Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Merrill The last word, or the next to the last word, on Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders’ ill-fated run for the presidency may be that of communist evangelist Karl Marx. In  The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte  Marx writes, “ Hegel  remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” This is the second time Sanders has run for president, succumbing the first time to former Secretary of State in the Obama administration Hillary Clinton and this time to former Obama Vice President Joe Biden. This, his second and one suspects last run for the presidency – Sanders is getting on in years -- may be a tragedy to the youth of the nation, who hung on his every word, but it is a farce for most grownups.

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of a passionate intensity”  – WB Yeats The Politico story came as a shock to no one: “ California Democrats decline to endorse Feinstein .” Connecticut has been blue roughly forever; ditto California, the political eagle’s nest of moderate Democrats turned progressive. Senator Dianne Feinstein, long a Democrat moderate, did not convert quickly enough. Then too, progressives, full of a passionate intensity, find protestations of progressivism dripping from the lips of moderate, long-serving Democrat political fixtures sadly wanting. If tomorrow Feinstein said she was backing a recent move to withdraw California from the union – a prospect eagerly awaited by national conservatives -- no one on the progressive side of the political barricades in California would believe her. Lions want red meat, not well cured moderate puff pastries.

Just prior to the California primary, a “must win” for socialist Bernie Sanders, the Hillary Clinton campaign pointed out that their beleaguered leader had acquired enough delegates to overcome Mr. Sanders at the upcoming Democratic Party Presidential nominating convention. A headline following the announcement, typical of most, read: “ Clinton secures delegates before last Democratic races ." The message of the Hillary campaign to prospective Sanders supporters just prior to the crucial primaries in six states – CA, MT, NM, ND, NJ and SD – and especially delegate rich California, could not be plainer:  Stay home, the campaign is over . Mrs. Clinton swept California and New Jersey. Following her California win, Mrs. Clinton slathered Bernie supporters with empathy. “I know it never feels good to put your heart into a cause or a candidate you believe in and come up short,” she said from her triumphant podium. “I know that feeling well.”

“The government doesn’t care about profits, which is why it’s always in the red. It doesn’t care much about service either, which is why there are long lines at Connecticut’s Department of Motor Vehicles. It cares only about votes.” – The Cynic at the Breakfast Table, a work in progress. On Thursday, Hillary Clinton came to Hartford, not so long ago the murder capital of New England, to agitate indirectly against Democratic presidential rival Bernie Sanders – AND FIRE ARMS. Mr. Sanders is from Vermont and does not suffer from hoplophobia , an irrational fear of guns. In the hinterland of Vermont, guns are used to shoot game; in one-party urbanscapes such as Hartford, guns are used by drug dealers, gangbangers and young school kids to kill rivals and innocent by-standers. Anti-gun Democratic politicians now seek to forestall urban gun crimes by allowing lawyers to sue gun manufacturers – good for the lawyers, bad for law-abiding gun owners and good for politicians wh...

It may not be too soon to consider, if only as a hypothetical exercise, what a second Malloy administration might be like. There is a short and a long answer. A second administration would look very much like the first. Republicans, kept idle on the back benches, would be curtly cut out of governing. During his first administration, Governor Dannel Malloy simply waved Republicans away from the budget negotiating table and formed a tax and spending plan through secret, closed door negotiations with Democratic General Assembly party leaders.

Nationally, most Republican election analysts called it wrong.   Moments following the election, Dick Morris repented in sackcloth and ashes . He had missed something that one might call the New Democratic Majority, which is on the order of missing Gibraltar while sailing the southern end of the Iberian Peninsula: “By the time you finish with the various demographic groups the Democrats win, you almost have a majority in their corner. Count them: Blacks cast 13% of the vote and Obama won them 12-1. Latinos cast 10% and Obama carried them by 7-3. Under 30 voters cast 19% of the vote and Obama swept them by 12-7. Single white women cast 18% of the total vote and Obama won them by 12-6. There is some overlap among these groups, of course, but without allowing for any, Obama won 43-17 before the first married white woman or man over 30 cast their vote. (Lets guess that if we eliminate duplication, the Obama margin would be 35-13) Having conceded these votes, Romney would have had...

It would be difficult for anyone other than politicians on the right, often the butt of his jokes, to disdain Colin McEnroe. We in the land of Mark Twain do love and forgive our humorists their hyperbole, and Mr. McEnroe is the closest thing Connecticut has to, say, Aristophanes, the famous Greek comic playwright of the 4 th century BC. Time, as we know, is the enemy of sound scholarship. The ruin of Greece has left huge gaps in our understanding of, among other things, Greek comic playwrights. Only eleven of Aristophanes’ 40 plays survive virtually complete. Modern scholarship, which relies on multiple disciplines –archeology, for instance -- to fill in the gaps, shows us an Aristophanes who was an arch political critic, though he wore many masks. In his plays, Aristophanes mercilessly and subversively routed by means of humor the larger and more offensive pretentions of his day. Plato’s beef against Aristophanes was that his play “The Clouds” slandered Socrates and so led to th...

According to Public Policy Polling , Governor Dannel Malloy “continues to be one of the most unpopular Governors in the country in our polling.” Mr. Malloy’s approval-disapproval spread likely astonished most political actors in the state, with the possible exception of the phlegmatic Roy Occhiogrosso, the governor chief flack catcher, whose response to a reputable, non-partisan poll showing the governor with an approval rating of a slender 33 percent and a disapproval rating of 51 percent was a barely suppressed yawn. “We generally don’t comment on polls,” said Mr. Occhiogrosso, “because what’s there to say? Polls come and go, numbers go up and down. The governor always tries to do what he thinks is in the best interests of the people of Connecticut, irrespective of the political consequences.” Politicians also come and go, and their comings and goings are sometimes intimately connected with sliding approval ratings. On previous occasions, Mr. Malloy has said that he i...

Russians Mull Burying Soviet Leader Lenin The corpse if V.I. Lenin has been awaiting burial since the Soviet Union was thrown on the ash heap of history during the administration of President Ronald Reagan. Comments by Russia’s new culture minister suggest, according to a report in the Washington Times , that Mr. Lenin is, finally, on his way out: “But recent comments by Russia ’s new culture minister have brought closer the possibility that the father of the Bolshevik Revolution could finally be laid to rest, signaling an end to the cult of Lenin . “’Many things in our life would symbolically change for the better after this [burial],’ Mr. Medinsky said, adding that he thinks Lenin should be buried with full state honors and his Red Square mausoleum turned into a museum of the Soviet era.” Nancy Pelosi Rakes In The Dough Borrowing a page from the 1912 election featuring socialist Eugene Debs on the far left, William Howard Taft in the center,   Woodrow Wil...