Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Bill Curry -- who lost an election, honorably I might add, to John Rowland -- is usually aggravating, in the good sense, and pushing his party with Archimedean fervor to the left. It was Archimedes who said “Give me a spot outside the world where I may place my lever, and I will move the world.” The Democratic Party, most especially in his own state, has obliged Mr. Curry in one respect; it has put up between itself and Mr. Curry a political Berlin Wall that, in a recent piece in Salon , he valiantly and sometimes confusedly attempted to breach.

It’s a little bit like watching a fly fallen into mug of beer wildly flapping its wings. Once the rhetorical mood hits Governor Dannel Malloy, he DOES go on . One has only to compare the talking points in the 20 minute speech given by Mr. Malloy with those given by 1 st District U.S. Representative John Larson to understand that the script from which both borrowed was co-produced at Central Casting. In his pre-speech remarks, Mr. Malloy vowed that he would not spend his time during his strut on the national stage talking about himself , unlike his Republican Party nemesis, Governor Chris Christie of New York. Reporters and commentators who have covered the much traveled, fleet-footed Mr. Malloy since he was first sworn in as governor well understand how the presence of a camera awakens the showman in him. Unlike preceding Republican Governor Jodi Rell, Mr. Malloy does not shrink from partisan displays, and be bathes in media adulation more often than other Connecticut politicia...