Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Q: Some people think you are a misanthrope. GG: I must regretfully reject the compliment. Q: Compliment? GG: It’s no small thing being a misanthrope. You must dislike or mistrust everyone . Unfortunately, I haven’t the energy to be so democratic in my antipathies.                                                                                                                        ...

Someone – could it have been the ghost of Tom D’Amore ? – has suggested that the Republican Party should open its primaries to unaffiliateds. An unaffiliated is someone who, for reasons not perfectly understood, does not wish to   formally affiliate with political parties. Tom D’Amore, now entertaining Jacob Javits Republicans in Heaven, was Senator Lowell Weicker’s majordomo when Mr. Weicker was in Washington DC fighting the good fight against Reagan Republicans. For a time, Mr. D’Amore, at the insistence of Weicker, was the Republican Party Chairmen in Connecticut. As Chairman he pledged he would not preside over the destruction of the Connecticut GOP and then introduced the idea of permitting unaffiliateds to vote in Republican Party primaries, an idea that went over like a lead balloon,  once thoughtful Republicans had discovered that the idea would prevent Ronald Reagan conservatives from making inroads into the Connecticut GOP, perhaps heaving Mr. Weicker ...

Former US Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker – now retired from public affairs and living the life in Old Lyme  – once again has stepped forward on the public stage to tell  Republicans in Connecticut what they must do to save themselves from the destruction wrought upon their party by Lowell Weicker, among others. The first thing they must do is to abandon the ideas of former President Ronald Reagan and embrace the ideas of Mr. Weicker. And of course if Republicans in his overtaxed and over-regulated tottering state saw fit to nominate for public office people just like Mr. Weicker, that would be a cherry on the state’s cake. And, oh yes – let us not forget – Mr. Weicker and his enablers on the Hartford Courant’s editorial board want the Connecticut GOP to open its primary doors to unaffiliateds.

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...

Should Chris Healy go as Republican Party Chairman? Who would replace him, Tom D’Amore? Mr. D’Amore, it will be recalled, was anointed Republican Party Chairman by then Sen. Lowell Weicker, who at the time was considered one of the nominal heads of his party. Weicker later tossed aside his rusty foil, the Republican Party, and became an Independent. One of D’Amore’s first proposals as Party Chairman was to open nominating conventions to those not formally registered as Republicans. Had he been successful, Weicker would have been spared the indignity of scrounging for money and influence from a party he abhorred. Republicans at the time were in no mood to commit suicide and spurned D’Amore’s gambit. D’Amore drifted off to assist such independent nobodies as former governor of Minnesota Jesse "The Body" Ventura, once a wrestler, and Ned Lamont, a democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate. Weicker himself lost a senatorial race to present Sen. Joe Lieberman and, in his se...

By Gerald and Natalie Sirkin Gerald and Natalie Sirkin have appeared in this space several times. It is time we review a book that offers hope for a civil and intelligent future for the United States. Such a book is not easy to find, but we have one: James L. Buckley’s Gleanings from an Unplanned Life, an Annotated Oral History ( Wilmington , Del.: Intercollegiate Studies Institute , 2006, pp. 308, $25). A country that can produce a man like James L. Buckley and see him rise to an important position in public life must have some chance of recovering from its present social squalor. As a member of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Judge Buckley was interviewed for the program of the Historical Society of D. C. to record oral histories of the judges. His book is the transcript of the interviews with his notes to clarify and amplify. Judge Buckley called his life “unplanned.” Actually he had plans. The point is that nothing went according to plan, beginning with b...

What do Nancy Johnson, Rob Simmons and Lincoln Chafee have in common? They were -- it now becomes possible to speak of them in the past tense -- all moderate New England Republicans. And they are all gone. Moderatism (if I can coin a word) has often kept Northeast Republicans in business in a political theatre that is overwhelmingly Democratic. Moderatism – some incorrectly called it pragmatism -- was the Republican’s River Styx; bathed in the waters of moderatism, Northeasten Republicans, afloat in a bitter sea of Democrats, seemed to be, like Achilles, invulnerable to attack. Until he was unhorsed by Joe Lieberman, Sen. Lowell Weicker was the very epitome of the Republican moderate, a rakish “maverick,” willing to “take on” his party in matters of grave principle, who often seemed to Republicans to be a liberal Democrat in a powdered wig. “Mavericks” are the party turncoats we like. Weicker was defeated, so it was thought at the time, because his treachery towards other Republicans h...

Is the Republican Party in Connecticut worth saving? The short answer is “No.” The long answer is, I’m afraid, longer. The Republican rot begins, as may be expected, with former senator and governor Lowell Weicker. When Weicker was senator for several terms and full of the puss of hubris, he sighed in the presence of a Hartford Courant reporter, “The Republican Party in this state is so small; someone should take it over.” So Weicker did, and the Courant , of course, obliged him. Weicker considered himself a Republican in the mode of Jacob Javits of New York – a moderate, anti-conservative with a lively social conscience. Weicker appointed his handmaiden, Tom D’Amore, as chairman of the party, and together they proceeded to reform and destroy it. What we see now in the age of Jodi Rell -- more popular, apparently, than salt -- is an empty husk of a party, paralyzed and useless. I am not speaking hyperbolically: Except as a reflex action to the preposterous and ruinous agenda of the De...

Since the retirement of the last Democrat governor, William O’Neill, aspiring Republican governors have not had inspiring role models. Former senator and governor Lowell Weicker should be considered a Republican, though he won office as an independent, since Weicker spent most of his political life toiling in Republican Party vineyards. Weicker, who likes to consider himself a Jacob Javitts moderate Republican, was a liberal perpetually at war with his surrounding environment. Former Governor John Rowland entered his first term in office waving an “axe the tax” banner and at first seemed to harbor troublesome conservative tendencies, assuming one was willing to give heed to his broken campaign pledges. Wiser heads in Connecticut now advise caution in the matter of campaign promises – most especially when the candidate is a Republican. The transformation of putative conservative Republicans into raging bull liberals, once the frauds have attained office, occurs at the sped of light beca...