The usual gubernatorial campaign in Connecticut begins with
brave platitudes and ends, once office has been achieved, with whimpering platitudes.
We recall a triumphant Governor Lowell Weicker warning
during his gubernatorial campaign that instituting an income tax in the midst
of a recession would be like “pouring gas on a fire,” then, having achieved
office, hiring as his Office of Policy Management Director Bill Cibes, who ran
an honest but losing Democratic primary campaign by agitating for an income
tax. Before you could say, “Let’s pour gas on the fire,” Connecticut had its
income tax. State businesses have taken note of the ungovernable growth in
spending and now have their eyes fixed on the exit signs.
Republican Governor John Rowland was wafted into office on a
pledge to repeal Weicker’s incendiary income tax; once in office, the pledge
was quickly moved to Rowland’s back burner, where it expired from lack of air.
Governor Jodi Rell, who replaced Rowland when he was sent to
jail for the first time for corrupt activity, proved to be an imperfect “firewall” preventing progressive
Democrats in the General Assembly from piling up debt through reckless
spending. Having declined to run for a third term, Rell passed the
gubernatorial reins to then Stamford Mayor Dannel Malloy and retired to
Florida, far from the hurly burly of tax increases and spending binges.
Enter Governor Malloy, who imposed on Connecticut the
largest and second largest tax increases in state history, having hinted in his
own campaign that the weight of debt in Connecticut would be more or less
evenly distributed between state employee unions and taxpayers.
Ha!
One political commentator in Connecticut, weary with all the
folderol, has now declared war on platitudes and artfully misleading campaigns.
Other journalists committed to telling it like it is may follow suit.
“There may be many differences between Republican and
Democratic candidates,” Kevin Rennie tells us.
“One unhappy trait, however, unites them. They all want to be governor and no
one wants to say how they would solve the state's most pressing problems. With
the state facing a $5 billion budget deficit this is the ideal moment to unveil
detailed, serious solutions before an engaged public. Let a thousand ideas
bloom. If they possess the talent to be a successful governor, tell us what you
would do right now, in a forbidding hour for Connecticut.”
Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck put such misgivings
more succinctly: “A statesman cannot create anything himself.
He must wait and listen until he hears the steps of God sounding through
events; then leap up and grasp the hem of His garment.”
In progressive
Connecticut, belief in God waxes and wanes in proportion to the trust one
places in blind fate and cowardly politicians; today, public faith in
Connecticut politicians is at its lowest ebb. We pray to politicians when times
are good and to God when politicians are bad, which is often. Bismarck again: “People
never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.”
And Bismarck again:
“Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.” Official
denials are rarely convincing, such as: “Just as he said during the 2014
campaign ‘there is no deficit, there will be no deficit,’ the Governor has no
clothes,” said House Minority Leader Themis Klarides in October, 2016. The state’s present
biennial deficit, as Rennie notes, is hovering around $5 billion.
The upcoming
elections in 2018 promise to be somewhat different for a series of reasons:
1) progressivism – the notion that if
government is good, bigger government is better – has been a conspicuous
failure; 2) mindful of Napoleon’s advice – when your enemy is making mistakes,
don’t interfere – leading Republicans in Connecticut are fully prepared to
exploit in a general election the opposing party’s tactical and strategic
errors on tax increases; 3) in the long run, Republicans are committed to substantial reform,
including wresting political power from unions entrenched within a solicitous administrative
state, while the Democratic Party has been for a half century defenders of the status quo; 4) it is true that there
is no Bismarck in the Republican Party gubernatorial line-up for governor so
far, but the Democratic Party's gubernatorial roster screams “more of the same,”
and its program for the future promises to be chock full of Bismarckian “official
denials” that many political watchers will regard as desperate, despicable and
laughably untrue.
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