Malloy Drops Seven Points

Vice President Joe Biden came to Connecticut for two reasons: to raise money – this is, after all, election season – and to fist bump Governor Dannel Malloy. Mr. Biden had hardly arrived in the state when some faithful Democrats began to wonder whether Mr. Malloy had fallen out of favor with the White House. Why dispatch to such a faithful state a second string, gaff prone VP? Where was President Barack Obama?

 Mr. Biden likes Mr. Malloy. And why shouldn’t he?  Mr. Malloy has been a good progressive foot soldier. While health care watchers elsewhere are watching the very expensive Obamacare sun set over the horizon, Mr. Malloy, Connecticut's Chanticleer, has been crowing up the sun. What a glorious morning! While national Democrats palaver about throwing the death penalty on the ash heap of history, Connecticut Democrats abolished capital punishment more than two years ago, shortly after two parolees invaded a house in Cheshire and proceeded to sack and murder the Petit family. Following the murder of Dr. Petit’s wife and his two daughters, gun sales in Connecticut zoomed upwards. Why the uptick?

People who had heard of the mass murder in Cheshire – and who did not? -- began to calculate how long it would take the police to reach their house after they had put in a call to report an impending home invasion. If the response time was, say, more than twenty minutes, the householder, particularly if he lived in the suburban outback, seriously pondered making a trek to his local gun supplier. A similar uptick in gun purchases followed the mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary School.   

All seven members of Connecticut’s all Democratic U.S. Congressional Delegation are energetic progressive foot soldiers. Does the Obama administration wish all opposing Republicans roasting in Hell? The Connecticut Democratic Party has long consigned opposition Republicans to the nether regions. Mr. Malloy is the first Democratic governor in two decades. The General Assembly has been a Democratic Party preserve for many more years. Democrats outnumber Republicans by a two to one margin in the state. Unaffiliateds or Independents outnumber Democrats by a slight margin. There are no Republicans within Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional delegation. All constitutional offices are held by Democrats.

Does the Obama administration wish it could slip by Speaker of the U.S. Senate Harry Reid a gun control bill as restrictive as the one recently rushed through Connecticut’s General Assembly in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre?  In the best of all possible worlds, it certainly would. On the matter of gun restrictions, Connecticut has rushed in where other states have feared to tread.      

Is the Obama administration impatient with state laws that prevent abortion facilities from becoming chambers of horrors -- late-term abortion Kermit Gosnell chop shops? Here comes Dick Blumenthal, the Senator from Planned Parenthood, clutching in his fist a bill that would prevent states from imposing any regulations, however reasonable, on abortion providers. Mr. Blumenthal, for twenty years and more the state’s Attorney General, has sponsored the regulation of pretty nearly everything in Connecticut from soup to nuts, but abortion is a fetish of the left that must never suffer restrictions, even such mild regulations as would ensure the health and well-being of women who choose to avail themselves of abortion services. The Blumenthal bill that would allow the federal government to outlaw all present and future state abortion regulations would, with a single stoke of the federal pen, abolish any regulation, however necessary, imposed by Connecticut’s General Assembly on abortion providers.

In the matter of crony capitalism, Mr. Malloy and Mr. Obama are neck and neck; of course, the federal government being so much larger than Connecticut’s state government, the scale of possible crony capitalist corruption is much greater in Washington than Hartford. The corporations and special interests that benefit from Mr. Obama’s attentions are much larger – and much more grateful – than those favored by Mr. Malloy. But the crony capitalist process is the same: A Democratic Government taxes the Middle Class, realizes a Potemkin Village surplus, and transfers tax money and special exemptions to “struggling” mega-businesses in return for votes and campaign cash.

Mr. Biden is also interested in campaign cash, which is why he postponed important conferences discussing the partition of Ukraine by Czar of all the Russians Vladimir Putin, the beheading of two or more Americans by ISIS, a terrorist spin-off of al-Qaida in Iraq, the possible reduction of U.S. unfunded liabilities, now in excess of $127 trillion, the inflaming of racial tensions in Ferguson Missouri, the fraying separation of powers doctrine under the sundering hand of Mr. Obama who, for mysterious reasons, insists on refashioning bills passed by Congress through an injudicious use of a power never granted to him by the U.S. Constitution – the non-power NOT to execute laws passed by Congress. All these important matters and more were left pending by Mr. Biden so that he might give a hand up and a hand out to besieged Democrats in Connecticut.

Isn’t that nice? The day after Mr. Biden wended his way back to Sodom on the Potomac, a new Rasmussen Report showed Mr. Malloy trailing his Republican opponent, Tom Foley, by seven points, which is seven points down from Mr. Malloy’s post primary estimate. At the tail end of the Republican Party primaries, Mr. Malloy said that the race was 50-50 – same as it was during Mr. Foley’s first gubernatorial challenge.

 Mr. Foley hadn’t even budged the needle, the eupeptic Mr. Malloy said.