Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The Hartford Courant story is titled, provocatively, 'Racist' Tweet From Republican Joe Visconti Draws Fire From Democratic and GOP Leaders . The word “racist” is imprisoned in quotes to indicate some disagreement as to whether the perennial right of center gadfly, Joe Visconti, is a racist. He is not a racist, those who know him best will assert, rather passionately. Visconti has argued that his message, appended to a picture of Democrat Attorney General prospect William Tong, has little to do with race and everything to do with political orientation.

Surrounded by ad makers, cartoonists, various temporary – we hope – politicians who reach for the stars in their attempts to explain the nature of man and the universe, Americans are used to hyperbole. It surrounds us like a sometime amusing sea of comic exaggeration and error. Sometimes, you have to blow a thing up to understand it. It’s OK; hyperbole has long history, sometimes honorable, sometimes not, in our politics.    Most Americans shrug when President Donald Trump unveils a stunning hyperbole; as with a window, they see THROUGH the intended exaggeration to the more modest truth obscured by the hyperbole. But some hyperboles are opaque; in these, there is nothing behind the words, no “there” there.

Thinking perhaps that he was Twitter-in-Chief President Donald Trump, Undersecretary for Criminal Justice Policy and Planning at the Office of Policy and Management Michael Lawlor in late January fired off the following tweet: “ Wow, Connecticut gets its first full-force racist enabler candidate for Attorney General.” According to CTMirror , Lawlor’s target was “Susan Hatfield, a state prosecutor from eastern Connecticut who was a Donald J. Trump delegate in 2016 and once worked in Washington as a young policy aide to former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich…” Hatfield, a Republican, is running for the Attorney General spot soon to be vacated by George Jepsen. For any number of reasons, this was not the brightest tweet in Lawlor’s constellation of tweets. Imputing racism to all Trump delegates smacks of McCarthyism, and Hatfield is a woman who should be able to toss her hat into a political ring without being peppered by politicians operating in the #me-too era who ought to...