Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Our national Coronavirus plague, which some dour, unscientific critics insist is no more deadly than the flu, has deposited in the hands of governors here in the Northeast an administrative power that might well bring a blush to the cheek of Gore Vidal’s Caligula. Asked by a reporter whether he objected to the seemingly endless senatorial reign of Edward Kennedy in Massachusetts, Vidal quipped – no, not at all, because every state should have in it at least one Caligula. Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York is the most visible and outspoken Vidalian Caligula in a compact of similarly endowed governors that includes Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

The MeToo movement has arrived finally in Connecticut, the land of steady habits. “ Biden accuser rips Democrats ,” an April 3 rd , above the fold, front page headline in The Hartford Courant screeches. And the story, written by Neil Vigdor, bulges with quotes. “The Democrats definitely don’t like to hold their own accountable,” said Amy Lappos, referring to an awkward incident that occurred in 2009, ten years ago when she was a congressional aide to U.S. Representative Jim Himes, during a $1,000 per plate fundraising luncheon held at the home of affordable housing developer Ron Moelis, a Greenwich moneybags.

An honest man in politics shines more there than he would elsewhere – Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad The national and state elections have, unsurprisingly, intersected. Former U.S Representative Chris Shays not only announced he would not be supporting the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump; he also said he would be actively supporting Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party presidential nominee. Ditto Lowell Weicker , the “Maverick” Republican who ran for governor of Connecticut under his own party label, “A Connecticut Party.” These defections are not at all surprising, and anyone writing about Connecticut politics who is surprised at them should have their press credentials revoked.

Some people – the Kennedys are among them – consider rules and regulations merely as obstacles to be surmounted on the path to political glory. It is a well-worn path often trodden by the great and near great. In Connecticut, the path offers special immunities from criticism for incumbent Democrats. Gore Vidal , who left us more than two years ago, memorably described the Kennedy clan descending on Washington D.C. after John Kennedy had been sworn into office as president. He said it was like watching the Mafia descend on a small, northern Italian town, and his was a friendly voice. First Lady Jackie Kennedy and Mr. Vidal shared a stepfather, the stockbroker Hugh Auchincloss.

There are, believe it or not, Republicans in Northern Connecticut. Like Republicans in the rest of the state, they remain closeted, and their voting influence in Connecticut is negligible – except in urban areas, where it is non-existent. Democrats outnumber Republicans in the state by a ratio of two to one; in the cities, the ratio is two to zero. But every so often, a closeted Republican gets his hackles up over some manifest indignity, and such was the case early in the New Year, after Governor of New Jersey Chris Christie permitted one of his staffers to drop him metaphorically off the George Washington Bridge. In “Speak Out,” a regular feature of The Rockville Reminder , Connecticut Commentary finds this: “Could someone bring me up to speed on this Chris Christie bridge scandal? Did he drive off one with a girl in his car who was not his wife and leave her to drown, making absolutely no attempt whatsoever to save her life? Why did he [Mr. Christie] take full resp...

Prior to her first debate with wannabe U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, Linda McMahon was assiduously avoiding most invitations by editorial boards in Connecticut to step into the lion’s den. This infuriated the lions, always hungry for red meat. If ask why she refused to submit to editorial board interrogatories, Mrs. McMahon might have replied honestly – though honesty is the first casualty of a political campaign – “I’m just tired of   defending WWE,” her former company “from the slings and arrows of outraged left of center editorial board members.” That would have been some sort of a rational answer. Mrs. McMahon, however, is not the only candidate for election skipping class. U.S. Representative for life Rosa DeLauro also has been politely refusing invitations from editorial boards. Indeed, she has been refusing to debate her Republican opponent, Wayne Winsley, an energetic, conservative African American who has been peppering Mrs. DeLauro with rhetorical buckshot. ...

U.S. Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts is as close to a proletarian congressman as the state, represented in the Congress for many years by the Kennedys and U. S. Senator John Kerry, net worth $194 million, is likely to get. The following ad – which, by the way, features a cameo appearance from former Senator Edward Kennedy’s brother John – shows that Mr. Brown has not yet lost the common touch:        

Sen. Joe Lieberman’s post mortem began even before he officially announced his retirement. Here in Connecticut, a politically battered Susan Bysiewicz rushed to announce in advance of U.S. Reps. Chris Murphy and Joe Courtney her availability for the seat hours after she had told bewildered reporters and commentators she would be spending the next few years ensconced in her new job with a prestigious law firm, drying out from a recent political dunking and acquiring active experience before the state’s bar. Mrs. Bysiewicz has been portrayed in the state’s media as an ambitious Lady Macbeth, but she probably is not much more ambitious than the usual political specimen. Well… maybe a wee bit. Connecticut can expect the same scramble for political crumbs that occurred when U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd announced his retirement. The frantic melee would be a little less over the edge if the state had term limits, a process that would allow a more dignified free for all. The present political r...

