Here is the lede to the story: “Coming off his overwhelming
re-election to the Senate and with an eye toward 2020, Chris Murphy is pulling
the levers of the Democratic machinery ahead of a pivotal vote on the next
party chairman… Some say it’s a natural progression for Murphy to want to have
a say in who leads Connecticut’s nearly 800,000 registered Democrats after
recruiting Ned Lamont to run for governor and Jahana Hayes to run for his
former U.S. House seat.”
Murphy – someone who is “more hands-on,” according to former
state party chairman and past president of the Connecticut AFL-CIO John Olsen –
seems deferential to Lamont: “Obviously I care a lot about the success of the
Democratic Party in Connecticut, and that's one of the reasons I worked so hard
to elect Ned Lamont. I'm excited to have him at the head of our party, and I
know he will choose the type of leaders that both our party and our state need
to keep moving forward." But senior Democrats
within his party, the story notes, say that Murphy favors “a party chairman
with whom he already has a close working relationship or alliance. Among the
names being bandied about are two of his trusted Senate aides, Sean Scanlon and
Kenny Curran.”
An important piece on the political chessboard, a party
chairman drawn from his own intimate circle certainly would be able to
frustrate contenders ambitious as Murphy from launching a primary when the
senator, recently re-elected to office, defends his seat in six years. Clouds
of presidential ambition have hung about Murphy’s head for the past few years.
If Democrats are able to seize the White House in 2020 from current President
Donald Trump, Murphy might make a fine cabinet head in a newly established
Office of Gun Regulation, in which case, were he able to hand-pick a Connecticut
Democrat Party Chairman, the lean and hungry senator might be able, by exerting
a little pressure, to hand-pick his own successor in the U.S. Senate.
One wonders what Connecticut’s senior senator, Dick
Blumenthal, who hails from a different time period when senators did not mettle
directly in state politics, thinks of the strategic tactics of the state’s
junior senator.
Murphy is not alone in his bid for power and status, coin of
the realm in US politics. The Progressive Caucus in the state’s General
Assembly also is flexing its muscle now that Democrats have swept Republicans
from power in a) the General Assembly, b) the governor’s office, c) all the
constitutional offices in Connecticut, and d) the state’s U.S. Congressional
Delegation. The failed unchallenged Democrat hegemony urban dwellers have long
been used to now spreads its dark wings over the entire state. Connecticut’s
major cities have been struggling for years with what journalists euphemistically
call “challenges.”
It is very much an open question whether the state’s media,
which should perform a mediating function between the two parties, will offer
any effective resistance to Connecticut’s dominant party. As is the case in virtually all progressive
New England states, the media in Connecticut is very comfortable with
progressive political prescriptions.
We have been down this road only yesterday. The correlation
of forces that obtained during the first of Governor Dannel Malloy’s two
unsuccessful terms – the capture of the governor’s office by Democrats, and overwhelmingly
superior Democrat numbers in the General Assembly – has now been restored. And
Lamont, unlike Malloy is a political novice, which puts him at the mercy of
professional politicians in Connecticut, Democrat long-beards such as President
Pro-Tem of the Senate Martin M. Looney and SEBAC’s best friend, Speaker of the
House Joe Aresimowicz, a former union president who is employed as a union coordinator
by AFSCME Council 4.
Murphy the progressive will be somewhere in the mix nudging
Lamont left. He will be joined by all the state’s constitutional offices, now
held by Democrats, including Attorney General in waiting William Tong, whose
chief ambition as Attorney General appears to be to provide Blumenthal and
Murphy with assistance in the impeachment of President Donald Trump.
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