Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Connecticut has just been bowled over by a bomb cyclone, a rapidly strengthening area of low pressure. In the area where I live, all the houses went dark – for three days and nights. Throughout Connecticut, about 41,000 energy consumers lost power. And winter is coming. CTMirror tells us there is a stalemate over long-term transportation funding between legislators and Governor Ned Lamont. The battle of the political egg-heads is “about to create an immediate crisis: With $30 million in promised local aid months overdue, fall tree trimming and winter snow removal are at risk.” The recent outage was caused mostly by falling trees that are singularly uninterested in Lamont and tax hungry legislators. The General Assembly in Connecticut has been controlled for the last three decades by Democrats whose reckless spending proclivities have been responsible for much of the budget outages during this time.

Chris Powell This sort of thing should happen more often. Early in June, someone asked Chris Powell, a fierce defender of open government, to address the annual general meeting of the Connecticut Council on Freedom of Information. Powell is one of those newsmen with a sense of humor, rare these days, who really does believe that the distribution of knowledge is indispensable to a flourishing democracy. And public intelligence involves unimpeded access to the organs of government, an access routinely threatened by hegemonic, one-party government.

Leftists are winning the culture war, the war on western civilization, because rootless politicians have shown themselves unwilling to enter the lists and do battle with the new morality. For this reason, American culture is being redefined – reinvented, as the leftists would have it – by social anarchists with knives in their brains. It has become fashionable among New York leftist politicians to wink at, and even to publicly celebrate, infanticide. No assault on traditional sensibilities, it would seem, is beyond the pale. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s notion that third trimester abortion is too close to infanticide to be tolerated by men and women of conscience is now regarded as embarrassingly quaint   by New York’s smart set, among whom are Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, not his birth name.

Well, that didn’t take long. Morning Consult   tracks the favorable and unfavorable ratings of governors across the United States. According to the rating service, Governor Ned Lamont’s favorability rating is hovering around 33 percent 100 days into the new administration. The bulk of the discontent can only be attributed to disappointed expectations. Former Governor Dannel Malloy , who high-tailed it to his old alma mater, Boston Law, following his not unexpected decision to abandon thoughts of a third term in office, absconded with an approval rating of about 29 percent. Shortly before he threw in the towel, Malloy was the most unpopular governor in the United States. Ironists – if there are any such creatures among Connecticut political watchers – will dwell on the   as yet unexamined ironies. How did it happen that an electorate that had registered such profound disappointment with Malloy never-the-less elected as his successor another Democrat who managed to...

I never had the pleasure of meeting Tech Sergeant John Chapman or his brave mother, who was featured in a short video , a loving remembrance of her son, sometime after the country graced itself by awarding to Chapman the Medal of Honor.   We do however share a town: Windsor Locks, a mill town with a characteristic one-sided Main Street, a canal that flows parallel to the Connecticut River, full of perch and snappers in the heat of July. Chapman’s mother says in the video her son was a little Huck-Finnish growing up in Windsor Locks – nothing too serious, but there was a playful and sometimes mischievous spirit in the recent Medal of Honor recipient. When you live by a sun-spangled river and you are a boy in a town in which all eyes lovingly spy you out, Huck lives and breathes in you.

After the August primaries, most major papers in Connecticut will endorse Ned Lamont as the state’s next governor. Like politicians, newspaper owners and Editorial Page Editors are victims of their past choices. If you’ve said “yes” at the altar in the presence of so many church witnesses, it becomes a chancy proposition to call it quits too soon after the honeymoon. Lamont was the preferred candidate of former Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker. Left of center writers in Connecticut became Weicker-likers for any number of reasons. He was a manageable Republican senator. Indeed, there are some people who think, considering his record in office, that Weicker was a closet Democrat. Weicker’s left of center  Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) rating  during his last term in office was 90; Connecticut U.S. Senator Chris Dodd’s was 85. Weicker could be depended upon to frustrate wide-awake conservatives. Generally, the left of center m...

It seems clear that state Democrats will be running against President Donald Trump in the 2018 elections. They already are doing so.   Will this be a winning strategy? Ned Lamont is the Democrat Party nominee for governor. His hand-picked Lieutenant Governor running mate is Susan Bysiewicz. Lamont is facing within his own tribe a primary challenge from Mayor of Bridgeport Joe Ganim. A straggler, Guy Smith, has bowed out of the race. Ganim, despite his recent graduation from prison, may present a real threat to Lamont. The two Democrats will be running against each other in a party primary, the winner of which will, it seems likely, be running against Trump, if only because the primary victor will not be able to win in a general election as a Malloyalist progressive.

