Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

"Everything has to be connected to the deeper case that Ms. Harris is weak and a phony and doesn’t truly care about the country or the middle class." These words written by Rich Lowry of National Review appeared, astonishingly, in the New York Times . For those of us whose youth was misspent in the post-World War II years, the word “phony”, Holden Caulfield’s most often used deprecation in J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye , has a prickly resonance. The book first appeared in 1951. Caulfield is a stubborn realist, and he rarely fails to confide to us his unvarnished thoughts: “The part that got me was, there was a lady sitting next to me that cried all through the goddam picture. The phonier it got, the more she cried. You'd have thought she did it because she was kindhearted as hell, but I was sitting right next to her, and she wasn't. She had this little kid with her that was bored as hell and had to go to the bathroom, but she wouldn't take him. She kept t...

The history of Western Christianity is, largely, a history of conversion. St. Augustine, we may remember, was an atheist rhetorician and pagan before he turned to Christianity. G.K. Chesterton was a dandified atheist, a child of post enlightenment Britain. Orestes Brownson, whom many consider to be an American John Henry Newman, a persuasive Christian apologist, was also an atheist. Brownson’s road to Rome was a winding affair: first atheist, then transcendentalist, then Catholic, after which he found himself shorn of friends and enemies. But he was not alone for long. J.D. Vance’s spiritual memoir, Hillbilly Elegy , may be viewed as a modern take on Augustine’s autobiography, The Confessions of St. Augustine, perhaps the most honest spiritual biography in the Western canon of Christian apologetics. The book is unflinchingly honest because its author, Augustine, is the book’s central villain. We remember the plaint, almost a prayer, that is unremittingly repeated throughout the bo...

The cost of energy in Connecticut is very high, relative to other states. A piece in CTMirror , reprinted in the Hartford Courant, tells us that both Democrats and Republicans want to reduce energy costs. “Republican state legislators,” according to CTMirror, “are closing in on a strategy leaders say would chop $125 or more yearly off Connecticut residents’ rising electric bills.” The strategy is to use a portion of Connecticut’s swollen budget surplus to pay off costs incurred by the state’s two energy suppliers, Eversource and United Illuminating.   Eversource supplies the bulk of energy to Connecticut consumers. Democrats say the GOP solution is fraudulent and politically convenient in an election year when everyone is suffering from high prices. Neo-progressive Martin Looney, Democrat leader in the Senate, is quoted in the piece: “Republicans have had ‘almost a religious adherence to the guardrails,’ and now, two and a half months before the election, they’re willing to jet...

The stranger you have been talking politics with at a local Connecticut diner – still opened, amazingly – mentions a particular politician in a cautiously approving tone. You have discovered flaws in the politician’s central nervous system you think should be made known, but you are unsure, because of the snippet of conversation, whether the propaganda victim is armed. So you proceed cautiously. Here is where a “but” or two is useful. You say, very softly, non-threateningly, probatively, beginning with a soft compliment: Yonder politician is a very shrewd and kind man or woman, the sort that doesn’t beat a wife or a husband or casual sleeping partner... but … Sometimes that sort of thing works. But … we are living in a postmodern political world of daggers drawn. A rather large and confusing “but” hangs threateningly over recently appointed Democrat National Convention (DNC) presidential candidate Kamala Harris. In some measure, Harris’ worst enemy is her past self as a top of th...

Henry Mencken (1880–1956) attended and reported on every national political conventions from 1904 to 1948. His was a time whose time has passed. Still, his reports are highly readable, instructive, brutally entertaining and truer than most contemporary reports on national conventions. This was because Mencken knew that a convention was a piece of political art, and art is always artificial, less so when it is most beautiful, like the plays of Shakespeare and the musical works of Bach. The current Democrat National Convention, he probably would agree were he alive and writing today, is a metaphysical mess of tasteless but predictable porridge. What is a national convention, most people, some of them reporters and political polemicists, will be asking themselves? The answer to this question, if we can take past history as a guide, might go something like this: A convention is an assembly of state delegates chosen in primaries as representatives to appoint the leaders of their party...

Yeats Dodd, Yeats and the Liberal Postmortem Former Connecticut US Senator Chris Dodd, retired from politics since 2010, was and is a John F. Kennedy liberal Democrat. The breed is fast diminishing. Dodd remembers the exact moment he decided to leave politics. “On Dec. 24, 2009, Dodd, then 65, was looking back on one of his hardest years in politics — and ahead to the prospect of an uncertain reelection in 2010,” CTMirror tells us. Dodd’s approval rating that year had plummeted and he was looking ahead to a grueling reelection. Finding he had some time to kill before boarding a flight to Connecticut from Washington DC, Dodd decided to visit former US Senator Ted Kennedy’s grave for the first time. “His resting place is marked by a simple cross and a flat stone, and a pathway linking his grave to his brother’s had not been built yet. “‘I couldn’t find it,’ Dodd said. ‘And I’m sitting there, and all of a sudden I said to myself, “Do you want to do this for seven more years?”...

