First Lady Michelle Obama has endorsed Dannel Malloy for
governor. In a picture worth a thousand words, Mrs. Obama was shown on “Capitol
Report” being bussed robustly by U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, who no doubt
would endorse Mr. Malloy were Mr. Blumenthal a newspaper; some would argue that
Mr. Blumenthal IS a newspaper. The winner of the Malloy- Tom Foley contest will
become governor of a state first in the nation in progressive governance and
crony capitalism and last in almost every other important measurement of
prosperity.
Will the First Lady’s endorsement matter to anyone but
hardened Democrats, or to voting age high-schoolers who prefer healthy and pallid
lunches to pizza and brownies? Probably not. For politicians, endorsements are
little more than shows of party solidarity, and there are few political marriages
in the nation more solid than that between Mr. Malloy and President Barack Obama.
Indeed, newspaper editorial endorsements in Connecticut’s left of center media
also have become highly predictable displays of ideological solidarity.
The lame duck president has had some difficulty getting
himself invited to campaign soirees elsewhere in the Disunited States.
Democrats vying for office in red states have tended to shun the president, if
only to avoid the falling timbers of Mr. Obama’s foreign and domestic policies.
Mr. Obama’s foreign policy is recklessly absurd because all foreign policy but
his is constructed around a realpolitik understanding of friends and enemies.
Mr. Obama is the first U.S. president who seems incapable of distinguishing
between the two. In domestic policy, Mr. Obama should have devoted his energies
during his first term to settling market uncertainties occasioned by a ruptured
housing mortgage bubble partly caused by beltway favoritism and the dismantling
of the Glass Steagall Act, a Franklin Roosevelt measure that
that prevented large financial institutions from meddling in banking
activities. Instead of attending to the crisis at hand, Mr. Obama created a
crisis of his own making by instituting Obamacare, a progressive baby step on
the way to universal health care.
Mr. Obama will be appearing in Bridgeport – if, indeed he
does make an appearance, a previous campaign appearance on behalf of Mr. Malloy
having been called off because of the Ebola crisis – only a few days after Anne
Melissa Dowling, Connecticut’s deputy commissioner of the Department of
Insurance, announced that OF COURSE she was concerned about insurance policy
cancellations in Connecticut.
“Dowling, NBCConnecticut reported, “says some 55,000 people across the state will have their policies canceled
either because it no longer meets the requirements of the Affordable Care
Act or because grandfathered policies that didn’t need to meet requirements
have simply been canceled by the insurer.”
Even here in true blue Connecticut, some members of the
state’s all Democratic Congressional Delegation have proven resistant to Mr.
Obama’s charming attempt to make the world over according to his eccentric predilections.
U.S. Congresswoman Elizabeth Esty, for instance, has announced she will not
attend Mr. Obama’s prospective campaign appearance of behalf of Mr. Malloy
unless the president somehow manages to cross her path in her own district. The
lady is very busy attending to her re-election – partly by composing and endorsing
killer ads against her opponent, Republican challenger Mark Greenberg, that
even the Courant considered “creatively misleading” and (GASP!) “false.” Mrs. Esty has announced she would not be calling on the President when he
appears in Bridgeport, only a hop, skip and a jump from Mrs. Esty's 5th
District. Connecticut is such a small
state that anywhere in the state is but a hop, skip and a jump from anywhere
else.
The Courant, the only state-wide newspaper in
Connecticut, endorsed Mrs. Esty, the second time it had done so. One of the indispensable determinants that garner Courant endorsements is
experience in office, a requirement the paper waived during its first
endorsement of Mrs. Esty, who at the time was running against a far more
experienced candidate, Republican nominee for the U.S. House in the 5th
District Andrew Roraback. The notion that the more experienced candidate for a
particular office ought to receive the approbation of voters is, in fact, an
argument for the perpetual election of incumbents, except on those rare
occasions when the retirement of an incumbent leaves an office vacant. It is a
policy, highly suspect in a constitutional republic, that would have stopped
the American Revolution in its tracts: King George III, who inherited the
British throne at the age of twelve, had a much longer and deeper experience
running the American colonies than did any of the founding fathers of the
country. Most Americans are uncomfortable with perpetual monarchies or
unchanging legislatures.
But not the Courant. The paper’s current endorsement of
Governor Malloy is riddled with enough qualifiers to sink a battleship, and
this year, as usual, Democrats in Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation
have garnered the paper’s affections; this at a time when Republicans are
expected to retain control of the House. Some bean counters expect Republicans
to capture the Senate as well. As the whole of New England moves further left,
the usual endorsements will increasingly be taken with a ton of salt by voters
less progressive than the usual progressive representatives.
Comments
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Would that these New England lefties (pols, press, and plebes) were resistant to the Obama policies. All they're actually resistant to is opening their eyes to the consequences and telling us the truth. So, at the Esty person's website we find that Obamacare is only slightly imperfect, that it could use a tune-up. The U.S. having the highest corporate tax rate among civilized nations, such as they are, has nothing to do with low "workforce participation." It's those corporate pirates (like Terrible Tom Foley) who use "loopholes" to take jobs out of the country.
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"Every American deserves quality affordable health care. Although the Affordable Care Act is far from perfect... In Congress, I’m working to make commonsense improvements to the law to make it work better for Connecticut businesses and families."
"I’ve cosponsored bills that support companies in bringing jobs back to America and that end unfair tax loopholes for companies shipping jobs overseas."