It’s a pretty safe
bet that Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim may not be Connecticut’s next governor,
now that current Governor Dannel Malloy has thrown in the sponge, opening the
door to a handful of Democratic gubernatorial hopefuls panting behind the
curtain.
Among the Democratic
prospects are Mr. Ganim, elected mayor of Bridgeport four times before he was
convicted of sixteen counts of corruption related activity, for which he spent seven
years of a nine year sentence under lock and key. Other possible Democratic
gubernatorial candidates are Comptroller Kevin Lembo, Middletown Mayor Dan Drew,
former state Senator Jonathan Harris, Christopher Mattei, the former
Chief of the Financial Fraud and Public Corruption unit for the United
States Attorney’s Office in the District of Connecticut who bagged
former Governor John Rowland a second time, and Lieutenant Governor Nancy Wyman who
presently is playing it coy.
No one knows exactly
why the good people of Bridgeport elected Mr. Ganim to represent their city as
its mayor so soon after his release from prison. The shadow of the prison was
yet upon him when he defeated petitioning candidate Mary Jane Foster by a two
to one margin, having previously disposed of incumbent Democratic Mayor Bill
Finch in a hotly contested primary. Prior to his incarceration, Mr. Ganim had
been a successful mayor. Somewhere along the way Mr. Finch lost the backing of
Bridgeport kingmaker Mario Testa, an indispensable political shaker and mover
in Bridgeport. Terry Cowgill, writing in CTNewsJunkie, attributes Mr. Ganim’s short journey from
prison to the mayor’s office to the “hypermasculine… testicular fortitude” of
Mr. Ganim, but Mr. Ganim’s overweening ambition does not quite explain why
Bridgeporters favored his bid for mayor; perhaps they figured … better the
crook you know. Then too, Ganim was not a Republican crook. Democratic crooks
have nine lives, Republican crooks have, at best, two. Blueness in
Connecticut’s major cities has its privileges.
The Malloy era will
end with a bang, not a whimper, and Democratic contestants would be wise to
separate themselves from a failed enterprise. The usual bromide for deficits –
more taxes – is no longer efficacious. In Connecticut’s political house, the
basement is flooded, the roof is sagging, and householders who might be able to
pay for repairs have skedaddled to other states. More is less; tax increases
have led to revenue reductions. The pillars of the Democratic Party in heavily
taxed and over-regulated Connecticut, mostly unions and companies bribed with
offers of low credit lending and tax exemptions, are beginning to show
wear. Mr. Malloy has vowed to maintain
present revenue levels and to discharge the state’s perpetual deficits through
administrative consolidations and lay-offs. No one believes him, least of all
Democratic progressives who hope to be able to increase current spending by
levying a progressive tax on hedge fund managers and other one-percenters.
Leading Democrats in
Connecticut have abandoned the middle way. There is nothing “moderate” about
progressivism, the doctrine that political action is sanctified when it
trickles down from progressive leaders such as former President Barack Obama or
Governor Dannel Malloy to needy parishioners in Democratic Party pews. What,
after all, is the point of having absolute power if you are not prepared to
abuse it? If you can make use of a party script in your campaign, and if all
the troops in your parade march to the same drummer, independent thought is
unnecessary – indeed, destructive. And impinging reality, which sometimes reminds
you of the disproportion between your holy resolve and the way things really
are in a hard-edged world, may be safely dismissed.
In your protective
bubble, a decrease in revenue that is caused by a tax increase may be
remediated by – further tax increases. A budget 30 percent of which is
devoted to “fixed costs” cannot be balanced by
an explosion of dedicated funds that further shift a greater proportion of your
budget to cosseted special interests. If students in your
urban public schools graduate without having mastered necessary pedagogical
skills -- reading, writing and
arithmetic – the answer to these deficiencies is to have the over-schooled but under-educated
illiterates take remedial courses in community colleges of their choosing –
which, of course, will be “free” under a progressive political regime.
Such is life in
Connecticut’s progressive Democrat hegemon. Every so often, one spots a glimmer
of hope quickly snuffed out. Mr. Malloy pledges that things will be different this time;
he is resolved to settle a future $5 billion deficit through spending
reductions alone – NOT revenue increases. And U.S. Representative Jim Himes is
organizing a “moderate” Democratic Party cult in the Congress.
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