We should reject the term “liberal” when applied to Democrat nominee for president Kamala Harris, because she is not a liberal, nor is she a progressive. She is, like Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an American socialist. Any political influencer – particularly reporters and editors used to using words correctly – understand full well that John Kennedy was a liberal, as were the 18 th century founders of our republic. Kennedy’s address to the Economic Club of New York easily might have been written by Adam Smith, the author of the Wealth of Nations . The first significant progressive in the United States was Theodore Roosevelt, a former Republican president who, denied re-nomination by Republicans, ran for the presidential slot under the progressive Bull Moose Party in 1912. Initially, progressivism was a reaction against the moneyed elite of the Gilded Age. Progressivism, much older than Roosevelt, is not a new idea. It is an old idea that in its postmodern invocation has been found ...

  Kamala, Getty Images “Time, there will be time… time for a hundred visions and revisions that time will soon erase – T.S. Elliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock “In her first policy speech in North Carolina later this week and then next week at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago,” Fox News reports, “Harris plans to present to Americans who she is and how she will govern essentially for the first time since [President Joe] Biden backed out of the race and endorsed her presidential campaign. In recent weeks, Harris has shifted on at least five major policy stances: mandatory assault rifle buybacks, fracking, immigration, health care and a federal jobs guarantee.” Astute political watchers will have noticed that, in addition to Harris’ reversal being a revision that time will soon erase, the revision is a revision of valiantly defended positions taken when Harris was President Joe Biden’s Vice president for four years. They will have noticed as well that Biden, ...

Murphy Incumbent politicians whose campaign treasuries overfloweth -- i.e. all major officeholders in Connecticut -- are used to hiding in plain sight during election periods. By such means they avoid defending their records in office. Depending heavily upon the reliable tolerance of a friendly media and the disinterest of many voters, incumbents can well afford to ignore their political opponents. Equally egregious on the part of the refuseniks is a disinclination to submit to media buffeting. Here in Connecticut, it is expected that U.S. Senator Chris Murphy will if possible ignore his Republican opponent, Matt Corey. The perverse, anti-democratic refusal to engage in public discussion with one’s political opponents is the most effective political instrument in the toolbox of incumbents; that and a campaign war chest brimming with contributions acquired from the incumbent’s pampered special interests groups. Connecticut Democrats depend heavily on public employee unions for campa...

Connecticut U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, up for reelection in November, may be having an early – very early – mid-life crisis. She pointed at the front page, above the fold headline in the paper I was marking up: “ Murphy: Address crisis of masculinity .” Our conversation at donut eatery went something like this: Her: Such a shame, how old is he (Murphy)? Me: Not sure, early 50s? Her: It creeps up on you. Me: He’s not worried about his crisis – everybody else’s. Her: Selfless guy. Some senators are like that. I saw it this morning, emailed it to the family in Tennessee for chuckles. My husband, who retired half a dozen years ago, has no problem with his own masculinity. They moved to Tennessee because of Connecticut’s spending and taxation crisis, among other reasons. Some of her family moved there about ten years before she, her husband and two children uprooted themselves from Connecticut. In fact, most of her family, on both sides, has now voted with their feet. Her: ...

Gabbard Tulsi Gabbard, former U.S. Representative for Hawaii's 2nd congressional district from 2013 to 2021, is best understood as a liberal John F. Kennedy Democrat . Gabbard was a candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 United States presidential election. In October 2022, she announced that she had left the Democratic Party to become an independent. The “liberal” John F. Kennedy wing of the Democrat Party has shrunk in the postmodern period to insignificance. Kennedy was a liberal in the manner of John Locke, the patron saint of the founders, and Adam Smith, author of “The Wealth of Nations.” The newest edition of the Democrat Party, as everyone knows, is solidly neo-progressive, best represented by President Joe Biden, his Vice President and soon to be Democrat nominee for president and her Vice presidential choice, the ebullient Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Historian Victor Davis Hanson regards the Biden administration as the most radical – read: neo-progre...

  Walz and Harris (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images) “Don’t ever shy away from our progressive values. One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness” – prospective Democrat Vice President Tim Walz A brief glance at history will show us that primaries, as a means of choosing candidates for national and state offices, became a serious enterprise in 1960 when Democrat candidate for President John F. Kennedy won his party’s nomination at a Los Angeles convention by leveraging the system of primary elections as a new factor in presidential campaigning. Following the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, both Democrat and Republican parties initiated reforms to ensure that voters had a more direct role in choosing political nominees. By 1976, “Democrats had selected 73 percent of convention delegates in primaries, while Republicans chose 68 percent,” according to the Daily Blog of the National Constitution Center . Naturally, national conventions have not disappe...

Fishman, second from left It’s fair to say that much of the Northeast and California, the nation’s neo-progressive crescent, is no longer fearful of the international communist beast. Presently, the communist stigma has largely disappeared in reliably blue Connecticut. A little more than three years past, U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal received an Amistad Award from the Connecticut Communist Party in New Haven. Someone made a stink, and Blumenthal, his back to the wall, was forced to lament that he never knew the state union connected communist party in New Haven was a vibrant part of the Communist International . Blumenthal amusingly said he thought he had been attending a union event. Immediately following the Amistad Awards ceremony, the Hartford Courant reported, “U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal says he would not have attended a recent awards ceremony in New Haven if he knew it was tied to the Communist Party.” There were two responses to Blumenthal’s fraudulent disclaimer . Of ...