The Lamonts, Governor Ned Lamont and his lovely wife Annie
Lamont, an accomplished money-making investor, have been with us a long while.
Ned Lamont first entered politics under the sheltering wings of former Governor
and U.S. Senator Lowell Weicker, a Republican millionaire bumped by Connecticut
Republicans way back in 1988 when they realized that Senator Weicker, who as governor
graced the state with an income tax, was a Teddy Kennedy Democrat in disguise.
Weicker served in the U.S. Senate for three terms from 1971 to 1989.
Weicker’s Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) rating
during his last year in the Senate was ten points higher than that of U.S.
Senator Chris Dodd, not a “moderate Republican.” Moderate Connecticut
Republicans espied Weicker’s Democrat Party leanings when rarely subtle Weicker
boasted of himself that he was “the turd in the Republican Party punchbowl.”
Neo-progressive revolutionists
with knives in their brains, socialists teetering on the edge of communism such
as Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City, have left the Lamonts relatively
untouched. The Lamonts are multi-millionaires who live in Greenwich, Connecticut,
part of the state’s so called “Gold Coast,” a place where millionaires live and
die in relative obscurity, safe from the torments that neo-progressives are
fond of inflicting on redundant millionaires.
The evil-rich in Greenwich, now trending
Democrat, want to live out their days in the state’s Gold Coast sanctuary in
comfort, unruffled by Oscar Wilde’s remark that Americans are people who “know
the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
Neo-progressives are, of course,
full of Nietzschean “ressentiment,” a term in philosophy indicating a form of
hostility directed toward an object perceived as the cause of one’s frustration
or loss of power. More potent than envy, ressentiment is a hateful desire for
revenge that arises from a sense of weakness, inferiority, or thwarted agency.
The victims of ressentiment are often incapable of true wit or humor.
Most Democrats view Lamont’s
reelection as a done deal, but before reelection he must run the
neo-progressive knout. The anticipated primary between Lamont and Josh Elliott,
a member of the Connecticut House of Representatives representing the 88th
district since 2017, promises to be a humorless and witless affair. Elliott, as
serious as a pile of rocks, has not been convincingly accused of committing
humor.
Connecticut’s media has anointed
Elliot with its prized neo-progressive affirmations. Elliot, we are told, is
the founder and chairman of the Tax Equity Caucus, which works to ensure “fair
taxation” in Connecticut. As elsewhere in the nation, the super-rich in
Connecticut pay a disproportionate share of taxes. Millionaires pay a much higher share of
federal taxes as a percentage of income than the general public, even if the
dollar amount varies widely. Elliott has supported legislation to raise the
minimum wage and guaranteed paid sick days for all workers; sponsored bills to
reform the electoral system, including restoring voting rights for formerly
incarcerated individuals and implementing ranked-choice voting; and championed
the elimination of the religious exemption for MMR vaccinations for K-12
students. His gubernatorial campaign is laser focused on the advancement of
neo-progressive policies to address
problems that, some conservatives suspect, have been caused by neo-progressive politicians like Elliott and
Mamdani.
With all the zeal of St. Patrick
driving the snakes out of Ireland, Bill Buckley, the most respected
conservative polemicist of his day, valiantly set out to exclude from the
American conservative movement anyone lingering in anti-Semitic political
hallways. He did so by publically rebuking leading conservatives, while
providing a standard to gage Anti-Semitism in his short book In Search of Anti-Semitism.
Moderate Democrats in Connecticut
– Lamont is reputed to be one – have not been as anxious to swab their decks of
immoderate elements. Lamont lacks the necessary passion to attack with energy disabling
extreme neo-progressive saboteurs in his party, a courtesy that may not be
returned in equal measure by Elliot in what may turn out to be a bruising
primary campaign.
Mamdani has shown
neo-progressives that they might ascend to power positions within a once
moderate Democrat Party provided they possess the requisite courage of their
convictions. Marx, Lenin and Stalin, the
Trinity of Soviet era socialism, were convinced, not without reason, that capitalists
would finance their purchase of the rope necessary to hang the capitalists, invariably
portrayed as the enemies of the working classes.
There appears to be no elbow room
on Elliott’s left for pretentious Democrat moderates like the Lamonts. Ned affects
neo-progressivism during political campaigns but, having secured office, it is
anticipated he will revert to type. Both Annie and Ned are successful venture capitalist
millionaires. Annie, in particular, appears to have done very well in financial
money markets. We are told in a piece appearing in The Connecticut Centinal, that “independent
journalists Tony DeAngelo and Professor Bob Swick have relentlessly documented a deeper, more troubling
pattern: no-bid state contracts funneled to OAK-backed companies, official business conducted on a private family office server, suspicious Cayman
Islands offshore vehicles tied to university foundation money, and a network of
FOI-exempt nonprofits that shielded decision-making from public view.
Annie
Lamont, we are told in her HT/FT bio,
“co-founded Oak HC/FT in 2014. Prior to founding Oak HC/FT, Annie spent 28
years at Oak Investment Partners, where she served as a Managing Partner and
led the healthcare and fintech practices. Over the course of her career, she
has invested in category-defining companies across the healthcare and financial
services industries, including Aspire Health, athenahealth, CareBridge, Devoted
Health, iHealthTechnologies (which became Cotiviti), NetSpend, OneMedical, and
VillageMD.”
No
neo-progressive is she.
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