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| Weicker and the Late Cuban Caudillo |
“I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives…” F Scott Fitzgerald in “My Lost City”
Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker,
as everyone knows, was a misfit in the Republican Party. He considered himself
a Jacob Javits Republican, but he often slipped the Republican leash and voted
with left leaning Democrats. During his last years in the U.S. Senate, his
Americans for Democratic Action rating was higher than that of U.S. Senator
Chris Dodd. And following his imposition of the Weicker income tax on
Connecticut, the ex-Republican received a Profile in Courage award from the
Kennedy Center in Washington D.C.
Weicker’s dissatisfaction with both the national and
Connecticut Republican Party was hardly a secret. “Someone should take over the
[Connecticut Republican] Party. It’s so small,” he once mused as Senator and,
in the blink of an eye, he was able to appoint as chairmen of the state GOP Tom
D’Amore, who began fiddling with it. State Republicans had opposed Weicker’s
views on any number of important issues. Weicker once said that the First
Amendment provided a right of freedom from religion; his views on abortion
as senator were in alignment with those of current U.S. Senator Dick
Blumenthal, labeled by some state Republicans as “the senator from Planned
Parenthood”; and Weicker was expert in sniffing out and terminating any
Republican in the state who gave off a foul stench of conservatism, however indistinct.
Fed up with unremitting betrayal, a bipartisan group of moderate,
fiscally conservative Republicans and loosely allied Democrats booted Weicker
from the Senate in favor of then Attorney General Joe Lieberman, but Weicker
would have his second act in Connecticut politics.
Weicker ran for Governor as an independent, having created
his own party – “A Connecticut Party (ACP)” – to do so. He won a plurality of
votes from the left leaning Democrats he had been courting for years as a
Republican Senator and Republicans understandably confused by his opportunistic
shape-shifting.
The hastily put together ACP was always a strange bird in
Connecticut politics. Weicker exited after one term as Governor. His party
lingered for a while in the antechamber of Connecticut politics and eventually
disappeared, political smoke blowing in a rough wind. Weicker also disappeared,
popping up here and there to comment, sometimes bitterly, on a Republican Party
weakened by its titular head that had refused numerous attempts to remold it
into a second Democrat Party. Following a ghostwritten biography,
entertainingly reviewed by Chris Powell under a masterful headline, “Mr. Bluster Saves the World,” an
always cantankerous Weicker rode off into the sunset.
Weicker’s cast off ACP contraption, it now appears, may have
a second act in Connecticut politics. Former West
Hartford Republican Town Committee Chairman Mark Merritt and three other
local Republicans — Lee Gold, Roni Rodman and Rick Bush — are rebuilding the
ACP.
Gold, the highest ranking Republican on the town council, is
quoted in a Hartford paper: “I’ve been frustrated and concerned about the
direction the GOP has chosen to take. I was really appalled at the events of
Jan. 6 at our nation’s Capitol. Liz Cheney being stripped of her position of
leadership has made me continue to question where the leadership of the GOP is
taking us.”
“Gold said he believes he can be more effective from outside
the Republican Party. He said he has tried to shift the local town committee to
a more centrist position for the past 18 months, but his efforts were rebuffed.
“’I’ve tried to change the approach but I’ve run into
resistance,’ Gold said. ‘I don’t want to be part of a party that keeps saying
no.’
“Gold and Merritt,” the Hartford paper reports, “said it’s
time to bring A Connecticut Party back.
“’When we look back at history, at what Lowell Weicker did
30 years ago, it was about coming up with ideas and getting away from partisan
politics,’” Merritt said. “We can learn from that.’”
Long before the attack on the nation’s Capitol or Cheney’s
removal as Republican Conference Chairwoman, West Hartford Democrats had
displaced moderate Republicans within its governing Town Committee. The times
in the state, they are changing -- indeed, have changed radically. Progressive state Democrats are proposing to
impose “mansion taxes” on wealthy towns like West Hartford and adjust zoning
laws to make residence more “equitable” for people living in multi-family
buildings. Democrat members in the
General Assembly, increasingly progressive, far outnumber moderate Republicans. Since the Weicker tax had
been adopted in 1991, state revenues have nearly tripled to keep pace with ever increasing state spending.
It’s still a free country, and disenchanted former
Republicans are of course free to do whatever they like. The old ACP drew votes
largely from befuddled Republicans, giving Democrats an edge in campaigns,
Weicker's ACP's misadventure ending in an income tax that fairly destroyed the
character of the state as a prudent spending watchdog. The new ACP will fair no
better. It is always dangerous to pour new wine into old wine skins, and
Weicker’s cast off shoes, though large, are old, worn and soleless.
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