Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

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...

No one said during a recent Hartford Courant’s seminar on blogging that the activity was pretty much like a masked ball on the Pequod; masked because most of the commentators on ship operate under pseudonyms, and the Pequod because that fair ship was, among other things, Melville’s metaphor for a jostling, multicultural world. Most of the usual arguments against gay marriage having been answered sufficiently by proponents of gay marriage, I was wondering whether the same defenses used by gays may also be used to check what appears to be a troglodyte resistance to polygamy. So I proposed the question during a blog session at Connecticut Local Politics, one of the most active sites in Connecticut’s burgeoning blog community. A blogger, ctkeith, helpfully suggested that I move the dialogue to my own blog, “where it will never be read”. If it is never read, I see no harm in this. What follows below is the resulting thread on the question proposed. I’ve edited out other comments that do no...

Ideological battles are not that much different than military battles. Winning, in both cases, involves establishing defensive lines while attacking the enemy aggressively. In politics, capitulation is always the easier course. The first step in the battle is the drawing of lines on a strategic map. The difference between Colin McEnroe , just to pick a thoughtful progressive at random, and Dan Gerstein, Sen. Joe Lieberman’s front man and the progressive everyman’s bête noire, also a thoughtful political commentator, is a matter of ideological circumference. In most matters, moderates like Gerstein and Lieberman have a wide range. Their circle of ideas is wider than that of progressives or conservatives and includes the kinds of inconsistencies Ralph Waldo Emerson boasted of when he said a “foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Now, here in Connecticut, as everyone must realize, there are few if any entrenched conservative incumbent politicians. Conservatives are regula...

Genghis Conn said... Effective for herself, I would say. She's doing what Bill Clinton did (and did very well)--taking the ideas and issues of the party opposite and somehow making them her own. It's going to get her re-elected. So then, a political strategy in which Rell distances herself from a coherent Republican Party message and adopts the protective coloring of Democrat Party initiatives helps Rell – and only Rell – to be re-elected. I’m beginning to sound a bit like ctkeith without the fangs. Only in politics – and indeed, only in modern politics – can a politician prosper as an island unto himself. So, let us assume that Gengis Conn is right. A Republican strategy of adopting and promoting Democrat programs will get you elected in this the bluest of blue states. No big secret here. Gengis Conn points to Clinton as an example of a politician who prospered by exploiting his moderation, but a more apt parallel would be between Rell and former Governor Lowell Weicker, a mas...

Here is a little back-and-forth between two anonymous bloggers, ctkeith and Genghis Conn, on a popular Connecticut blog . ctkeith said... GC Wrote, “What's interesting about this is that in the past, Rell has been able to make compromises break her way. Stem cells, civil unions, public funding of campaigns and even the recent transportation bill have somehow ended up making the governor look good.” Can you tell me which one of those issues made REPUBLICANS happy? 11:56 PM, April 29, 2006 Genghis Conn said... To Republican partisans and social conservatives? None of them. In fact, most of the Republicans in the legislature didn't support those initiatives. Legislative Republicans are irrelevant, and Rell doesn't really care what social conservatives think. This leaves her trying to pass her own agenda all by herself. She may be most effective when she's proposing compromises to Democratic plans. That exchange pretty much says everything needful about Rell, compromi...