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| Weicker -- Hartford Courant |
G. K. Chesterton, who wrote volumes of readable journalism, used to say, “Journalism largely consists in saying ‘Lord Jones is dead’ to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.”
Former U.S. Senator and Governor of Connecticut Weicker
never had that problem.
But memories are perishable. And politicians, many of whom
like Weicker are rich, manage to live their lives in sequestered bubbles, none
more comfortable than inflated media adulation. Wealth is, among other things,
a protective cocoon, a safe place for the wealthy, so long as they are able to
cling fiercely to their riches with sharp talons or, at the very least, with
the help and advice of very expensive but always affordable accountants and
lawyers.
Chesterton’s good friend, Hilaire Belloc, could say
imperatively in a poem titled Advice to
the Rich – “Get to know something about the internal combustion engine, and
remember, soon you will die” – but politicians who live in the political
moment have no need to worry themselves to a frazzle about impending death or final
judgments. It is plain from the reportorial notes sounded in stories announcing
his death that Weicker, a politician astute enough to know how to play both
ends against the middle, did not worry overmuch about dying or a fabled “last
judgment.”
The judgments that matter most to professional politicians
such as Weicker -- in political office continuously for more than 30 years --
are those that may be found in the editorial sections of newspapers. On this
score, Weicker has lived a blameless life. Editorials that shadowed Weicker’s long
political journey were uniformly admiring and unquestioning.
Weicker was, as he mentioned in Maverick,
an autobiography written by ghostwriter Barry Sussman, usually at odds with his
own Republican Party – and not in a good way.
During his last year in the U.S. Senate, Weicker’s liberal
ADA rating was 10 points higher than that of Chris Dodd. Weicker’s gradual move
towards progressive Democrats was years in the making. The imposition on Connecticut
of the Weicker income tax, a measure heartily resisted by moderate liberal
Democrats such as former Governor Ella Grasso, is portrayed, in Weicker’s telling,
as inevitable. To force the income tax down the gullets of Connecticut tax
payers, Weicker had vetoed a number of balanced budgets passed by the General
Assembly, many of whose members regarded an income tax as a license to spend.
Time has proven them right. Connecticut’s present budget is more than three times
larger than Governor William O’Neill’s last pre income tax budget.
Weicker had claimed in several interviews that his initial
resistance to the prospect of an income tax – instituting an income tax in the
midst of a recession, Weicker said during his gubernatorial campaign, would be
like “pouring oil on a fire” -- was overcome by political reality. The state could
not go forward, Weicker insisted once he was elected Governor, without an
income tax.
What this really means is that the General Assembly, quickly
moving leftward, always had been averse to permanent, long-term spending cuts –
and that
was why an income tax was in order. In Weicker’s estimation – though he was
careful not to mention it -- increases in spending were irresistible;
therefore, a new income tax was inevitable.
Nothing in politics is inevitable. The General Assembly has
long lacked the courage to restrain its ungovernable appetite for spending. Weicker
fueled the simmering fire. The new tax, the state’s present alarming state debt
of $43 billion, and the general disposition of political forces in Connecticut
are Weicker’s real and lasting legacy to his state.
At a press conference in 2020, the Yankee
Institute reported, Governor Ned Lamont, Weicker’s political protégé, shouted
from the rooftop the long suppressed truth concerning the state’s obscene
pension debt, the largest per capita pension debt in the nation: “I got to tell
you, debt and unfunded pension liabilities are a big deal. We probably have
more debt and unfunded pension than any other state in the country.”
In 1991, the year Weicker’s pivotal income tax was passed,
Connecticut was approaching an irreversible either/or moment. Either the state
would control future budgets by painful permanent cuts in spending, or the
state would increase revenue through the imposition of a new income tax. Weicker
chose the road of tax increases often taken by timid legislators in
Connecticut. A real maverick, alive to economic realities, would have cut spending,
one of those awkward truths that almost certainly will not be mentioned in any
of the maverick’s obsequies.
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