Democrat MIAs Aboard The Titanic

Democrat Dan Drew, the mayor of Middletown, has withdrawn from the governor’s race. His name may now be added to a crowd of Democrat MIAs. Drew announced he was running for governor before Governor Dannel Malloy threw in the towel. His gesture of mild defiance could not have set well with the thin-skinned Malloy who, like a post-Capone Capo di tutti capi, likes his vengeance dishes served cold.

Malloy’s Lieutenant Governor Nancy Wyman, pleading grandchildren, has decided not to run. Malloy’s Comptroller, Kevin Lembo, earlier decided he did not want to be governor. Attorney General George Jepsen, who easily might have held his position as long as his predecessor, Dick Blumenthal, decided to call it a day after only six years – hopefully setting an unalterable precedent. And Jepsen did not announce for governor. Blumenthal was Attorney General for two decades and might still have been there, a scourge of Connecticut businesses, had not then U.S. Senator Chris Dodd left the Senate for Hollywood, turning over his two decades old sinecure to St. Dick.

Suddenly doors are open: three important offices -- governor, attorney general and treasurer – have become available, almost as if the state had instituted term limits. Present State Treasurer Denise Nappier has abandoned ship after eighteen years, perhaps because, like Drew’s campaign, the state has run out of money.

John “Cactus Jack” Garner, Franklin Roosevelt’s Vice President, a most un-Blumenthal-like character, retired from his job after only eight years, Roosevelt having served as president for a total of twelve years, after which the presidency was wisely term-limited. Someone asked Garner what he thought of the vice president’s office, and he replied, disarmingly, that it “wasn’t worth a warm bucket of s**t,” a good old Middle English word the use of which in private discourse made public has recently got President Donald Trump into a boatload of trouble. They still make politicians that way in Texas.

The down-and-out state that Malloy has left to his successors ain’t worth a boatload of trouble, and THAT is why the governorship can’t be sold for a penny to any first-string Democratic politician in Connecticut. No one yet has asked Blumenthal whether he wants to be governor; nor has anyone asked the other worthy Democrats that hold every position in Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation. If the state had term limits, there would be no need to ask.

While Drew was running for governor, a local dust-up was occurring in his own bailiwick. A slate of progressives replaced a longstanding Democratic Town Committee group prepared to support Drew’s gubernatorial bid. Having lost the support of a committee that selects delegates to the state nominating convention, and broke after having shuttled $88,000 in consulting fees to the Vinci Group where, CTPost noted, “Drew’s ousted mayoral chief of staff Geoff Luxenberg had once been a partner,” Drew threw in the sponge and withdrew from the race.  Recently entering the opened door are Susan Bysiewicz and Ned Lamont, who, some years ago, had successfully challenged then Senator Joe Lieberman in a Democrat primary but lost to the senator in the following general election.

All the scrambling for seats on the Titanic, quickly approaching the iceberg, casts a veil over the real political issues in Connecticut. Do we continue on the state’s failing progressive course, or do we reverse engines and re-plot a course in an opposite direction? Should Connecticut, which has transferred to the state’s most politically effective special interest a control over budgets constitutionally assigned to legislators, dissever contractual ties with unions in the near future? The predominant constitutional budget making authority in Connecticut rests with the General Assembly – not with an executive department that finds in a mutually beneficial alignment with grasping unions a certain path to reelection. Pressed by artfully arranged extensions of contracts, should the state achieve cost savings by privatizing all possible state functions? Should a besieged legislature pass “right to work laws” in Connecticut, a union oppressed state that still has not recovered from a national recession that ended elsewhere in the nation more than eight years ago? Should the income tax, volatile and unpredictable, be replaced in due course with consumption taxes? How will the state deal with its “fixed costs,” which are crowding out discretionary costs? Answer: unfix them. Should Connecticut adopt recall and ballot initiatives to counter anti-constitutional and anti-republican (note the small “r”) court decisions? And what should we do about appellate courts, mini-legislatures that regularly breech constitutionally necessary walls of separation? In a well ordered constitutional republic, should Connecticut’s Malloy-packed Supreme Court be allowed to override the collective will of elected legislative representatives, as it had done recently in its absurd capital punishment revocation? The answers to these questions will determine the future of Connecticut. All the palavering about balanced budgets is a progressive blind to insure repetitive and self-destructive tax increases and, of course, equally ruinous spending increases.

These are questions of moment that ought to be ventilated in election before Connecticut collides with the iceberg.