Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

I’d like to thank Dennis Swanton for inviting me here.  I want to touch on two areas of interest tonight, national and state government --they impinge on each other -- and end with a prayer to God to save us from ourselves. Otto von Bismarck used to say “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” Let us hope it’s true. We’ll need a little divine intervention if Connecticut is to survive as a prosperous and welcoming state.  If you feel inclined to chuckle along the way, don’t restrain yourselves. Laughter is therapeutic. I’m hoping we might be able to bat around some questions in the Q&A that will follow. “All politics is local,” said Speaker of the US House Tip O’Neill. The phrase is pretty common, though it is most often associated with O’Neill, President Ronald Reagan’s Democrat counterpart in the glorious -- for conservative Republicans -- 1980’s. In many other ways, the 80s were a painful regurgitation of the 60s.  I’m ...

Journalism, we are told, is suffering from two ailments: Fake news – some of the boys and girls are just pestiferous ideologues – and transactional journalism. Of the two, the more fatal is transactional journalism, because it perverts the very purpose of honest reporting, which is to tell the truth and shame the Devil. Reporters who engage in transactional journalism are the Donald Trumps of the reportorial world. Journalism is, among other things, a business, and business orbits around access to a product. When he was Attorney General of Connecticut for more than 20 years, Dick Blumenthal was a master at putting his product before the television cameras, so much so that it was said of him -- by journalists weary of having to make his frequent media releases into reportorial foie gras -- that there was no more dangerous place in Connecticut than the space between Blumenthal and a television camera.

The address below was given at Meriden’s Fourth Annual Lincoln Day Dinner The day is named after Abe Lincoln, and well named too. I suppose this year those attending these remarks will thank God – who else? – that they are not called upon to celebrate the Jefferson, Jackson Bailey Dinner, which used to be a day of feasting and merriment for Connecticut Democrats. This was before conscience stricken Democrats re-named their annual event. They did so because Democrats decided, three quarters of a century after President Jackson died, that he had owned slaves – who knew? -- and was not kind to American Indians. Though somewhat debased, Jackson, revered as a populist, is still regarded as the founder of the modern Democratic Party. Lincoln owned no slaves and, in fact, prosecuted a bloody Civil War to emancipate them. He had a wicked sense of humor, unlike the stern, forbidding, disputatious and humorless Andy Jackson. On one occasion, in the midst of a speech, a heckler in the aud...

How worried should politicians be over the Tea Party Patriot movement? They should worry. Critics of the movement tend to focus on the theatrics involved: the signs the crowds, the UTube clips. But this is a genuine grass roots movement. And, of course, the object of any movement is to move things, to effect change. Sober politicians would do well to take note. It’s a movement still in its early stages, unattached to particular persons. That does not mean that it is a disorganized movement. Not to make any direct comparisons, but the original Boston tea party sprang from a sense of frustrated helplessness. And before what later came to be called the American Revolution took shape, the resistance was an emotive idea that burned in the brains of Sam Adams and others like him. The movement is being pushing forward by a settled sense that principles to which most Americans have given their internal asset are being violated with impunity. One principle is that power should not ove...

Chris Powell, managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, is a knowledgeable observer of Connecticut politics whose column appears in that paper and a dozen others in Connecticut and the Providence Journal in Rhode Island. When Powell became managing editor of the JI in 1974, he was the youngest editor of any daily in the state. I must here acknowledge that I wrote a regular column for the JI for about 15 years when Powell was also editorial page editor, drawing from time to time on his unfailing political memory. Powell, who off-line is screamingly amusing, agreed to submit to an interview broadly focused on the U.S. Senate race featuring the Democratic incumbent, Chris Dodd, and a crew of ebullient Republicans. It is difficult to place Powell on the political spectrum except to say that he loves a good story and has a gift for poetic concision: "The General Assembly is little more than a nest of locusts. ..." I recall once describing Powell as a "rad...