When former president Jimmy Carter said in an interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes” recently that the late Sen. Edward Kennedy killed a health care initiative during Carter’s failed administration, he scared up a ghost or two. Mr. Dodd quickly came to the defense of his departed friend, telling Reuters that factors unrelated to Kennedy doomed Carter’s health plan : “At the time … you had 22 percent inflation, you had gas lines going everywhere,” Dodd said. “The idea that healthcare was going to be a major debate in ‘79 is sort of selective history. I don’t think there was any room for that debate in ‘79.” Today, of course, the times are more propitious: a  national debt is approaching 14 trillion  (in Carter's last year it was about $1 trillion);  bailouts of failing Wall Street investment firms, banks and housing mortgage ponzi schemes; inflation, breathing heavily, waiting in the wings; an expensive regulatory apparatus with Dodd’s fingerprints all over it that surely...

A chameleon will change its color, depending upon the place in which it finds itself, so as to make itself invisible to predators. Large animals have powerful toothy, bone splitting jaws to see them past precarious moments. Small animals have their wits. I saw my first chameleon when my wife and I were visiting Savannah, Georgia. I had taken my coffee out to a brick enclosed courtyard and from the corner of my eye perceived a motion in the plush ivy. I froze when I saw the chameleon because, never having seen one before at close range, I wished to observe it moving stealthily not a foot from the cup. Rotating its pin-hole of an eye, it passed from brick to ivy, changing color in its course from brick red to ivy green. When I made a sudden movement, it was up and over the wall like a marine at boot camp. Some politicians are like chameleons, others not. Martha Dean, the Republican nominee for attorney general this year, opened her campaign last March with all flags flying. Her o...

It cannot be a surprise that those in Connecticut’s left of center community who secretly loathe Republicans not tucked within the Democratic Party heart of darkness continue to advance the political fortunes of so called “moderate” Republicans. They revere and praise ex-Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker at every opportunity and have supported him in the past because Weicker abhors and will not abide conservative Republicans. They urge other Republicans to vote in primaries for those candidates who show themselves willing to sell their birthright for a mess of moderate pottage, even though Democrats they enthusiastically support have driven Connecticut to the brink of bankruptcy. According to this view of things, Weicker, scourge of the Republican Party, father of the state income tax – a levy that kept the heads of the solidly Democratic governing class above water, even as the drowning masses were blowing bubbles towards the unquiet surface – is the ideal Republican, a man who ru...

We think we know what made Dodd not run, but what makes him run? Over the last few months, U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd has been waving goodbye to the senate, a bittersweet farewell occasioned, some think, by plummeting polls and the perception on the part of some of his constituents that he stuck around too long, like some disintegrating, punch-drunk boxer dreaming of his glory days in the ring. Then again, in the last few months, Dodd has been “born again” – this time as a reformer. Prior to his born-again experience, he was what Roll Call calls “the consummate insider .” The senator after whom Dodd patterned himself, “lion of the senate” Edward Kennedy, was, to be sure, more “consummate,” beltway lingo indicating the congressional “virtue” of getting your way by playing between the keys of the political organ. It is said by the chattering class that Dodd is “working on his legacy .” A politician’s legacy is what remains of him after he has left office, history’s verdict on his multif...

Marc Ambinder, writing for the Atlantic , says that “Obama's political team had been in touch with Attorney General Dick Blumenthal, who has a Hamlet-like record of not getting into races he is expected to get into, and had cemented from his team an assurance that, if Dodd stepped down, Blumenthal would indeed formally announce.” In his valedictory, Dodd remarked that an hour after he had cast a vote to reform health care, he was “standing on the Virginia hillside at Arlington Cemetery, where Ted Kennedy rests, along with his brothers in eternity, as he is in history, wishing I could have seen the look in Teddy's eyes as the Senate took that historic step only an hour before.” It might be interesting to find out if the Obama-Blumenthal concordat occurred when the sentimental Dodd was visiting deceased Sen. Edward Kennedy’s grave. The Democratic heir apparent, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal – who does not plan to surrender his day job in pursuit of Dodd’s vacant seat...

The day after the mid-term elections in which Republicans in Connecticut appeared to have staged something of a come-back, evidence that the party is not cold-stone dead, Ned Lamont announced he was forming a committee to explore a run for governor. The following day, his announcement was wreathed in headlines. The Hartford Courant ran a top of the fold front page story: “ Ned Lamont May Run For Governor .” Is there any significance to the timing? If one is going to throw one’s hat “near the ring,” as one publication put it , a post election period is not a bad time to do it. The T.S. Elliot poem, “The Lovesong Of J. Alfred Prufrock” comes to mind: “There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;… Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea.” The attention grabbing headlines suggest that Lamont’s entrée into the race will change...

