Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

If you lop off California and New England, you’ve got a pretty good country” – Barry Goldwater To people who have been stung by socialism – ask any American refugee from Cuba, Venezuela, or any of the Baltic States that only recently have thrown off Soviet tyranny – there is not much difference between professed socialist Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

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...

U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, Connecticut’s consumer protection Congressman, might have been speaking of the Clinton Foundation, a mare’s nest of government-corporation entanglement, when he mused, “Time is not on our side. We really need to move quickly, because the longer it goes without some scrutiny or oversight, the more general acceptance there will be. We need to create this sense of outrage and alarm that pieces of the government are being sold and compromised.” But of course, he wasn’t.  Mr. Blumenthal was drawing a bead on President-Elect Donald Trump. Apparently, there is to be no honeymoon during this post-election season. It used to be considered seemly to wait a few weeks into a Presidency before the political opposition began to seed the political theatre with their Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs).

An honest man in politics shines more there than he would elsewhere – Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad The national and state elections have, unsurprisingly, intersected. Former U.S Representative Chris Shays not only announced he would not be supporting the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump; he also said he would be actively supporting Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party presidential nominee. Ditto Lowell Weicker , the “Maverick” Republican who ran for governor of Connecticut under his own party label, “A Connecticut Party.” These defections are not at all surprising, and anyone writing about Connecticut politics who is surprised at them should have their press credentials revoked.

On slow news days – especially when the state legislature is out of session and everyman’s life, liberty and property is a bit safer from despoliation – some newspaper in Connecticut is bound to run a story on the state’s “wealth gap,” the always intolerable difference between the assets of Greenwich hedge fund managers and city dwellers hedged about by poverty, crime and cultural dissolution. The wealth gap in Connecticut is large because the poor, despite years of Great Society programs, are still poor, and the rich are still rich. Quick now: Which has been the least successful national policy, the war on drugs or the war on poverty? The stairway connecting Heaven, Connecticut’s upstairs, and Hell, the state’s downstairs, is long but gilded at the top. The underlying assumption of all such stories is that the poor are poor BECAUSE the rich are rich. It follows that if a compassionate government were able to even the scales by redistributing wealth from rich Paul to ...