Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Anyone hoping to hammer into a coherent ideology Mark Twain’s robustly critical admonitions on politics and politicians is bound to be disappointed. Here is Twain on the Congress of his day: “An honest man in politics shines more there than he would elsewhere.” That is taken from A Tramp Abroad, written in Hartford, Connecticut . Twain wrote most of his important novels in Hartford, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer ,  The Prince and the Pauper ,  Life on the Mississippi ,  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Towards the end of his life, tragedy became the uninvited guest at Twain’s table. He lost his beloved wife, both a spiritual anchor and a literary censor. Twain did not believe writers should self-censor. Olivia Clemons was concerned about her husband’s place in the world, as all good wives should be, and worked to keep his combustible politics from bursting into flame – at least publically -- and sing...

Nationally, most Republican election analysts called it wrong.   Moments following the election, Dick Morris repented in sackcloth and ashes . He had missed something that one might call the New Democratic Majority, which is on the order of missing Gibraltar while sailing the southern end of the Iberian Peninsula: “By the time you finish with the various demographic groups the Democrats win, you almost have a majority in their corner. Count them: Blacks cast 13% of the vote and Obama won them 12-1. Latinos cast 10% and Obama carried them by 7-3. Under 30 voters cast 19% of the vote and Obama swept them by 12-7. Single white women cast 18% of the total vote and Obama won them by 12-6. There is some overlap among these groups, of course, but without allowing for any, Obama won 43-17 before the first married white woman or man over 30 cast their vote. (Lets guess that if we eliminate duplication, the Obama margin would be 35-13) Having conceded these votes, Romney would have had...

Dick Morris, once an advisor to President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton, thinks so. “The race is over,” Morris writes in his column, “The results are already clear. Obama will go to the Democratic Convention with a lead of between 100 and 200 elected delegates. The remaining question is: What will the superdelegates do then? But is that really a question? Will the leaders of the Democratic Party be complicit in its destruction? Will they really kindle a civil war by denying the nomination to the man who won the most elected delegates? No way. They well understand that to do so would be to throw away the party’s chances of victory and to stigmatize it among African-Americans and young people for the rest of their lives. The Democratic Party took 20 years to recover from the traumas of 1968 and it is not about to trigger a similar bloodletting this year.” How does Sen. John McCain, the likely Republican nominee for president, fit into the mix? He serves as a guarantor that ...

Obamamania is foaming and bubbling in America’s stew pot of opinion and commentary. George Will , no progressive, views Obama as the only adult in a squabbling classroom of fossilized politicians caught in the imprisoning amber of yesteryear: “Barack Obama, who might be mercifully closing the Clinton parenthesis in presidential history, is refreshingly cerebral amid this recrudescence of the paranoid style in American politics. He is the un-Edwards and un-Huckabee -- an adult aiming to reform the real world rather than an adolescent fantasizing mock-heroic ‘fights’ against fictitious villains in a left-wing cartoon version of this country.” Dick Morris , certainly not a progressive and no longer a boot licking Clintonite, agrees: “Suddenly, the Clintons have become old before our eyes. They are, as if by magic, now part of the past, no longer inevitable in the future. It took Obama and Huckabee to put them there, but they have become the couple that can’t stop thinking about yesterday....

Dodd Likes Spinach When a politician begins a statement this way – “Don’t misunderstand me, I like spinach’’ – you can be certain he deplores spinach. If the politician is a progressive, the same rule holds true when the “spinach” is “soldiers in Iraq busily undermining the Democrat congressional effort to subvert the war on terror and make the White House safe for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or John Edwards or Dennis Kucinich or Chris Dodd, who has more experience than the other Democrat presidential candidates in subverting wars.” Hillary the Stiff It is said that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is much stiffer on the stump than her husband, ex-President Bill Clinton – soon to be, God willing, the future president’s First Partner. And this is true. Hillary is more formal than Bill, more cautious, less certain that –whatever the rhetorical thicket she may wander into – she possesses the wit, charm, grace and verbal agility to escape the briars that will tear her tender flesh. She is a...

The Hartford Advocate reports that the Lamont campaign may be gay-averse at worse and at best simply rude. Kevin Brookman, vice president of Hartford’s Connecticut Pride Center, a gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people organization, was rudely rebuffed by staff people working for Democrat Party nominee for the U.S. senate Ned Lamont. When Brookman attempted to collect a promised contribution from Lamont for Hartford’s Connecticut Pride Festival, he was met with a torrent of verbal abuse from top Lamont campaign staffer John Murphy, once Tom Swan’s deputy at Connecticut Citizens Action Group. Swan is Lamont’s campaign manager. According to the Advocate: Brookman said when he recently tried to secure a promised donation from Lamont’s campaign, he was stunned by the cursing and disrespect he received from a campaign staffer. Brookman is organizing the Connecticut Pride Festival, which is expected to draw at least 10,000 people to downtown Hartford on Sept. 9. (He’s also a neighb...

In a blog entrée reproving former Democrat Party chairman John Droney for having suggested that besieged Senator Joe Lieberman should run as an independent, Courant columnist and radio talk show host Colin McEnroe reached over and slapped Democrat Senator Chris Dodd upside the head. The jolt to Dodd’s brain stem did not appear to be inadvertent. It’s no secret that McEnroe regards Droney as a crass opportunist. My chronic distaste for Droney has mostly to do with my belief that he's a bit of a bounder, as they say, and that, during the Rowland years, this acclaimed Democratic power broker never did much to unseat the Republican governor because he and his cronies liked the way Rowland and state Treasurer Paul Silvester ran the candy store. Droney capped off that marvelous phase of his life by becoming, appropriately, Rowland's defense counsel. McEnroe rose to the defense of people characterized by the politically inept Droney in a Hartford Courant story as “weirdoes.” Apparen...