Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Governor Ned Lamont, primed for a third term, now finds himself between a rock, conservative Republican gubernatorial candidate Ryan Fazio, and a hard place, Democrat primary opponent state Rep. Josh Elliott. Other politicians have survived the squeeze.   Lamont was nursed early in his political career by former U.S. Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker, widely regarded as a “moderate” Republican until it became impossible for Republicans in Connecticut to regard him as such. Towards the end of his Senate career, Weicker had brashly identified as a liberal Democrat, long before the term “Republican In Name Only (RINO)” had become a fashionable tag for politicians who straddled both party political sawhorses in their highly misleading political campaigns. Finally, and at long last, Connecticut Republicans gave Weicker the boot, shortly after Weicker had presented himself in his last campaign for the Senate as a “turd in the Republican Party punchbowl.” During his last year in C...

 In a Library of Congress blog, Ellen Terrell tells us that a quote often attributed to President Calvin Coolidge – “The business of America is business” – is an abbreviation.   What Coolidge actually said to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington D.C. on January 17, 1925 was this: “After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world.”   Terrell adds a codicil to her correction: “Given that the speech was before a news trade group, Coolidge was talking about the role of the press in a modern, democratic America and included warnings about the evils of propaganda.   But more specifically, he was talking about the role of the press in free-market America.”   For conservatives in the U.S. squaring up against their opposite number, neo-progressives and socialists, the correction may be a distinction without a difference. “W...

“The difference between the right word and the wrong word is the difference between a lightning bolt and a lightning bug” -- Mark Twain   Everyone in Connecticut, perhaps including political writers, should know by this time nearly everything they were afraid to ask about Maine Democrat U.S. Senatorial prospect Graham Platner .   Thomas Feeney in the Washington Examiner has provided us with a shortened version of Platner’s resume. Leveling a criticism at what is still amusingly called The Mainstream Media, Feeney writes: “There is also no excuse for not looking at the candidate’s social media profile. Clearly, the Democrats missed what one news outlet characterized as “a slew of horrifying posts made on Reddit [in which he disparaged] women, rape victims, minorities, veterans, cops and working-class voters. Moreover, might it not have seemed off-putting to voters that the candidate sent sexual text messages to numerous women while he was married, as reported nationall...

As a general rule, incumbent politicians do not like audits. An audit is a scrupulous examination, political and economic, of a politician’s record in office. If the audited politician’s career in office is at an end, an audit, usually performed by the opposition party, may seem redundant. What is the point of beating a dead political horse? These strictures would seem to apply to former New Britain Mayor Erin Stewart’s career-ending audit about which much reportorial and commentary ink has been spilled. At this point, it seems safe to say that Stewart’s political reputation has suffered irremediable damage. Stewart’s withdrawal from her race for Governor of Connecticut on the Republican ticket was occasioned by the publication of an audit’s findings. The audit was commissioned by the incoming Democrat Mayor of New Britain, Robert (Bobby) Sanchez, and conducted by a putative “non-partisan” law firm, Crumbie Law Group. In recent days, we find another audit has tickled the interest o...

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so” – misattributed to Mark Twain   The statements made by Jadon MacCormack on a Facebook posting were not unattributed.   MacCormack wrote, “This ideology” – the transgender and LGBT movement, according to the Hartford Courant – “promotes confusion over clarity, prioritizes feelings over biological reality, and seeks to redefine the natural order of marriage, family, and human identity in ways that directly contradict God-given rights and common sense.”   MacCormack was not called upon to clarify his propositions because those condemning him needed no clarification. He was, unsurprisingly, roundly denounced and asked by all and sundry to resign from his position as the Republican Party nominee for House District 50, currently held by “Patrick S. Boyd of Pomfret, a well-known conservative Democrat who has served in the legislature since 2017 and currently co...

A CliffNotes version of the case against Graham Platner, Maine’s Democrat Senate frontrunner, may be found in the Connecticut Centinal under the byline Reese On the Radio.   Revelation followed revelation, most of them debilitating: “The most recent revelation: Platner exchanged sexually explicit text messages with multiple women early in his 2023 marriage. His wife discovered them, reported the matter to campaign leadership last year, and the issue was handled privately—reportedly with counseling. When the New York Times and Wall Street Journal published the story days before the primary, Platner dismissed it as ‘gossip’ and ‘journalistic malpractice.’ His wife called the coverage ‘shameful’ and urged focus on ‘the issues.’ Some Democrats muttered about ‘questions to answer,’ but the campaign and base largely treated it as a distraction.”   Connecticut’s U.S. Senator Chris Murphy recently was given the opportunity by Margret Brennan of CBS News to defend the indefen...