"Throw mud and some will stick. Stick but not stain." -- Cardinal John Henry Newman. The operative motto of all demagogic bloggers is: Why say something, when you can intimate it? Some bloggers are now intimating that Linda McMahon, a Republican Party U.S. senatorial hopefull, approves necrophilia -- the last frontier among sexual liberationists -- simulated rape and public sex. "As WWE chief operating officer, Linda McMahon presided over programming that showed simulated rape, public sex, and necrophilia, and now she wants to be our U.S. Senator?" asked Democratic spokeswoman Colleen Flanagan. "People across this state, not to mention the millions of women who are the victims of sexual violence every year, would be horrified and embarrassed to know that the person who seeks to represent them condones this kind of behavior. That kind of programming has no place in our society, and Linda McMahon has no place in the U.S. Senate." The questions asked...

Most moralists would have no difficulty with the notion that good people have a flip side; they are sometimes bad. The trick in judging them morally, which ought to be done rarely and with great circumspection, is not to slide into a kind of moral Manichaeism in which you end up saying that the good side of a man redeems the bad side. It does not . St. Augustine, who was very bad before his mother drew him into Christianity, may serve as a model. He flew from his sins without having make the mistake of believing that his meritorious works in some sense cancelled the sins. It took sometime after the late former Sen. Edward Kennedy died for people to get around to noticing that he was, in fashionable parlance, “complex,” which is to say he was riven, as most men are, by sin. Or, if agnostic and atheistic readers prefer a less religiously freighted expression, we might say Kennedy was the victim of “human failings.” Some of Kennedy’s human failings were monstrous. Kevin Rennie , a...

The United States, and especially American politicians, is best and most accurately seen from afar. The Guardian’s report on the late Sen. Edward Kennedy’s political career is what the Brits might call “spot on.,” so far the finest-- by which I mean the most accurate and unsentimental -- review of Edward Kennedy's trip to the top of the political greasy poll. All the warts and angel wings are here.

Before she began to comment upon what is now called ObamaCare, Betsy McCaughey , a former lieutenant governor of New York and presently an adjunct senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, took the precaution of reading both the voluminous stimulus bill as well as the health care bill, a path not followed by the majority of legislators who either voted or are due to vote on both measures. McCaughey’s findings ought to disturb everyone who will be affected by either bill – which is to say, everyone in the United States. Her recent commentary in Bloomberg News begins: “Republican Senators are questioning whether President Barack Obama’s stimulus bill contains the right mix of tax breaks and cash infusions to jump-start the economy. “Tragically, no one from either party is objecting to the health provisions slipped in without discussion. These provisions reflect the handiwork of Tom Daschle, until recently the nominee to head the Health and Human Services Department.” That’s right: Health ca...

This Friday, August 8, 2008, Sen. John Edwards, once a Democrat presidential candidate, now a repentant philanderer, announced that he did indeed have an affair with a young lady who filmed his campaign. According to an Associated Press front page story in the Journal Inquirer Edwards has “denied fathering a daughter born to the woman with whom he had the affair, and offered to be tested to prove it… After the story broke Friday, Edwards released a statement that said, 'In 2006, I made a serious error in judgment… I recognized my mistake and told my wife that I had a liaison with another woman, and I asked for her forgiveness. I was honest in every painful detail with my family. I took responsibility for my action in 2006, and today I take full responsibility publicly.'” The cause of Edward’s infidelity was that ol’devil hubris, according to the AP report and Edwards’ statement: “In the course of several campaigns, I started to believe that I was special and became increasingl...

Political commentary here in Connecticut, the land of steady liberalism, is not dangerous or witty or even humorous; it is dull and repetitious, which is one of the reasons newspapers are foundering. The Harford Courant, which bills itself as the oldest continuously published newspaper in the United States, has fallen on hard times. In fact, it has now fallen into the unforgiving clutches of Sam Zell , a real estate mogul who seems to believe that newspapers should be more like blog sites and should operate on four rather than six cylinders. The Courant is in the process of being downsized or, in the lingo of its new owner, “right-sized.” Apparently right-sizing is a synonym for “made profitable.” We all know how real estate moguls make profits. As the press goes, so goes the state. Connecticut too is foundering, flopping around on the sand like a beached minnow, gasping for breath. The narrative in newspaper land could be more exciting, but the ideological mix on most editorial pages...