Independence is regarded as a boon for several reasons, one
of them best stated by Mark Twain: “Look at the tyranny of party -- at what is
called party allegiance, party loyalty -- a snare invented by designing men for
selfish purposes -- and which turns voters into chattels, slaves, rabbits, and
all the while their masters, and they themselves are shouting rubbish about
liberty, independence, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, honestly
unconscious of the fantastic contradiction; and forgetting or ignoring that
their fathers and the churches shouted the same blasphemies a generation
earlier when they were closing their doors against the hunted slave, beating
his handful of humane defenders with Bible texts and billies, and pocketing the
insults and licking the shoes of his Southern master.”
Towards the end of his life, following the death of his wife
Olivia and the shattering death of his daughter Susy from spinal meningitis at
age 24 while Twain and his wife were in Europe, Twain put aside his
political inhibitions. His daughter died while Twain was on one of his European
jaunts attempting to work his way out of bankruptcy. These were not happy
years. His wife, as good wives do, had served as an anchor and political censor
for much of his writing life. After her death, all the shackles fell off.
And the first prominent politician who felt Twain's public
bite was Teddy Roosevelt, the nation’s first progressive president. Twain
thought TR was a successful political showman, but a preposterous fraud: “Mr. Roosevelt is the Tom Sawyer of the
political world of the twentieth century; always showing off; always hunting
for a chance to show off; in his frenzied imagination, the Great Republic is a
vast Barnum circus with him for a clown and the whole world for audience; he
would go to Halifax for half a chance to show off and he would go to hell for a
whole one.” The disapprobation was returned by TR, who said, “I would like to hang
Mark Twain.”
Roosevelt’s
independence of party was on display during the 1912 election when, having been
refused the nomination of the Republican Party, Roosevelt ran for president under
a progressive flag – The Bull Moose Party.”
Both as senator and
governor, Lowell Weicker was a progressive independista. Having lost his senate
seat to former Attorney General Joe Lieberman, Weicker ran for governor under
his own flag, A Connecticut Party, and won the general election by putting up a
false front during his campaign. Instituting an income tax in the middle of a
recession, said Weicker, would be like pouring gas on a fire. Connecticut’s
income tax is Weicker’s legacy to his state. Weicker was as bullish on Weicker
as TR was on TR. There was no love lost between Weicker and his Republican
Party. Even today, there are Republicans who insist, not without cause, that
Weicker, during his last years in the senate, was a faux Republican. But he
certainly was – at least in respect to the state’s Republican Party -- an
independent. His autobiography is titled “Maverick.” And it should not be
forgotten that an income tax is the point of progressivism’s spear, the sharp
edge of its sword.
Two party Republican
governors followed Weicker in office. One, John Rowland, campaigned on
repealing the income tax. Rowland ended up in prison on charges of corruption.
Jodi Rell followed Rowland into office, retiring after a full term with an
approval rating much higher than that of Governor Dannel Malloy who, like
Weicker, whipped his state with the highest and second highest tax increases in
Connecticut history. Rowland and Rell were hobbled by a General Assembly
dominated for nearly half a century by Democrats slouching towards
progressivism.
Malloy was not
inhibited by legislate drag. It would be fairly accurate to say that Weicker and Malloy, both progressives, were independent in this sense: both were rather
more like Twain's TR than his William Howard Taft, whom Twain much preferred to TR. Both Weicker and Malloy overcame Republican Party opposition. The failure of progressivism in Connecticut became evident –
indeed, obvious to anyone who was not a progressive – towards the end of Malloy’s
first term, when the state began to leech entrepreneurial capital and young entrepreneurs
to contiguous high tax states such as New York and Massachusetts.
Roland Lemar,
a young Democratic state Representative who works on campaigns statewide, adequately
summed up the chief problem his party will be facing in the upcoming elections:
“The Democratic brand in Connecticut is suffering to the point that our natural
advantage that we should have in a mid-term election with a Republican
president, with Democratic ranks of voters far outnumbering Republicans, we’ve
lost that advantage. All the natural advantages that we should have we don’t
have right now because our brand has suffered and we don’t have a candidate who
can articulate where we should be.” The Democrat Party has moved too far to the
left.
The Republican
Party, as always, is suffering from timidity. It has not been able in past campaigns
to tie the knot – to prevent the thread from slipping from the needle’s eye.
But neither party needs a world-savior governor
independent of either party. Been there, done that.
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