering the call. (Well, maybe a bit of false advertising, pressure sales involved, too.) But, Mr. Weicker says, "the Democrats are not the problem." Why not? Why shouldn't the Dems have open primaries, etc.?

Similarly, the Republican Party is simply not popular with particular racial/ethnic minorities. These minority groups have their reasons. But, if blacks, for example, vote 90% Dem year after year it's hard to see how an animus can thereby be attributed to the Republicans. For our pompous ex-Governor to suggest otherwise is disgraceful.

The Republican Party is not as fervently libertarian or reactionary as I would like, but it does a pretty fair job of differentiating itself from the increasingly radical Democratic Party. For the good of the State we can only hope that more voters will wake up, see the destruction the Dems are causing. But, the worst thing the Republicans can do is attack the "Tea Party."
BillBoy Baggins said…
"Exclusivity . . . is what rallies Republicans." Don, my friend; thanks for bringing Weicker's op-ed to my attention. It floors me every time I hear the word "exclusive" in relation to the Republican Party. We are indeed, "a state comprising(ed of) large numbers of blacks, Latinos, gays, laborers, women and urban poor". ("women"?) What few states do not have "large numbers" of these demographics? (Women; really, Lowell?)

I know people who fall into at least four of the six categories he mentions. These people are Conservative Republicans who are active and influential withing the Party. The Republican Party that I know and am working to strengthen, welcomes everyone who shares the values of smaller, leaner, less intrusive government, personal responsibility and individual liberty.

Admittedly, the Party has done little to engage the minority populations while the Democrat Party has slowly made inroads over a period of decades, resulting in the consumption of our inner cities. Remember, MLK was a Republican. Recognizing that some time ago, I added to a platform, which I intend to formally put before the Middletown Republican Town Committee*, a plank that includes a minority outreach and recruitment effort.

Coincidentally, Regina Roundtree is speaking at a meeting of the State Central Committee, this Tuesday, on this very matter. Ms. Roundtree, a self-professed Conservative Republican and an African-American, is simultaneously reaching out for that very thing; a conservative out reach to urban communities (which, by the way, include blacks, Latinos, gays, laborers, women and urban poor). A new day is dawning upon us.

Regina is also founder of CT Black Republicans and Conservatives and will also be on Channel 3's "Face the State" with Dennis House, at 11:00 AM, today.

*I am a newly elected member of the committee.

http://www.ctbrac.org/
Anonymous said…
Thank you for calling a sham a sham.
Don Pesci said…
BillBoy,

I know and like Regina. I'll have something up here soon on blacks, sort of an address to blacks in Hartford -- or, for that matter, any other city in the state. I'll make sure Regina sees it. Good to have you pulling on the oars. What Republicans really need is boots on the ground in the cities. Harp's empty seat, for example, can be taken, but it would require an energetic attempt to turn out voters. I notice hat Joe Markley is interested in the Republican candidate for that seat. It might be nice to send him a postcard.

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