The gubernatorial nomination on the Republican side is
heavily, if politely, contested. In a few days, Republican nominating delegates
will gather at Mohegan Sun Casino to sort out their ticket. On the Democratic
side, the gubernatorial slot is a Malloy gimme – almost.
State employee union gadfly Jonathan Pelto continues to
sting Governor Dannel Malloy.
Mr. Malloy’s temperament, like that of President Barack
Obama, is sting averse. The Malloyalists who surround him sting back when stung.
Both they and their chief have thin skins. And Mr. Malloy, when caught in a
compromising position, has been known to throw a few elbows at his critics.
In the past, whenever Mr. Pelto had harpooned Mr. Malloy on
his blog “Wait, What?” gubernatorial factotum Roy Occhiogrosso, who has parleyed his Malloy connection
into a Vice Presidential slot with Global Strategy, leapt forward to answer Mr.
Pelto with a box on the ear.
“No one cares what Pelto thinks,” said Mr. Occhiogrosso
after Mr. Pelto had pelted Mr. Malloy for having joined the forces of darkness
by attempting to purge Connecticut’s educational system of underperforming teachers
who, Mr. Malloy felt, had only to “show up for four years” to achieve tenure, after which dismissal for rank incompetence becomes decidedly
less frequent.
Even so, Mr. Malloy last January issued a letter underwritten
by Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman, House Speaker Brendan Sharkey and Senate
President Donald E. Williams that delayed, according to one report “an important component of the new evaluation system: linking a teacher's
performance rating with students' standardized test scores. Malloy also
said he would create a working group to make changes in the
implementation of the new Common Core State Standards. The administration will
also scrap a $1 million marketing campaign for the Common Core.”
The decoupling of teacher performance and test scores, as
well as the canning of a million dollar marketing campaign for Common Core, strenuously
resisted by both teacher unions and many conservative groups, certainly did
not bode ill for Mr. Pelto.
Conservatives and teacher unions oppose the Common Core effort
for quite different reasons. Teacher unions are rather touchy on standards of
any kind linked to student performance that might be used to weed out non-performing
teachers; conservatives, comfortable with the principle of subsidiarity, do not
want the federal government to do to education what it has done to, say, the
private insurance market.
We have here a case of political ends touching and producing
unmanageable political sparks. Without abjectly retreating from his school
reform efforts – not in the cards -- Mr. Malloy has bent himself into a pretzel
shape so as to remain in the good graces of the powerful unions whose votes he
needs to whip in a general election the Republican Party’s gubernatorial
nominee. Once the election is in the bag, Mr. Pelto will have been politically neutered,
and Mr. Malloy’s education reforms, momentarily put on the back burner, may be resurrected
from the “working group” to which the reforms have been entrusted for safe
keeping. To parody Mr. Obama in his pre-presidential election meeting with Dimitri
Medvedev, Mr. Malloy will have considerably “more flexibility,” following his victorious election, to repair burnt bridges with unions and to
deep six the annoying Mr. Pelto.
There are three reasons why candidates for office enter
campaigns: They’re in it to win; they’re in it to make an exotic political point;
or they’re in it to affect the correlation of forces, so that the candidate’s
views will be upheld by the likely candidate in a general election.
At this point, only Mr. Pelto and his conscience knows which
of the three reasons cited above has moved him to suggest, very coyly in an appearance
on Eyewitness News’ “Face The State” with Dennis House that a) Mr. Malloy can’t win the race for governor, and b) he might primary Mr.
Malloy, if the delegates to the Democratic nominating convention are not
enlightened enough to choose him on the first ballot as their gubernatorial
standard bearer.
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