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| Tip O'Neill |
It is always difficult during an election year to separate the wheat from the tares until the elections have been concluded, at which point most information is stale and useless to politicians on the make.
One important datum in the 2020 elections, as in all elections,
concerns base turnout and negative campaigning. What turns people off often
turns them out. That is why so called “negative political ads” excite and alarm
politicians and media adepts.
It is generally assumed that President Donald Trump and
former Vice President Joe Biden both have unbudgable base support, that early
campaign polling is reliable, that election messaging must appeal beyond the
base to unaffiliated voters whose political preferences have not been
sufficiently probed by Harvard and Yale political scientists, that state
politics is less important than federal politics, and that political results in
elections are determined by personalities
rather than policies, which might explain why most debates are short on policy prescriptions
and interminably long on personal attacks.
Certainly all the above notions are debatable, which raises
yet another political question -- do political debates any longer matter? Does
media reporting, almost universally hostile to Trump, matter? Trump hates the
media, and the hatred is paid back in kind. Will the daily drip of anti-Trump
venom in the media, returned in kind by Trump, affect the upcoming 2020 presidential
vote? Does any of it matter?
If one pays attention to political commentators – do they
matter? -- Republican voters regard Biden as an empty vessel into which
progressives with knives in their brains will pour their toxic ideological brew
immediately after he is sworn in as president, while freedom lovers among
Democrats regard Trump as the modern equivalent of the mad Roman emperor
Caligula, an unrepentant tyrant. Only term limits and a wide-awake media
prevent a prolongation of the Trump tyranny.
So then, what matters? Is all politics still local, as Democrat
Speaker of the U.S. House during the President Ronald Reagan administration
once asserted?
O’Neill was President Ronald Reagan’s opposite number on the
Democrat side of the political barricades. The two were well mannered towards
each other, but not bosom pals. O’Neill said of Reagan that the president “wasn't
without leadership ability, but he lacked most of the management skills that a
President needs. But let me give him his due: he would have made a hell of a
king.” He likened Reagan to Herbert Hoover – “Herbert Hoover with a smile” he
said, “a cheerleader for selfishness.”
Comparing O'Neill to the classic arcade game Pac-Man, Reagan
said in one of his speeches that O’Neill was "a round thing that gobbles
up money.” He joked that he had received a valentine card he knew was from
O’Neill. “I knew it was from Tip, because the heart was bleeding."
The usual political riff on Reagan-O’Neill is that the two
were friends off the political battlefield. Not true, said Craig
Shirley, who had
written four bestsellers on Reagan:
If people want to look for bipartisan measures between
the executive and legislative branches, they shouldn’t look to Reagan and
O’Neill. Instead, they should look to President Clinton and Speaker Newt
Gingrich. True, the latter helped impeach the former, but before that hoopla
went down, the two did restore the economy, and they did pass major reforms.
No, they weren’t best friends. But there was a substantial ability to
compromise, far more so than Reagan and O’Neill.
Is O’Neill’s
immutable political law that all politics is local any longer true?
What O’Neill meant
by his apothegm is this: Federal laws and policies written by Congress and signed
into law by presidents eventually trickle down to the states and municipalities.
If they are beneficial, voters will take note and reward their benefactors by
retaining them in office. If they are harmful, tormented voters, acting
democratically in their own interests, will sooner or later “throw the bums
out!”
We now come to
Connecticut, our local theatre of political action, and ask whether voters
tormented by a gubernatorial autocracy will in the 2020 elections throw their
tormentors out. While Governor Ned Lamont is not up for reelection in 2020, all
the seats in the General Assembly are up for grabs. Have the present run of
Connecticut politicians restored Connecticut’s economy, as did Clinton, the
last president to discharge the nation’s debt, and his Republican antagonist, Gingrich?
The answer is – no.
Connecticut is laboring under a $68 billion debt that preceded the Coronavirus
infestation. Spending has grown by leaps and bounds under the withering hand of
a longstanding Democrat dominated General Assembly.
Despite the
headlines and misleading ledes – “Pratt&Whitney
to cut 450 jobs: Commercial aviation facing steep declines as a result of
pandemic” -- a virus is not a politician and therefore cannot be held
responsible for ruinous policies that have caused job losses. The virus has
written none – not one – of the possibly unconstitutional dicta issued by
Governor Ned Lamont during the last half year, and Coronavirus certainly is not
responsible for extending for another five months the plenary powers of a
governor who, in the absence of fully functioning legislative and judicial branches
of government, is a far more autocratic chief executive than the yellow-haired
hobgoblin anti-Trump Democrats rightly or wrongly despise.
In this sense – the
only sense that matters – politics is no longer local. Voters for some time
have NOT been voting their own interests. It is impossible in the kind of
democracy celebrated by O’Neill to imagine voters indifferent to crippling debt,
improvident spending, autocratic governors, and solitary confinement.
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