A recent story in the Hartford Courant, “ Lamont Gaining Party Support ," focuses on U.S. Senator Chris Murphy as a Democrat Party kingmaker. Murphy is a kingmaker by default. Party bosses disappeared long ago. They were done in by two things: an anti-boss movement that had been picking up steam since very early press attacks on Tammany Hall, and reforms in election processes. The old party boss, usually a party chairman, fell victim to primaries and open elections. But necessary functions in politics do not disappear; they are transformed. In post-reform modern times, the party boss is the party’s most important elected official.

Speaker of the State House of Representatives Joe Aresimowicz has planted his flag. He has announced he will call a vote on instituting a new tax, congestion tolling, in Connecticut. “I’m not willing to walk away from this session with doing nothing to solve this problem. Our job is to rep (sic) the citizens of the state and make very difficult decisions for the betterment of this state. This falls into that category for me.” There is no need to pause here and discuss the touchy question whether Aresimowicz properly understands what Connecticut's real problems are. After two major tax increases, the largest and the second largest in state history, inexorably followed by high and unsupportable deficits, the question – is Connecticut suffering from a revenue or a spending problem? – has now been settled. Even major newspapers that had in the past asserted Connecticut’s budget problems had been caused by insufficient revenue have since repented and now acknowledge the state ha...

A historical repetition, Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard reminds us, is not possible, because it is not possible to recreate historically the precise conditions that occasioned the event we wish to replicate. Karl Marx, a poor economist but a passable social critic, put it this way: “History repeats itself; the first time as tragedy, and the second time as farce.”   The shadow of a not too amusing farce hovers over a recent report in a Hartford paper . The central premise of the report is this: Charlie Barker of Massachusetts is a successful Republican Governor, his approval rating an astonishing 71 percent. Baker is the usual New England moderate Republican, one who is conservative on fiscal issues but liberal on social issues. If only Connecticut were able to field a Charlie Baker-like gubernatorial candidate in the upcoming 2018 race, the GOP might be able to sweep the boards and restore to the gubernatorial office – held for two terms by Dannel Malloy, a p...

“Connecticut’s political left," as Mark Pazniokas of CTMirror has taken to calling them, met in New Haven at a “People’s Symposium” -- what else? – to grill Connecticut’s Democrat candidates for governor in 2018. The interrogators, members of Connecticut’s “ Working Families Organization ,” a left-wing subset of the state’s Democratic Party ideologically affiliated with state union employees, itself a subset of the Connecticut’s much more numerous real working families, came away from the grilling somewhat satisfied that the candidates had met their non-negotiable demands. The next Democrat governor must soak the rich with progressive taxes, support a $15 dollar an hour minimum wage, oppose any and all efforts to “erode collective bargaining for public-sector employees in Connecticut,” and agitate against President Donald Trump – which, in Connecticut, is not a high hurdle to overleap.

Projected revenue figures from Connecticut’s usually non-partisan Office of Fiscal Analysis (OFA) have been fairly accurate. The accuracy of figures produced by agencies used in assembling budgets is generally proportionate to the political independence of the number crunchers. And of course all figures utilized by partisans – especially during elections, which bend hard truths to suit the ambitions of the reigning power – should be viewed with a great deal of suspicion. The figures most recently released by the OFA are balled fists. This year’s budget could be in the red by as much as $266 million, a too frequent occurrence during the entire administration of Governor Dannel Malloy.

If you’re passing by a house on the street and see flames licking the windows, hear the screams of people rending the air, watch them as they pour out of the house carrying with them their prized possessions, note the blasts of firetrucks approaching, it would hardly be presumptuous of you to conclude that the house is on fire. Politicians and legislators do not as quickly reach such obvious and solid conclusions; they are extraordinary people whose sensory apparatus is… well… different. For the lean and hungry ambitious politician, whether or not the house is on fire depends upon whether it is politically prudent to reach the obvious conclusion. One must consider exigencies before pulling the alarm: For instance, “If I cry fire, will I be elected next term?”

