A few weeks after
announcing he would not officially begin his campaign until the General
Assembly had shut down its short three month session in May, Governor Dannel
Malloy officially opened his gubernatorial campaign in Stamford, his old political stomping grounds. Mr.
Malloy had been mayor of Stamford for four four-year terms before becoming
governor.
In Stamford, Mr.
Malloy explained his “early” announcement to reporters who long ago had
exploded the absurdity that he was not running for governor. He had in fact
been campaigning behind the veil for some time; like his counterpart in the
beltway, President Barack Obama, Mr. Malloy is a perpetual campaigner. And like
most politicians, he is given to telling what Mark Twain used to call
“stretchers.”
The Stamford Advocate reported on the switcheroo:
“Malloy said that, in part, his rationale for waiting to make his
re-election effort official was to avoid distractions during his recent
successful effort to get the General Assembly to enact legislation to
raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour.
"’I didn't want to politicize that issue unduly,’ Malloy said. ‘I
talked to Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman several times about when is the right time to
start the campaign, and this seemed like the right time.’"
The General
Assembly, some reporters know, is Mr. Malloy’s Pomeranian, the Connecticut
legislature having been dominated by Democrats ages ago, long before some of
the state’s younger reporters were wetting their diapers. Perhaps one of them
is keeping a record of Mr. Malloy’s politically opportune fantasies. If so, he
or she will understand the full import of George Orwell’s remark that “To see
what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.”
In an essay that
ought to be required reading in all journalism schools titled “Under Your Nose,” Mr. Orwell wrote:
“The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: The only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Mr. Malloy’s
official Stamford announcement gave Mr. Malloy the opportunity to stop road
testing his campaign and launch his vehicle.
Mr. Malloy’s 2014
campaign appears to be a replication of President Barack Obama 2012
presidential campaign. Connecticut has been battered by a rough economic
climate, Mr. Malloy told the Democratic in Stamford. He was careful not to draw
the connection between Connecticut’s sluggish economy and Obamanomics. Hey,
sluggish economies happen. The national recession ended in 2009. However, about
three in five jobs added since the recession’s end pay less than $13.83 per
hour. Lower-wage occupations were 21 percent of recession losses and 58 percent
of recovery growth, while mid-wage occupations were 60 percent of recession
losses and only 22 percent of recovery growth. Connecticut still lags behind
the nation in job growth. As of August 2013, the New England Economic Partnership (NEEP) reported, “Connecticut had regained 62,200 jobs, or
51.3% of those lost. By comparison, the U.S. economy had recovered 78.2% of the
8.6 million recession jobs that it lost.”
During his first
term as president, Mr. Obama commanded the heights: The presidency and both
houses of Congress had fallen to Democrats. Instead of focusing the energies of
his office on repairing the collapsed housing market – which would have been a
painful ordeal for the progressive president – Mr. Obama reached for the stars
and pulled Obamacare out of his hat. He also engaged in corporate cronyism on a
massive scale and managed to pull off a win against moderate Republican Mitt
Romney by capturing the “social issues” battleground from which Republicans had
retreated with their tails between their legs.
Mr. Malloy’s
campaign strategy may be deduced from the remarks he made in Stamford. The
Malloy program no doubt has been laboratory tested by one of the many strategy
groups in the business of winning campaigns. Global Strategy, whose Vice
President Roy Occhiogrosso continued to speak in news reports in favor of Mr.
Malloy long after he had disassociated himself from the Malloy administration,
likely will play some behind the curtain role in Mr. Malloy’s re-election
effort. But as governor of a northeast progressive state, Mr. Malloy will be
able to draw upon a vast reservoir of political magicians, some tied by
progressive political umbilical cords to the Obama administration, many of
which are not formally associated with political parties.
In Stamford, Mr.
Malloy said that Connecticut’s economy was on the mend, largely owing to his
programs. Connecticut’s pre-Malloy “$3.6 billion deficit, the greatest deficit
in the nation on a per-capita basis," has been liquidated. In fact, the
deficit has been resilient to Mr. Malloy’s ministrations.
Connecticut’s
non-partisan Office of Fiscal Analysis (OFA) and the Governor's budget office,
the Office of Policy and Management (OPM), have both projected a deficit of about $1 billion in the next 2016 biennial budget.
Mr. Malloy reduced a
major portion of his “inherited deficit” through the imposition of the largest tax increase in state history, a $1.5 billion tax on entrepreneurs and
business people who might have used the dollars appropriated by a Democratic
Governor and a Democratic dominated General Assembly to invigorate Connecticut’s
painfully slow, nearly jobless recovery.
Mr. Malloy’s tax
increase was not mentioned during his re-election stump speech in Stamford,
which is on a par with offering a history of the Elizabethan period in Britain
that does not mention Queen Elizabeth. Neither did Mr. Malloy mention that
Republican Governors Jodi Rell and John Rowland did not have at their command a
Republican dominated General Assembly. Although it is the legislature that
shapes and affirms budgets presented to it by the executive office, Mr. Malloy
was content in his Stamford re-election announcement to lay at Mrs. Rell’s feet
the debt he inherited. Mrs. Rell is likely to play in Mr. Malloy’s coming
campaign the same opéra bouff role played by outgoing President George Bush in Mr. Obama’s
first – and second – presidential campaigns.
Mr. Orwell noted in
his “Under Your Nose” essay that political
fantasies eventually bump into reality, at which point, usually too late, those
who have been lulled to sleep awaken with truth-blistered eyes:
“In private life most people are fairly realistic. When one is making out
one's weekly budget, two and two invariably make four. Politics, on the other
hand, is a sort of sub-atomic or non-Euclidean world where it is quite easy for
the part to be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same
place simultaneously. Hence the contradictions and absurdities I have
chronicled above, all finally traceable to a secret belief that one's political
opinions, unlike the weekly budget, will not have to be tested against solid
reality.”
Comments
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I will be curious to see how Pol Malloy handles the issue of Access Obamacare Connecticut. Mrs. Rell joined in on the Medicaid expansion. Will the Governor give her credit, or will he blame her for the expansion of the hole in the State's budget that results from more welfare spending? My hunch is that he'll drop the subject. He may be willingly blind to the practical and moral impossibility of Obamacare, but I'm pretty sure he sees the political hazard. I'd like it a lot if there were some mention of it by our guys. As George Orwell says,“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
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Under former Gov. M. Jodi Rell’s administration, Connecticut was the first state to expand that portion of Medicaid, which previously had been solely funded by the state. In three years, enrollment in the program has doubled from 45,000 to more than 90,000. The state receives partial reimbursement now from the federal government for the program.
http://www.ctnewsjunkie.com/archives/entry/medicaid_program_leaves_a_question_mark_in_budget_projections/