A 2022 Campaign Artifact

Voltaire

“If you want to know who controls you, look at who you are not allowed to criticize” ~ Voltaire

At first I thought the column might be a parody of Democrat Yahooism taken straight from the 2022 Democrat Party campaign book. But on second thought, I believe it’s the real article.

The column should be preserved as a political artifact of the upcoming 2022 campaign, which helps to explain why Connecticut is on the ropes, economically, politically and journalistically. The state has been laboring for decades under an unsupportable $58 billion debt. Its debt to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) ratio is about 20 percent, and every citizen of the “state of bad habits” owes the overmastering Democrat hegemon about $16K, figures rarely mentioned by Connecticut columnists. 

Here is what Hearst readers of the column -- Moderate Connecticut Republicans should head for the lifeboats -- are asked to swallow. The columnist's remarks are in italics.

There may be no better example of the disintegration of the Connecticut Republican Party than the reaction party-endorsed candidates for governor and U.S. Senate got this month to their very bland, happy Gay Pride Month tweets...

You would think, from some of the blistering criticism they heard in response tweets, from the hardcore within their own party, that they had suggested sex with donkeys.

Twitterland, we all can agree, is full of manic twitterers, some left, some right. But deducing general Republican sensibilities in Connecticut from tweets is a bit like deducing Shakespeare from lamb chops. It is the considered opinion of the columnist that the reactions Republican Party endorsed candidates for governor and U.S. Senate got from twitterers concerning their positive, though “bland,” support of gay rights shows that the party they hope to represent is hopelessly anti-gay rights, so numerous are anti-gay Republicans in Connecticut’s GOP.

Sigh…

It's been a long time now since any Republican has been able to win statewide office in Connecticut.

The odds for that ever happening are getting a lot longer, as the Trumpists and their followers become more entrenched in the party both nationally and in Connecticut.

Not really. All the Republican members of the U.S. Congressional Delegation supplanted by progressive Democrats were Republicans conservative on fiscal issues and moderate-to-liberal or suspiciously silent on social issues, just the sort of Republicans the columnist would seem to be comfortable voting for.

None of them were Trumpsist, their reign in office having begun and ended long before Trump descended into his first public campaign for office on a Trump Tower down escalator. And all of them lost office to progressive Democrats. The last Republican standing in the U.S. Congressional Delegation was Representative Chris Shays, who lost to current Democrat U.S. Representative Jim Himes in the 2008 election -- nine years before the usurper Trump assumed office in 2017.

Most Republicans in Connecticut, despite the tweets that so offended the columnist, think some of Trump’s policies are superior to those of Democrat President Joe Biden, but that Trump’s character is off-putting, as was Huey Long’s and Teddy Roosevelt’s, who gave Mark Twain a political hernia.

It was Bill Buckley who said of Trump that he was a “vulgarian.” No doubt that assessment would produce some negative tweets about the guy who launched the modern conservative movement. But conservatives are used to being man-woman-handled by leftist Democrats and zany, sometimes anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic commentators on the left and right of the political spectrum. Buckley, deeply Catholic though he did not wear his Catholicism on his sleeve, wrote a book about all this titled In Search of Anti-Semitism. Yours truly is quoted in the book supporting Buckley’s view that anti-Semites should have no place in Republican Party ranks.

Republicans, in their reckless embrace of extremists, from religious zealots against reasonable abortion to gun crazies advocating access to military weapons by young people and, now, election-denying insurrectionists, have made themselves pretty unelectable in blue Connecticut.

Right, such out of-the-box Republicans – “reckless extremists,” “gun crazies, “insurrectionists,” explosive terms here dangled enticingly before Hearst readers, but left undefined -- have consistantly been frowned upon by Connecticut Republicans. How many “reckless extremist” Republicans have held statewide political office in Connecticut Who are they?

Connecticut Democrat Party Chairmen Nancy DiNardo would have a hard time improving on this calumny, and no doubt would properly credit the sentiment to a Connecticut political writer who has said in other columns that he has voted tremulously for Republicans. But who exactly are the Republicans running for statewide office this year that have “recklessly embraced religious zealots,” and how many of them are orthodox Catholics and orthodox Jews?

Republican Party endorsed gubernatorial candidate Bob Stefanowski, Collins generously allows, is not a deplorable Republican religious zealot.

I've met gubernatorial candidate Bob Stefanowski, and he seems to me to be a socially moderate, reasonable, small-government advocate who, in the past, might have been able to cobble together enough votes from his own party, conservative Democrats and independents to win.