Shortly after Governor Dannel Malloy presented his budget to the Democratic dominated General Assembly, a cataract of critical comments washed over his administration. Noting the governor had passed along to the legislature a highly problematic budget, one commentator sniffed , “If the state budget is a football game, rather than a tragi-comic version of naked beer pong, then Gov. Dan Malloy admitted the other day to punting on third down at the bank robbery.” No compliment was intended.

Former US Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker, the bad conscience of Connecticut’s Republican Party, has surfaced once again in one of his usual haunts, the Hartford Courant , a paper that has in the past managed to oblige Weicker’s whimsy, whether he was muscling the General Assembly into passing an income tax or torpedoing Republican campaigns against then US Senator Chris Dodd, now a Hollywood mogul, or supplying the Republican Party in Connecticut with the rope Weicker suspected it would use to hang itself. Having appointed his majordomo, Tom D’Amore, as state GOP Chairmen, D’Amore proposed that the Republican Party should allow independents to vote in party primaries, thus assuring the election for life of then US Senator Weicker. At the time, D’Amore assured the party’s central committee that he had not assumed his responsibilities as Chairman to preside over the demise of the Republican Party. Republicans declined the offer of the rope; D’Amore later was replaced by a cha...

Girolamo Grumpi, obviously not his real name, is a retired journalist who lives north of Hartford and who wishes to remain anonymous -- November 9, 2014 Q: By Sunday November 9, most journalist morticians in Connecticut and others had turned in their reports. Among them was Lowell Weicker, who left the Republican Party to run as an Independent for Governor in 1990. GG: The Weicker response to the current elections was a reprise of a column written by him and printed in the (Hartford) Courant last May. Even then, there were serious problems with the Weicker analysis. Weicker argued that the Republican Party has declined since he left it to run as governor. A careful historian may want to pause here to note that Weicker did not leave the parry of his own accord when he lost his seat to then Connecticut Attorney General Joe Lieberman. He was not able to garner a sufficient number of votes to win re-election, possibly because the Republican Party in his own state had grown t...

The Hartford Courant has only recently discovered the vital connection between taxes and spending: The more you tax, the more you can spend. For many years, stretching back to the administration of maverick Governor Lowell Weicker, the father of Connecticut’s income tax, the paper argued in countless editorials and op-ed pieces that Connecticut did not have a spending problem; it had a revenue problem. Translation: The state needn't worry about the level of taxation or spending or regulation, a hidden tax on the cost of business in the state, for as long as Connecticut was viable enough to continue to increase taxes. Any bumper stickers from the failed anti-income tax years reading “I survived the Weicker income tax” are, this year, 23 years old. In two years, Connecticut will be celebrating the 25 th anniversary of the Weicker income tax – which, during its day, was thought to have solved Connecticut’s revenue and tax problems.

Juliana Simone, for nine years the host of the Barkhamsted Republican Town Committee's political interview show "Conservative Chat and Chairman of the BRTC since 2009," has invited me to make a few impromptu remarks during the town’s biannual fundraiser on September 30. If anyone following Connecticut Commentary attends the event, please coral me and say hello. I’ll be touching briefly on a few topics I’ve written about recently. There are some things I will not have time to address. Allow me to do so here.

A recent poll – Governor Dannel Malloy has called it, dismissively, a survey – shows Republican gubernatorial prospect Tom Folly leading Mr. Malloy by nine points. The poll by YouGov , a survey firm that has partnered with The New York Times and CBS News, is a bit different than the usual survey.  Unlike the more traditional Quinnipiac poll, YouGov derives its nonpartisan data from an online panel of more than 100,000 respondents nationwide. In Connecticut, the poll shows Republicans favoring Mr. Foley 81-5, while Democrats favor Malloy 72-12. But one of the most alarming takeaways from the poll is Mr. Foley’s 50 to 15 percent lead among Independents .  That gap is huge, and unaffiliated voters in the state outnumber both Republicans and Democrats. These figures should alarm Democrats. Further, the majority of respondents said that they disapprove of Malloy’s performance as Governor.

Who shapes politics? The question is not quite so easy to answer as it may seem. In what some politicians consider the good old days, politics was fashioned by the public official running for office, a handful of political associates, party leaders and a few old boys in the establishment media network. In the modern period, party bosses have all but disappeared; the media network has expanded to include, comedians, Hollywood starlets and bloggers; both political parties have been shorn of much of their power through campaign reforms; primaries have made party convention decisions much less decisive; and politicians – if they are not incumbents – may have half a dozen reasons for entering the campaign jousts.