Navigating among the founders is always a perilous business, most especially for commentators who quote them to give heft to their own views. Just when you are thinking that John Adams is a crusty old republican who does not translate well into a modern idiom, he tantalizes you with this tasty morsel on lawgivers: “One useless man is a tragedy. Two are a law firm. More are a congress.” We like to think of Thomas Jefferson, the American herald of liberty, as a friend of the press, until we remember that he was soundly beaten up by the papers of his day in one of the most vicious American campaigns in history and nursed a grievance poured out in letters that, he surely knew, would see the light of day and ring out through the ages: “I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.” And again: “The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” And again: “I read no newspaper now but R...

WASHINGTON - An overwhelming advantage in experience and lopsided support from working-class and suburban whites have lifted Republican John McCain to a slender lead over Barack Obama less than two months from Election Day -- ALAN FRAM , Associated Press Writer That is what we call a red flag. Running short on message, Sen. and presidential aspirant Barack Obama first borrowed an idea from a cartoon bubble and then, for good measure, threw in a trite saying about lipstick and pigs, all to no avail. The moose hunter and her partner have galloped past him in the polls. Why? Obama’s Achilles’ heal is his lack of administrative and foreign policy experience. His trip to Germany, France and England earlier in the year was a frenetic attempt to acquire quickly the semblance of foreign policy experience. Palin has the edge on him with respect to administrative experience, and presidential aspirant John McCain is light years ahead of him on the foreign policy front. Importing Biden into the...

“ You can go to live in Turkey but you can’t become a Turk. You can’t go to live in Japan and become Japanese. But . . . anyone from any corner of the world can come to America and be an American.” -- Ronald Reagan Americanism is a matter of the mind and heart; Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race and ancestry. A good American is one who is loyal to this country and to our creed of liberty and democracy .” -- Franklin D. Roosevelt In 1776, we declared ourselves independent and committed ourselves to certain principles and ideals. Our ideals, set forth in the Declaration of Independence, implemented in the Constitution, go back to the Magna Carta, common law, Athenian democracy, and the Hebrew covenant. What does it mean to be an American? Opportunity , reward for hard work, respect for talent, entrepreneurship, leader in productivity, respect for education; the chance to get ahead, to name a few characteristics. What makes us a nation is our heritage, but we ar...

The news to the north of us in Massachusetts is that the good people who once dumped tea in Boston harbor to protest taxes and an indifferent ruling power are once again upset by high taxes. Like Connecticut, Massachusetts has been for many years a one party state. Like Connecticut, spending in Massachusetts has increased to a point where further increases threaten to beggar the population. Like Connecticut, the ruling powers occasionally take a break from spending to remind the people they are representing that they live in a representative democracy and can cashier their politicians whenever they like. Unlike Connecticut, Massachusetts has a ballot initiative , a political instrument that can be used by voters to reduce their tax burden and send a message to fat, greedy politicians in the grip of special interests. The axe the tax forces also have made a powerful argument for budget transparency: And very shortly Massachusetts will use its ballot initiative to attempt to repeal the ...

D. Dowd Muska was kind enough to invite me to speak to the Yankee Institute on blogging. This is the result: I’d like to thank Mr. Muska for inviting me here today to talk to you about blogging. And if it’s possible to thank an institution, I’d also like to thank the Yankee Institute for having provided to me over the years the live ammo I’ve used in political columns and blogs. You, the keepers of the right data, have been and are an invaluable resource. In this talk, if I am successful, I’d like to set blogging in its proper place in the political firmament, and then offer some words of encouragement. About a month ago, I was engaging in political fisticuffs on a blog not my own, Connecticut Local Politics, run by a gent who calls himself Ghengis CONN – that’s C-O-N-N – when I was rudely interrupted by a pest who styles himself Connecticut Keith. CtKeith said this: “Perhaps Mr. Pesci will consider moving his remarks to his own blog – where no one will ever read them.” That’s the sor...