It’s all over, but for the gnashing of teeth and the weeping
of tears. The banner headlines on Tom Dudchik’s Capitol Report pretty much said it all on the day after Connecticut
voters went to the polls and turned back the clock to out-going Governor Dannel
Malloy’s first election win eight long years ago.
Once again, Democrat chestnuts were pulled from the fire by
the larger Democrat controlled cities in the state and college students at Yale
and UConn, many of whom are transients who will not be making their homes in
the state after they receive their sheepskins. These voters will not befoul
their own nests.
The Democrat ploy – make the campaign about President Donald
Trump’s delinquencies – worked remarkably well in a state in which Democrat
voters have for years held a huge margin
in party registration.
Here and there, grumblers in the media rained on the
Democrat parade. Chris Powell, once the Managing Editor of the Journal Inquirer
newspaper, now a free-lance Cassandra whose column continues to appear in the
JI and other media venues, noted “Five days before the election Lamont, the
Democratic nominee, told a rally of government employee union members in New
Britain, 'We're going to be fighting for you for the next four
years.' Lamont's remark recalled Governor Malloy's infamous if honest
declaration to a rally of government employee union members at the state
Capitol four years ago: ‘I am your servant.’” And Powell asked pointedly, “How
will the new servant of the unions deliver to them after first pledging to
raise taxes, then pledging not to, and then, hours before the election,
dismissing a radio interviewer's question about taxes with a ‘no comment,’ as
if that answer was not as arrogant as anything ever uttered by his ignorant
Republican rival?”
The “ignorant Republican rival,” gubernatorial
nominee Bob Stefanowski, was almost certainly right about Connecticut next
governor when he said repeatedly during his campaign that a Governor Lamont
will raise taxes and continue the warm relationship with Connecticut's employee
unions that was such a prominent feature of the Malloy administration.
So then, where do we go from here? We go back to the future.
The Republican flank of the General Assembly has been
effectively neutered by losses in a Senate that had been tied at 18 -18. Representative
Joe Aresimowicz eked out a narrow win to retain his post as Speaker of the
House. Aresimowicz is employed by a union and cannot be expected to befoul his
own nest. Senator Martin Looney, a leftist born and bred in New Haven, will continue
to preside over the Senate as President
Pro Tem. “I’m raring to go with the excitement of having a majority again,”
Looney said in an interview with the
New Haven Independent.
As usual, these door keepers will keep the doors shut to Republican leaders in
both chambers. They will not entertain Republican budgets or Republican ideas, an
eerie repeat of the correlation of forces that followed Malloy’s first gubernatorial
victory in 2011.
Lamont, Looney and Aresimowicz may now proceed along their
merry way as if the Malloy years, throbbing with union favorable contracts, business
flight, the largest tax increase of any administration in state history, shouts
from outside the state commentators that Connecticut -- whose cup runneth over
with taxes, regulations and accelerated spending, along with repeated budget
deficits – was simply a bad daydream. Night is coming on, with its soft
murmurings of a future prosperity.
Yale and UConn graduates, who vote and run, will figure it
all out soon enough. They will not have to live in the tax-prone, progressive
nest they have helped to build here in the land of steady habits.
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