Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Governor Ned Lamont is an imitative politician, which is okay, provided your model is a fitting one. Connecticut, we know, is not New York. Indeed, it is precisely because Connecticut is not New York that New Yorkers, in pre- income tax days when Connecticut state government was far less rapacious, flooded into the state. The New York expatriates were looking for a modest state government and settled in Fairfield County, then aflame with job opportunities. New York City is an international port of call; Connecticut, not so much. Coronavirus is most virulent in Fairfield County because Fairfield County,  contiguous to New York, is New York’s watch pocket, to some degree a bedroom community many of whose residents either work in New York City or travel there on business. Fairfield County is not Hartford. For all these reasons, thoughtless imitation in the absence of political discernment, far from being the sincerest form of flattery, may be a dangerous form of narcissism...

We all remember where we were when Walter Cronkite brought us the news. I had just finished playing ball and took a shower in the gym at Danbury State Teachers College, now Western Connecticut University. The weather that day, November 22, 1963, was fairly mild, around 50 degrees. Cars were parked in the lot, students crowded around some of them. The girls were weeping, the boys somber, a look of fury and shame on their faces. “What’s the matter?” I asked “Kennedy has been shot,” one of the girls said, weeping bitterly.

Pelosi “When in doubt  tell the truth . It will confound your enemies and astound your friends” ―  Mark Twain It looks like Majority Whip James Clyburn has let the political cat out of the bag. National Democrats have larded with ideological pork a massive $1.8 trillion dollar rescue plan brought forth to mitigate Coronavirus, stopping in its tracks a bill designed to stop the pandemic in its tracks. “The Senate bill that Democrats stopped,” the New York Post notes, “would have given nearly every American $1,200, with $500 for every child. It would have allocated $250 billion for unemployment insurance, $350 for a small business loan program, more than $100 billion to hospitals, $11 billion towards vaccines, $4.5 more to the CDC, $20 billion to veterans’ healthcare, $12 billion for public education, another $10 billion to airports, and $5 billion to FEMA.”

Kudzu, everyone knows, is a perennial vine native to much of eastern Asia that destroys growth by wrapping itself around native plants and trees and shadowing them so that they do not receive the proper sunlight to grow and flourish. Unnecessary regulatory schemes are to the economy what Kudzu is to vegetation. The operative political rule should be – less is better. The COVID-19 virus, which for inexplicable reasons has resulted in a shortage of toilet paper on grocery shelves, will have long-lasting effects. Thankfully, grocery shelves empty of toilet paper will not be one of them. The shelves have been emptied by hoarders and not by an interruption in the supply chain. So, at some time in the future, when hoarders have had their fill of toilet paper, we may expect the bare shelves to be sagging with rolls and rolls and rolls of the precious product. At some time in the future COVID-19 will itself have petered out. We know this not from any assurances of politicians, th...

Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders has been puttering in politics only four years longer than U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, and the two may have more in common than most suppose. Both were born in New York and entered politics about the same time, Sanders in 1981 as Mayor of Burlington, Vermont, and Blumenthal in 1985 as a member of Connecticut’s State House of Representatives. Neither political career has been marred by service in the private marketplace. Both are East Coast, secularized, cultural Jews. That is, they are Jews who have shaken the dust of orthodoxy from their feet. Religious discipline is too confining for either, and their attitude toward heterodoxy parallels that of Ahab in Melville’s Moby Dick: “Speak not to me of blasphemy, man. I’d strike the sun if it dared insult me.” Blumenthal, in particular is well known as a champion of abortion provider Planned Parenthood. An orthodox Jewish Rabbi once was asked what the position of cultural Jews on abortion was. “...

Bernie Sanders When in 1992 Queen Elizabeth had been asked how she felt after Windsor Castle had suffered a severe fire gutting 100 rooms, she responded, “Awkward.” Moderate Democrats and recovering progressives likely consider Vermont Socialist Bernie Sanders’ primary losses to former Vice President Joe Biden a propitious sign. Many Democrats are silently wishing Sanders will have the good grace to slink off silently into obscurity after he had been decisively rejected by voters. The association of the party of President John Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt with Sanders’ batty socialist ideas has been awkward. And why, friends of the Democrat Party are now asking, should Sanders cast a shadow over Biden’s presidential prospects when every Democrat’s nightmare, President Donald Trump, is waiting in the wings for four more years?

Campaign money raised by DeLauro and challengers Those of us who paid close attention to the Republican presidential primary of 2016, which gave us President Donald Trump, and the current Democrat primary, which could give the country its first socialist president in Bernie Sanders, though this seems increasingly unlikely, have come away from these rough and tumble experiences thinking that political anarchy in the country’s two major parties is perhaps more ruinous than party bossism. Primaries, it is true, did get rid of the party bosses. Old news hounds will remember with some affection Connecticut Democrat Party boss John Bailey, the last of his kind in the state. All of the stink and corruption associated with party bossism remain, and incumbents are no more likely to be dispossessed of their power in the new system than they were under the iron rule of the bosses. “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” the French say -- the more things change, the more they rem...

Schumer at the Supreme Court Even the universe has borders and limits, both perhaps undiscoverable; so we are told by science. The big bang theory has not only a beginning but an end. Chuck Schumer of New York and Dick Blumenthal of Connecticut are two U.S. Senators who fervently believe that abortion should be borderless, not hemmed in by reasonable regulations, such as those that they believe should govern the exercise of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Laws are limits to human behavior which, we deduce from bank robberies, rapes and murders, may be overridden in some ungovernable people. The law is a red line saying thus far you may go but no further -- without risking some painful sanction. Blumenthal knows, perhaps better than most, that one way to set limits to the sometimes audacious behavior of businesses is through the establishment of regulations. As Attorney General of Connecticut for more than 20 years, Blumenthal earned his political spurs by...

Blumenthal and Sanders Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders is exciting agita in some Democrat breasts, and he knows it. Sanders, who arrived in Springfield, Massachusetts at the Mass Mutual Center on a wave of primary wins, told enthusiasts in the crowd, “Some of you may have noticed that the political establishment and the corporate elite are getting very nervous. You know what? They have a right to get nervous. We’re going after them.” Sanders has been going after the Democrat political establishment and the corporate elite since his 1988 honeymoon days in the Soviet Union. The political trajectory of the leading Democrat candidate for president was set in the student revolution days of the 70s. Sanders may be the only live-wire protester of that time who has failed to grow up in the intervening years. Marxism is an outworn creed; the Berlin Wall fell in 1989; Fidel Castro’s seemingly endless Cuban Revolution puttered forward when Fidel died, leaving his brother communis...