Governor Ned Lamont spoke over the heads of moderate Democrat delegates to a different neo-progressive constituency in his acceptance speech as the Democrat Nominating Convention concluded. He was addressing the 25% of delegates who voted for Josh Elliott, a neo-progressive heartthrob some quasi-socialist Democrats in Connecticut regard as the Zohran Mamdani of Connecticut.
Elliot, who garnered a sufficient number of delegate votes
to primary Lamont, has vowed to engage the governor, considered by some a
moderate Democrat, in a primary.
The delegate count, Elliott has said, did not adequately
portray his delegate support. He believes he would have won the endorsement had
the delegate vote been anonymous.
“People were afraid to cast their votes against the
governor,” he said. “I’ve been hearing threat after threat from people if they
voted against the governor today. I’ve been telling people to channel that
frustration into energy over the next three months. We have a 169-town
strategy. We will have field organizers at every corner of the state. Our team
will talk with every single Democrat, and we will be at every town committee in
the state. We are going to win in August, and we are going to win in November.”
In his own post-nomination convention comments, Lamont
vigorously struck the usual Democrat piñata.
“We’re challenging one of the most dangerous, extreme, and
corrupt presidents in my lifetime,” said the usual mild-mannered moderate. “And
I’ve been around for a while. This is why it’s important Democrats stand tall,
stay united, and show what we’re made of. We will beat him back and win back
Congress this fall and take control of our destiny. It’s just ironic that this guy is in the
White House at the same time when we are celebrating our 250th anniversary. A
country created by the best sentence ever written ‘all men are created equal.’
But when Donald Trump reads that, he thinks it means all white men are created
equal, and it doesn’t mean women. And by the way it doesn’t mean you, you and
you. That’s what this election is all about. Regardless of race, color, creed,
what you believe or who you love, you belong here in Connecticut.”
Anyone who has been around in politics for a while knows
that political targets are mobile. Trump moves through political events like a
speeding bullet, and the state’s congressional and gubernatorial elections will
not be decided until the political clock reaches V-Day, November 2026. Midterm
congressional elections take place halfway between presidential elections.
Trump will not be on the ballot in November and, despite Democrat caterwauling
to the contrary, it is absolutely certain he will not be on the ballot when the
presidential election rolls around two years later.
Americans are used to gaudy campaign rhetoric, but time
marches on. The Democrat’s target – a president who will establish a
fascist-like, Stalinist-like, end-of-democracy era of autocratic rule – is a
disappearing target, a campaign scarecrow. Trump, for instance, has not
proposed eliminating the Electoral College, a political devise adopted during
the founding to prevent large population centers from determining elections. He
had not proposed packing the Supreme Court, a political measure solidly
rejected during the presidential administration of Franklin Roosevelt, a
strongman president who served four terms in office before he and succeeding
presidents were rebuked by the Twenty‑Second Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution, ratified on February 27, 1951, limiting the presidential office
to two terms.
Democrats in Connecticut have so far made numerous political
and programmatic errors, some short term, others long term.
The most serious long term error lies in the buried
assumption that neo-progressivism in the United States, swiftly on its route to
full scale socialism -- as in Zohran
Mamdani’s benighted New York City -- is the preferred ideology of Connecticut
voters. Socialism preeminently is a doctrine that relies heavily on envy – the
bad kind -- and a revolutionary expropriation of wealth on behalf of the poor
and lower middle class. Even Connecticut’s poor, languishing in long term
politically produced poverty, know that all this is a false promise made by a
seemingly omnipotent state that has, for more than thirty years in the state’s
large cities, created the problems it long has purported to cure.
The second long term error lies in a misreading of the
state’s disenfranchised Independents, more properly called unaffiliateds. Some unaffiliateds are born that way, other
have defected from one of the two preeminent political parties. Henry David
Thoreau considered himself a party of one.” When he resigned from the Friars’
Club, Groucho Marx wrote in his resignation letter, “I don’t want to belong to
any club that would accept me as one of its members.”
The mistake is to regard such people as easily persuaded by
political rhetoric. Those who decline to participate in the life of established
political parties cannot for various reasons be moved as a bloc towards
political parties. But it is likely that the unaffiliated breakdown patterns
the breakdown of political parties across the state: There are in Connecticut
22% registered Republicans, 36% registered Democrats and 44%
Independents/Others. We do not know how many Independents are disgruntled
dropouts from the state’s two major political parties, but we can hazard a
reasonable guess that within the dropout independent/Other group there are more
independents disgruntled with Connecticut’s hegemonic Democrat Party.
The Republican Party in Connecticut must forge a new
vocabulary to give it an edge over majority Democrats. And that vocabulary will
of necessity at first seem unsettling to status quo ears.
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