Themis Klarides, the leader of a much reduced Republican
contingent in the Connecticut House of Representatives, is fair-minded, but not
the sort of woman who will suffer fools – and, more importantly, political
frauds – gladly. She may allow two strikes, but three strikes and you’re out.
Very early on, Klarites drew a bead on the Malloy
administration, which sought to marginalize Republican influence over political
affairs by loudly shutting the door on Republicans such as Klarides. A shrewd
judge of character, she carefully catalogued the quills Governor Dannel Malloy
had been throwing about.
Malloy had described himself as a bristly porcupine, a
self-designation that stuck and struck because it was inconveniently true. As a Republican leader in the House, Klarides
did not suffer gladly Malloy’s lordly indifference. It was either Malloy’s way,
Republican leader in the Senate Len Fasano noted early in Malloy’s first term,
or the highway. But then, what is the point in having absolute power, a well-known
caricaturist once said, “if you are unwilling to abuse it?”
After years in the desert – Malloy was the first Democrat
governor since former Governor Bill O’Neill turned over the reins of government
to former Governor and US Senator Lowell Weicker in 1991 -- Malloy was fully
prepared to shut down Republican opposition. Nationally, former President
Barack Obama followed the same course. Why struggle with the oppositionists if
you can politically marginalize them?
Klarites knows that people whose life’s blood is power --
Obama in Washington and Malloy in Connecticut – fall neatly into two
categories: truth-sayers and imposters. Between the two are crowded any number
of sub-categories.
The typical political fraud is animated by a hunger for
notoriety and approval. But this pathology must be carefully disguised,
sometimes, notably in the case of Malloy, as an indifference to public opinion.
Before he left office in January 2019, Malloy let loose upon
the general public, as well as reporters who could not help but take notice of
his absurdly low approval rating, a self-celebratory 300 page manifesto
accounting for his abysmally low approval rating. Malloy bottomed out, before he left
office, at 15 percent, the lowest approval rating of any governor in the
nation.
“I purposely chose to be unpopular,” Malloy boasted to CTMirror. “I did
every time I took up an issue that someone else had failed to take up. I knew
what the response was going to be. And you haven’t talked to a politician who
can answer that question in that way. I wasn’t afraid of it. It doesn’t mean I
enjoyed it. But I was absolutely not afraid of it. That is the difference,”
between Malloy and lesser politicians.
Malloy was his own best – and worst – advisor. As Thomas
More pointed out to Thomas Cromwell, the good advisor “ever tell[s] [the king]
what he ought to do,” never “what he is able to do.” The king always knows what
he is able to do – whatever he chooses. Malloy had no Thomas More at his elbow
telling the chief executive of Connecticut what he ought to do; this was
both his blessing and his curse. At the
height of his power, Malloy and members of his Democrat Party controlled the
governor’s office, both houses of the General Assembly, all the state’s
constitutional offices and the entire membership of the U.S. Congressional
Delegation. In view of this suffocating correlation of forces, it would have
taken a saint to impose restraints upon himself, and “the porcupine” was no
saint.
What Malloy ought to have done was -- rein in spending. This
would have required real courage, the courage to confront and deny the
inexhaustible political appetites of his Democrat associates, including the pleas
of union leaders. Malloy was at least as imperious as Weicker, his nearest
autocratic Republican predecessor, celebrated in Connecticut journalistic lore
as the Moses of his people.
One thinks of Weicker, pushing his income tax through a
largely resistant legislature after having vetoed three balanced non-income tax
budgets, wading through the largest crowd of resisters in Connecticut history
on his way to the governor’s office in the state Capitol building, braving a
human Red Sea, parting before his august presence. This was, the Connecticut political
commentariate advised, Weicker’s finest hour.
And Malloy’s finest hour was that disapproval rating, his red badge of
courage.
Both Malloy and Weicker are recipients of the Profile in Courage Award dispensed by
the John F. Kennedy Library in Massachusetts.
Malloy received his at the
beginning of his second term in office for having resisted “a wave of
anti-refugee and anti-Muslim proposals by local, state and national
politicians” three days “after the Paris [terrorist] attacks, and in a direct
challenge to those calling for the U.S. to close the doors on Syrian refugees,
Malloy announced that Connecticut would continue to accept refugees from Syria.
Two days later, he personally welcomed a family of Syrian refugees to New Haven
after the governor of Indiana [now Vice President Mike Pence] turned them
away.” And Weicker received his accolade in 1992 for having “shocked
many residents of [Connecticut] by proposing a first-time-ever personal income
tax as part of his fiscal year 1992 budget package.”
Among progressives, unpopularity would be a mark of divine
favor, but only if, implausibly, modern progressives had fallen into the bad religious
habit of crediting the divine in the affairs of men. The Kennedy award then is
a mark of secular progressive favor. Weicker lards it with lauds this way: “For the scientist, the moment is the Nobel
or the Lasker; for the journalist, the Pulitzer; the actor, the Oscar. For
those in government, it is the Kennedy." In 2009, the Kennedy award went to Edward Kennedy, the hero of
Chappaquiddick,
for having “weathered every storm” that came his way as a US Senator.
However, we may now speak of both Weicker and Malloy in the
past tense, so many suppose. They may be wrong -- and would be right only
if the Lamont administration represented a policy break with its predecessor.
On this score, there is both bad and good news.
Shortly before his State of the State Address, Republican
Leader in the Senate Len Fasano smiled faintly upon Governor Ned Lamont.
The good news, Fasano proclaimed, is that Lamont is not
Malloy. There is a vast temperamental difference between the two. The important
open questions are these: Is Lamont Malloy without the porcupine quills? Does
temperament matter more than or as much as policy affirmations? Would Malloy
have been Malloy if his temperament had been similar to Lamont’s and his policy
prescriptions had remained the same? In
awarding Malloy an approval rating of 20 percent, were his subjects reacting to
the quills or the policies? Would different policy prescriptions have rendered
Malloy more acceptable if he had retained his quills and adopted less ruinous
policies?
Governors are called governors because they govern, and governing
is the art of producing policies that benefit the governed. Temperament is
overrated in politics. A governor is nothing but his policies, just as a judge
is nothing but his judgements. Malloy’s failure is a policy failure, quills or
not. In him, sentiment overruled reality. If Connecticut had been attending to reality, it would not have tripled
its spending in the space of four governors.
There are
truth-sayers out there in the public square, Cassandras whose messaging is left
unattended because it will occasion unwanted change. Chief Economist and
Director of Research Don Klepper-Smith of DataCore Partners is one of
them. “Revised data shows that Connecticut ranked 50th in real GDP growth
in 2017, last in the nation, down 1.1 percent, and the state still has the
lowest job-recovery rate since the Great Recession in New England at 90.4
percent,” Klepper-Smith
writes in Hartford Business. “Between 2007 and 2017, the U.S. economy as
measured by real GDP has risen 15.5 percent. During this same period, new
revised data shows that the Connecticut economy has declined 9.2 percent.”
Quasi-socialists in
the General Assembly’s strengthened Democrat progressive caucus will not pay
heed to Klepper-Smith's analysis or policy prescriptions: “Bottom line: This
‘economic stagnation’ is likely to continue as long as we adhere to state
economic-development policies that are predicated on outdated, anachronistic
economic fundamentals that were prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s.”
Lamont might easily
survive a much diminished Republican opposition in the General Assembly, but
can he – or, more importantly can Connecticut – survive Democrat
outdated and anachronistic business-as-usual pushed forward by 60’s
progressives?
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