Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Chris Powell, managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, is a knowledgeable observer of Connecticut politics whose column appears in that paper and a dozen others in Connecticut and the Providence Journal in Rhode Island. When Powell became managing editor of the JI in 1974, he was the youngest editor of any daily in the state. I must here acknowledge that I wrote a regular column for the JI for about 15 years when Powell was also editorial page editor, drawing from time to time on his unfailing political memory. Powell, who off-line is screamingly amusing, agreed to submit to an interview broadly focused on the U.S. Senate race featuring the Democratic incumbent, Chris Dodd, and a crew of ebullient Republicans. It is difficult to place Powell on the political spectrum except to say that he loves a good story and has a gift for poetic concision: "The General Assembly is little more than a nest of locusts. ..." I recall once describing Powell as a "rad...

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...