Republican Mayor Boughton of Danbury has bowed out of the
gubernatorial campaign, apparently because he could not raise sufficient funds
in time to gain access to public financing. When John McKinney appeared in
Hartford to debate other Republican candidates for governor, he found himself
quite alone. Mr. Boughton had withdrawn,
and Republican Party nominee for governor Tom Foley has been assiduously
avoiding debates with other Republican gubernatorial candidates. Odd-makers
think it will be a Foley-Malloy gubernatorial race after the primary in August.
Joe Visconti is still in the race. Assuming the odds-makers are right, how will
Mr. Foley fare against Mr. Malloy?
No one knows because, possibly for strategic reasons, Mr.
Foley is playing his cards very close to his vest. Usually, part of a
contestant’s hand is shown during primary debates. Before declaring he intended
to run again for office, Mr. Malloy said he was delaying his announcement
because he wanted to give Republican gubernatorial contestants an opportunity
to bloody themselves in a primary campaign. That has not happened. One might
consider this an upside, but there is a downside to a quiet, uneventful
campaign.
Apart from a few vague assertions at the Republican Party
nominating convention, Mr. Foley did not offer up a campaign platform. Party
platforms, a usual feature at conventions, have gone by the wayside.
Republicans at the state nominating convention this year were casting their
ballots for persons, not articulated programs. If a candidate does not offer a
platform of some kind early in a race, he or she is simply allowing the contest
to be defined by what we might call the correlation of forces: incumbent
politicians, campaign propaganda networks and the media, among other shaping influences.
It is extremely important in Connecticut, a one-party Democratic state, for
Republican gubernatorial prospects to set their own course. By failing to do
so, Republicans simply trust fate to decide elections. And here in Connecticut,
fate is a Democrat.
What might such a platform or program look like?
Journal Inquirer Managing Editor and columnist Chris Powell
put that question to himself recently. His answer to it may be found in one of
his columns, “What A Real Campaign For Governor Might Address.”
On education, the
state should attend to what Mr. Powell calls social promotion, which has
flooded colleges with illiterates and degraded diplomas. End social promotion
and see to it that all students can read and figure by, say, fourth grade; a
reform of this kind would liquidate about half of Connecticut’s state college
system, and the resulting savings then might be used to finance
universal preschool, which would remediate “some of the damage done by
childbearing outside marriage and save money for many working parents.”
Employee compensation should be frozen for four years. If
unions prove obstreperous, the governor should, as an emergency measure, repeal
collective bargaining for government employees. State government should
withdraw from the pension business and provide “new employees only with defined-contribution pensions, 401(k)s
-- the kind taxpayers have to settle for… Binding arbitration of state and
municipal employee union contracts should be repealed, or, better, the arbiters
should be elected, since opposition to that by the unions will expose their
opposition to democracy.”
Social disintegration might be ameliorated “by outlawing
welfare benefits for households with children born outside marriage, with
current welfare households grandfathered. State government then should take
custody of children born into such neglectful circumstances, and the ‘family
reunification’ policy of the state Department of Children and Families should
be discarded as the costly and often fatal coddling of the slob culture. When
government no longer finances child neglect and abuse, most of it will stop.”
The criminalization of drugs should be replaced with much
less expensive drug rehabilitation programs. This measure will end a good deal
of violent crime, “as well as most of the work of the criminal-justice system
and prisons… With drugs decriminalized, state prosecutors should be directed to
focus on government corruption and welfare fraud, which are rampant even as
there are virtually no state prosecutions for them.”
The state should require nursing homes to bid competitively
for welfare patients. Crony capitalism should be thrown on the dustbin of
history: “Direct grants and tax breaks for particular companies in the name of
economic development -- corporate welfare -- should be outlawed.”
One may quibble with part or all of such a platform, but
this at least is a platform and not a pointless gesture in the direction of a
platform.
You cannot beat a bad idea in politics by refusing to offer
a compensating good idea. And you cannot hope to beat Mr. Malloy by hoping he
has beaten himself. Pursue that course and you will leave a beaten state in the
hands of a merciless correlation of forces.
Comments
The democrats have abandoned all pretense of supporting regular workers. Their constituencies are teachers, wealthy professionals with elite aspirations, greens, official minorities and welfare enterprises. They've abandoned industry, brown business, and even civil service unions they don't like such as Corrections Officers and Police.
It's a truly crony approach. The GOP can succeed if they take a no handouts policy that applies to UTC as well as Unions.
You're right all the way around. I just wanted to mention some of Powell's points. They are all defensible and could be elaborated if Foley took some of them up in a campaign. The problem with the usual Republican non-campaign is that there is very little there in it. Foley appears to be waiting for the misery index to put him in office. Of course, in the absence of a vigorous campaign, any Republican governor will be hobbled by majority Democrats; that’s what Rell was all about. You end up with someone as governor who is pretending to be Malloy.
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And, I'd vote for Powell in a heartbeat.
I must say that from what little I can see McKinney is to be given credit for addressing the spending issue. I don't know what can be done to get traction for a real candidate willing to tell the truth. As it is, we can only hope that Foley gets in, and hope against hope he deals more effectively with the legislature than he recently did with the Trumka Thugs. It may be that he appreciates Powell's points, but would he fight for them? Meow.