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| John Droney |
“If men were angels,” said James Madison, “no government would be necessary.”
And if governors were angels, no political advisors such as
John Droney, former state Democrat Party chairman and Lamont supporter, would
be necessary
Droney along with other angels and academics, are now
offering their expertise, which is considerable, to Governor Ned Lamont,
battered for the last couple of weeks for having been too opaque concerning the
wicked Machiavellian way of professional politicians.
Somewhat like former President Donald Trump, Lamont is not a
professional politician; he is a millionaire who lives in toney Greenwich, along
with other millionaires such as U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal. He makes lots of
money – Greenwich is a rather high priced burg – but less than his enterprising
wife, Annie Lamont.
Droney is caught spilling the political beans in a Courant
piece titled “As Gov. Lamont faces questions on Annie
Lamont’s investments and state contracts, critics say more transparency is
needed.”
Here is Droney on
the indispensability of Droney: “His [Lamont’s] crew is not the most
sophisticated political operatives in the world. They didn’t have people who
are very familiar with all the black arts of politics who would say, ‘You’ve
got to do this, and you’ve got to do that.’ I don’t think that goes on in their
minds.”
And: “He doesn’t
have [former state Republican chairmen] Tom D’Amore and Dick Foley, and he
doesn’t have John Droney. He’s got to get somebody who is really a politician
as an informal adviser that says to him, ‘Don’t do this and don’t do that for
political reasons’ while he’s running for office again.”
My deceased Italian
mother whispered to me in a dream last night, “Sure sounds like Droney is
angling for a job as the principal Machiavellian in the Lamont administration.”
I admonished her,
“There is some truth in what Droney said though.” She nodded her assent, and my
dream moved on.
Millionaire
politicians could always make good use of campaign advisors. The services of millionaire
Trump advisor Steve
Bannon may be available at some
point.
The general advice
bearing down on Lamont like an onrushing freight train appears to be this: If
only Lamont had been wiser in the black arts of politics or, failing that, if
he had thought to hire someone such as Droney, intimately familiar with the
black arts, he would not now be struggling with angelic academics, journalists
and the political opposition. Somehow, such an advisor would have stood Lamont
in good stead. He would have been transparent, against the best advice of his
and Annie’s accountants -- more like likable Ned than the dastardly,
redundantly rich Trump.
In other words, had Lamont
been transparent, he would have gotten a pass rather than an ill-deserved back
of the hand from Connecticut’s media which, to the misfortune of politicians dealing in black arts, appears to be committed to honest
dealing in governmental affairs.
Underlying the
desperate necessity for erring politicians to bring aboard their campaigns
experts such as Droney – or, for that matter, the suddenly unemployed brother
of former Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo -- is the notion that destructive
policies can be managed by honeyed tongues and political experts used to
massaging the media. But occasionally, as was the case with former CNN
twinkling star, Chris Cuomo, reality intervenes.
To provide just one
example of a potential destructive downwind for Connecticut Democrats –
consider the weather. “Everybody talks about the weather in New England, but nobody
does anything about it,” quipped Mark Twain.
According to energy
suppliers, it's going to be a cold, Biden Winter in New England. There may
still be time to open pipelines closed by Biden in a fruitless attempt to
convince car buyers they should go electric.
“Just in time for Winter,
Eversource warns customers of a double-digit increase in natural gas prices.
Heating and electricity costs also predicted to increase,” a Hartford
paper tells us.
Republicans in Connecticut
may take a campaign page from Democrats in 2022 and run against Biden, even as Democrats
successfully ran against former President Donald Trump, though he was not on state
election ballots.
"Cold" and
"inflation" are sound campaign issues, American as apple pie and
motherhood. “Natural gas pipeline constraints, global supply chain problems and
even a shortage of fuel delivery truck drivers on local roads place New
England’s power system at ‘heightened risk’ heading into the winter, the
Holyoke, Massachusetts-based organization Eversource said."
A total of 469 seats
in the U.S. Congress (34 Senate seats and all 435 House seats) are up for
election on November 8, 2022, and the weather in New England, very much
affected by Biden’s energy constrictions, cannot be adjusted by sweet talk,
however honey-tongued the sweet talker may be. Reality will trump rhetoric, trip
up the anti-realist, and stuff him down the rabbit hole every time.
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