Owning Malloy

Governor Dannel Malloy has seven months remaining in his second term. His administration has been a deceptive failure.

Malloy came into office complaining loudly about the problems put on his plate by his predecessors, Governors Jodi Rell and John Rowland.  They had not done what was necessary to remediate Connecticut’s economic woes.

When Malloy leaves office at the end of his second term, the problems will be intensified.  Because he has promoted false solutions – tax increases, the extension of crippling state employee contracts beyond 2027, to mention just two missteps – Connecticut’s problems have become more intractable.

It was a profound though somewhat successful deception to suggest that Rell and Rowland were principally responsible for budget dislocations, because budgets are largely the responsibility of the legislature, and Connecticut’s General Assembly has been controlled by the members of Malloy’s own party for near a half century. Recently, Republicans managed to pass a Republican budget in the General Assembly, later vetoed by Malloy, because their numbers had improved and a few Democrats concerned with providing real solutions to the state's budget woes summoned enough courage to break ranks with Malloy Democrats.  

Once in office, Malloy marginalized Republicans in the General Assembly. Republican fingerprints appear nowhere on any Malloy budget, most of which tilted out of balance months after they had been approved by the Democrat dominated General Assembly.

The parallels between the Malloy and Obama administrations are striking.  When President Obama was first elected, he pursued a strategy later adopted by Malloy. During Obama’s first term in office, Democrats controlled the chief executive office and both houses of Congress. Nationally, the entire Republican Party was put in Coventry, and Obama wielded his pen and his phone with reckless abandon during his first term. His second term collided with reality. When Obama left office, the presidency and both houses of Congress were firmly in Republican hands. Improbably, Trump, and not former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, had been elected president.

Malloy’s approval rating has bottomed out at 28 percent. Because he fears a referendum on his policies, Malloy has decided wisely not to run for a third term, and Connecticut Republicans have made gains in the state’s Senate and House that may signal the end of his hegemonic state government.

Malloy’s administration, a comic flop, was successful in its deceptions; it is still lying about future tax increases. The laughter that should follow him as he leaves the public stage could bring down the rafters, assuming the state’s media has not altogether abandoned its mission, which is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Malloy and his progressive supporters in the General Assembly have been perhaps too comfortable in their work of destruction.

Nationally, the media’s uncritical slumber has been shattered by the roughhousing of the Trump administration. Claims that the media is partisan have aroused partisans from an eight year slumber. The national media is now fully awake, but there is no doubt that the left of center media was snoozing during much of the Obama administration. A partisan media is incapable of writing critically about its own ideologically compatible political bums. A faithful son will not willingly expose his father’s nakedness.

Something similar has happened here in Connecticut, where a left of center media has reacted slothfully to the reckless economic and social policies pursued by dominant Democratic progressives. It took the Hartford Courant more than four separate gubernatorial administrations before its editorial board declared that Connecticut’s recurring budget problems were the result of excessive spending.

After Governor Lowell Weicker, who reduced the state’s competitive advantage by instituting an income tax, after Republican  Governors John Rowland and Jodi Rell, both imperfect “firewalls” preventing reckless spending by a runaway, spendthrift Democrat General Assembly, after Malloy, who hobbled Connecticut by the imposition of the largest and second largest tax increases in Connecticut history, after a revenue reducing  business flight owing in part to the weight of state employee financial obligations and excessive spending , after all these red flags fluttering over Connecticut’s burning house, the paper finally produced an editorial pointing out that the state had a spending problem, NOT a revenue problem, a near miraculous admission.

Among other things, the media is supposed to be a non-partisan, non-ideological fire brigade. We all feel the flames licking our heels. Where has the fire brigade been all this time? Has it been supplying Molotov cocktails to the arsonists?

It may be too severe to suggest as much, but many people believe that Connecticut’s flight from centrist politics may in some measure be put down to a failure of good journalism.