But… In polarized politics, there’s always a “but.”

I think in this polarized environment, when independents realize that a conservative U.S. Supreme Court is pushing crucial social/cultural issues [i.e. abortion] to states to decide, that there's no wiggle room in who you elect.

And therefore, I am not going to give my vote to someone like Stefanowski, who may seem like an acceptable candidate in his own right, but who is going to have to cater to the crazies in his party that want to arm young people with military weaponry and deny women the right to abortion.

Rather than vote for Stefanowski, a Republican he himself considers a moderate, the columnist, it seems, is prepared to allow Twitter zanies determine his vote in the upcoming 2022 elections.

In search of a “moderate” Republican, the columnist hits upon former Republican U.S. Senator-for-life Lowell Weicker. For two decades, a political life-time in a single office, Weicker was the face of the Republican Party in Connecticut. But, unhappily, Republican voters discovered at the close of his reign of terror in the state Republican Party that Weicker had two faces.

Lowell Weicker, a liberal Republican, managed to start his own party and defeat his Republican and Democratic rivals to be elected governor.

Sure, sure … There are some Republicans – not immoderate, not crazy, not insurrectionists – who would hesitate to place Weicker in the category of a moderate Republican, a moderate independent, or even a moderate Democrat.

The year before Weicker lost his U.S. Senate race to moderate liberal Democrat Joe Lieberman, Weicker’s leftist Americans for Democratic Action rating was twenty points higher than that of Chris Dodd.

Weicker had been rejected by moderate Connecticut Republicans in part because of his Trump-like taunts. Proudly and boastfully referring to himself on occasion as “the turd in the Republican Party punchbowl,” Weicker was, in fact, an irritable early version of President Donald Trump, tempestuous and a valiant outlier in the Republican Party under whose flag he flew. Trump's Republican bona fides were not in order at the beginning of his entry into politics, but he embraced some important Republican issues as he progressed in office. Weicker moved in the opposite direction.

Booted from the U.S. Senate, Weicker, a Maverick Republican whose ghost written biography is titled Maverick, ran for Governor on his own party ticket. Weicker won in a three way race, after which he imposed an income tax on Connecticut, before rushing off to a university in Washington DC, there to teach a course on himself and Thomas More. His imposition of an income tax on Connecticut followed an implicit pledge during his gubernatorial campaign not to do so. But the Maverick stormed ahead, vetoing three balanced non-income tax budgets, and at long last the Democrat dominated General Assembly passed the measure, rejected repeatedly by liberal moderate Democrat Governors Ella Grasso and Bill O’Neill.

Weicker, a Republican Party scold whose denunciations of his own party did not differ in intensity from Trump’s denunciations of an opposition media, was consequently rejected by Connecticut Republicans.

The columnist here cited has written little concerning the dramatic drift to the left of Connecticut’s Democrat Party.

Moderates, including many mainstream Republicans, have a lot to offer the people of Connecticut, mostly a balance to the monolithic Democratic Party and its tight-fisted control of government.

Given the sad state of the Republican Party and its new embrace of authoritarianism, those independent-thinking moderates might better find a new political home than try to live with what seems to be irreparable damage to the state's once Grand Old Party.

Let the crazies who have taken over keep it. And let's all fight them hard in defending democracy.

Yes, yes … the dreaded Trumpian authoritarianism is now on display in the Democrat dominated U.S. Congress. And yes, Connecticut’s General Assembly, dominated for the past half century by Democrats, moving sharply left during the last two Democrat gubernatorial administrations, might need a few moderate Republicans for democratic balance.

 But … there’s always a “but” … the tweets, the tweets …

The columnist has declined to vote for any Republican who holds blandly “moderate” positions on abortion and gay rights – i.e. Stefanowski and Klarides – so long as twitterers, presumably Republican rightists, oppose moderate Republicans for having supported, however blandly, positions the columnist says he ardently embraces.

This position – throw the baby out with the wash water! – may strike many Hearst readers as outlandishly indefensible.

However, it is a position that in the near past has been championed as eminently rational by Connecticut left wing commentators and editorialists, which is why, some conservatives in Connecticut argue unavailingly, Connecticut has the left wing government it has, along with the persistent problems mentioned above.

Inflation, it would appear, is not only an economic problem. Unless one is willing to heed Voltaire’s admonition -- “If you want to know who controls you, look at who you are not allowed to criticize” – there is a good amount of inflationary leftist opinion in Connecticut newspapers as well.

It’s a problem.