Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

We are fast approaching “V Day,” vote day here in Connecticut, on November 6. Republicans are punching through the mask, Governor Dannel Malloy, to hobble the gubernatorial ambitions of Ned Lamont who, along with Republican gubernatorial hopeful Bob Stefanowski, has had little direct political experience. Connecticut Commentary has styled this “the Junior Varsity campaign.” The first string team – Malloy himself, his Lieutenant Governor Nancy Wyman, along with other possible experienced Democrat prospects for governor such as Comptroller   Kevin Lembo – is sitting on the back bench. It would not be too fanciful to suggest that Democrats have not fielded their strong team for two principal reasons: 1) Malloy has sunk to a new low in his favorability rating, 15 percent, which suggests that his policies have failed the state, and 2) it may be prudent to wait until the storm of disapproval has passed; there is always tomorrow.

No one has yet asked Ned Lamont – according to recent polls, Connecticut’s next governor – how he plans to bring the state’s public employee unions to heel. Connecticut’s unionized, tax supported UConn Health Center is now, for all practical purposes, bankrupt. “As a public institution with a large share of unionized physicians and staff,” The Hartford Courant notes in a recent story, the UConn Health Center faces “added challenges. Pension liabilities for its more than 2,300 employees increased from $1.2 billion in 2016 to an anticipated $2.3 billion this year.”

Connecticut’s gubernatorial “debate” – Where are Lincoln and Douglas when you need them? -- between Ned Lamont and Bob Stefanowski appears to be stuck on a single “how” question: How will Stefanowski implement his campaign pledge to eliminate Connecticut’s income tax, once considered a final solution to the state’s debt problems, now a millstone around the neck of Connecticut. The media coverage of the debates has been diverting, but most reports have been stuck in a single groove, playing over and over the same starkly abbreviated section of a larger unheard song, rather as if inconvenient questions launched in Lamont’s direction will upset the precariously balanced apple cart that has been constructed over a period of three decades by the   Democrat General Assembly hegemon in charge of state finances. Stefanowski has said his pledge to eliminate the income tax within the space of eight years is an aspirational goal that will become operational two years into his gubern...

National Democrats are, ever so gently, following socialist Pied Piper U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders back to the cave.   Connecticut Democrats, progressive to the bone, are likely to go along for the ride. The Pied Piper, it will be recalled, was hired by the mayor of Hamlin to rid the town of rats, which he did by piping them an enchanting tune. The mayor of the town refused payment, and the Pied Piper later avenged himself by piping the town’s children to a cave, where they were never heard from again. There are two morals to the story: debts incurred must be paid, and the instruments of destruction you use against your enemies easily may be turned upon yourself. Forbes Magazine has examined the detailed Congressional Democrat tax hike plan. Many of us, including Newsweek magazine, have long concluded that " We Are All Socialists Now ."   The Democrat detailed plan includes, according to Forbes , an i ncrease in the top marginal income tax rate from 37 percent to 3...

Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh has been installed on the U.S. Supreme Court.  A voting majority on both sides of the apparently permanent political barricades is breathing sighs of relief, if only because the chaotic Senate hearings are over.  Most people are bone weary of the political posturing and wonder how much permanent damage the U.S. Senate, not to mention the Supreme Court, may have suffered. Nothing on the Democrat side of the barricades will be over until the party triumvirate – U.S. Senators Dick Blumenthal, Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer – says it is over.   That seems unlikely. The Democrat effort here seems to be to strike at the president through his mask, in this case Kavanaugh. Blumenthal, it should be noted, pledged to vote against the Kavanaugh nomination even before he was nominated by Trump to succeed Justice Kennedy on the high court. In fact, Blumenthal was opposed to any of the candidates whose names appeared on a list of accept...

Hillary Clinton, who lost the presidential election to current U.S. President Donald Trump, has been effectively sidelined as a national leader of the Democrat Party. Clinton, whose emails the Chinese were reading in real time when as Secretary of State she typed them out on an unsecured private server, likely will not make an appearance in Connecticut as a supporter of Democrat gubernatorial hopeful Ned Lamont. But all is not lost. Lamont, running against Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob Stefanowski, has received a fulsome endorsement from former President Barack Obama, whose political star still twinkles in the dark heavens.