Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Hester, I have a modest proposal. I was talking to a friend of mine, a politically connected tradesman and a marine retired from service. Everyone should be advised that there is no such thing as an ex-marine. I doubt this is true in all cases, but marines, when they grow old, tend to lose some conventional inhibitions. I suppose that’s true of most of us. Conventions can be a smothering blanket, but in the winter one wants warmth. Inhibitions gone, friends are the next to ditch us. Anyway, my marine friend is full of salty expressions. Comradeship arouses in men, especially when engaged in battle or sports, the scatological imperative. People, he says, think politicians are helpful – compassion and do-goodism is after all in their job specs -- and so people turn to them when in distress, even when the distress is caused by the self-same politicians. But, my friend says, politicians the world over are concerned chiefly with acquiring power and utilizing it to their be...

Themis Klarides, the leader of a much reduced Republican contingent in the Connecticut House of Representatives, is fair-minded, but not the sort of woman who will suffer fools – and, more importantly, political frauds – gladly. She may allow two strikes, but three strikes and you’re out. Very early on, Klarites drew a bead on the Malloy administration, which sought to marginalize Republican influence over political affairs by loudly shutting the door on Republicans such as Klarides. A shrewd judge of character, she carefully catalogued the quills Governor Dannel Malloy had been throwing about. Malloy had described himself as a bristly porcupine, a self-designation that stuck and struck because it was inconveniently true.   As a Republican leader in the House, Klarides did not suffer gladly Malloy’s lordly indifference. It was either Malloy’s way, Republican leader in the Senate Len Fasano noted early in Malloy’s first term, or the highway. But then, what is the po...

Dante death mask Monsieur l’Abbé, I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write -- Voltaire The trouble with bad manners, Bill Buckley used to say, is that they sometime lead to murder. The late Charles Manson and his maenads, we can agree, had deplorable manners. Anyone who has met President of UConn Susan Herbst will tell you she has exquisite manners. And the author of “Rude Democracy: Civility and Incivility in American Politics,” also is an authority on political manners. Unfortunately, there are no mandatory courses on good manners at UConn.

Former Governor Lowell Weicker surfaced recently and both condemned, unwittingly, and complimented lame duck Governor Dannel Malloy. Every so often, Mr. Weicker, intent on working the dents out of his legacy, pokes his head above the fox hole, scans enemy territory for a friendly face, and spills some political beans. Ken Dixon of the Connecticut Post asked Mr. Weicker to comment on Mr. Malloy’s decision to pack it in, and he obliged. What Weicker said was, as usual, confusing and contradictory.

“ Hillary, The Other Woman: A Political Memoir By Dolly Kyle ” is in part a Southern bodice ripper, so keep it from the kids. Ms. Kyle (well preserved and pictured to the left) very well may be Bill Clinton’s “first love.” According to a cliff-notes review of Ms. Kyle’s new book written for the Daily Mail by Caroline Howe, the two lovers got it on in high school and kept it on before, during and after Mr. Clinton’s marriage (sort of) to Hillary Clinton, who snatched his heart while the two were students at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

For Republicans in Connecticut, editorial endorsements from many papers – but most especially from the Hartford Courant – provide a momentary, fleeting pleasure. In primaries, the Courant does tend to endorse some non-incumbents. But in general elections, the paper’s endorsements tend to favor incumbents who have, unsurprisingly, more practical experience in the contested office. For the most part then, incumbents have an insuperable advantage over challengers seeking the endorsement of the paper’s editorial writers and administrators. Whether this arrangement is pragmatic or not depends, to borrow phraseology from former President Bill Clinton, on what you mean by “pragmatic.” The dark side of pragmatism is opportunism, a cold, sportsman like estimate of political possibilities. When St. Thomas More accuses Thomas Cromwell of being a pragmatist in Robert Bolt’s play “A Man for All Seasons” he intends no compliment. “ALICE: They say he's [Cromwell] a very penetrating la...

Republicans who lean to the right in Connecticut are used to running the knout. This is because the mainstream media in the state is 99 and 9/10 percent pure liberal or, as timid liberals now prefer to call themselves, progressive. But there are two kinds of Republicans in Connecticut. Among a certain kind of Republican, prolonged exposure to the knout produces an amused weariness best glimpsed in the famous Reagan remark, “There you go again.” Reagan ran the knout, put salve on his wounds and lived to fight another day. Battling made him more resolute because he was not entirely absorbed by political considerations alone. He had a life. He was amused by the opposition. He had a flag to defend, and he defended it stoutly. He could boast, along with other principled warriors, that there were no scars on his back, while his front was loaded with them. For a host of reasons, there are very few Republicans of this kind in Connecticut. Politicians running for office really do, when al...

The day after the great debate between Sen. Joe Biden and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, everyone was prepared to pass judgment. I didn’t catch the debate. My wife Andrée had arranged for us to see at UConn the Bolt play, “A Man For All Seasons.” And so when the two bumped heads, we found ourselves in the sold out Nafe Katter Theatre's packed house watching Michael McKensie, playing St. Thomas More, scowling at Thomas Cromwell’s pragmatism: “ALICE: They say he's a very penetrating lawyer. “MORE: What, Cromwell? Pooh, he's a pragmatist-and that's the only resemblance he has to the Devil, son Roper; a pragmatist, the merest plumber.” McKensie spat the word “pragmatist” far out into the second row. It is an explosive line and ought to remind us, in this the age of pragmatism and cynicism, that once there was something more honorable than reasons of state. After viewing the debate, what strikes me most forcefully is how wrong everyone was about Palin, except of course the peo...

It is not at all surprising that former senator and governor Lowell Weicker, the prime mover in the enactment of an income tax that has doubled state expenditures, should now be spending his twilight years in retirement bemoaning – high taxes. Weicker’s entire public life has been wasted in attempts to pound square pegs in round holes. In addition to high taxes, Weicker also is troubled by what he perceives as a dangerous and possibly unconstitutional religious resurgence in America, an alarming turn towards faith that apparently has not affected public education administrators in Maryland who, eyes cocked in the direction of mischievous suits brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, have developed curricula pointedly not mentioning that the Puritans were preeminently a religious people who often thanked God for their good fortune – as was the case during Thanksgiving. “Too many Americans,” Weicker writes in Northeast magazine, a Hartford Courant publication, “have the view that...