Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

You cannot be a loyal opposition unless you are opposed to the reigning power – in Connecticut’s one party state, a General Assembly and a gubernatorial office dominated by Democrats – and are, at the same time, loyal to something other than the present regime. When Republicans in the General Assembly were frozen out of budget negotiations last fiscal year by a “notice me” governor and a Democratic legislature dominated by a single party, the Valley Forge experience forced them to become, perhaps for the first time in several decades, an authentic loyal opposition. Republican leaders in the state Senate on February 17 published their priorities for the 2012 legislative session . Pointing out the legislature’s constitutional requirement to devote the session in even years to budgetary matters, the Republicans outlined three major goals: •Strict adherence to the state’s constitutional spending cap; •No new taxes; and •No spending increases. Highlights of the Republican proposals ...

Most media outlets in Connecticut have called for a speedy resolution of budget negotiations now being held in camera by the governor, a few Republicans and leaders of the Democratic controlled legislature. The problem here is that all these so called budget “negotiations” are being held behind closed doors, out of view of the public. So, one must accept at their word conflicting reports of the discussions. Naturally, there are two widely divergent accounts of the secret meetings. Here’s what we know: Rell and the Republicans are heavily outnumbered. The Democrats could, if they wished, pass their own preferred budget over Rell’s objections. Indeed, she has challenged them to do just this. It is possible they declined for politically expedient reasons: It was not in their long term interest to present a bill during the regular session in public square. In the past, Republican governors and the thimble full of Republicans in the legislature have shown themselves to be amenable to press...

Through his White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, who once sent a political opponent a dead fish by mail, President Barack Obama is signaling that the bipartisan honeymoon is over, according to a story in Politico . It did not take long for Obama to figure out that bipartisanship is overrated, particularly when one is the titular head of a party that controls congress. It was the stimulus package that tipped the scales. “Meeting with reporters Thursday night, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said that there were times during the stimulus debate when ‘I don’t think we were sharp about the benefits’ of the legislation, letting Washington process dominate the message. “Reflecting as ‘somebody who has been in this town,’ he observed that ‘there’s an insatiable appetite for the notion of bipartisanship here and we allowed that to get ahead of ourselves.’ “But Emanuel said that they recognized they had overdone their initial outreach to Republicans and had offered ‘a sharp messag...

Good times and bad times, as we all know, are determined by state budget crunchers. A good time is one in which the state – here defined as state legislators, mostly Democrats – are wallowing in surpluses. A surplus is an excess of treasury money, here defined as the amount of money that legislators have overtaxed the citizenry. In good times, these overcharges are not returned to taxpayers. They are sometimes used to pay off debts incurred by legislators, mostly Democrats, who have not kept up payments on their obligations. To pick but one example, state teacher pensions are languishing because the state has used surpluses for purposes other than to meet its obligations to teachers. The state has not used its surpluses to pay off bonding debt because legislators know that they can fool most of the people all of the time into thinking that state bonding does not create debt. In fact, bonding creates debt – but, as we have seen, no obligation to pay it off – and overspending also create...

U.S Representative Mark Foley, as everyone must know by now, is gay. His sexual orientation makes any discussion of his fall from grace treacherous. If you are pro-gay, very likely you will argue that Foley’s disgrace was not related to his gaiety. The seduction of young female pages would have been equally repulsive. Foley was charged, as teachers are, with authority over young people, and he betrayed that trust. If you are anti-gay, you will take a quiet pleasure in his undoing and may hint that his sexual orientation, as well as his alcoholism, is primarily responsible for his precipitous fall. If you are an amateur psychologist – and who isn’t? – you might adopt the view that his frequent denials of his homosexuality forced him to wear a social mask that that could only lead to disaster. Had Foley been out of the closet, he might have been a little more circumspect and less self destructive. In fact, the amateur psychologist might reason, Foley’s e-mails, were a tearing away of the...

The length of a politician’s coattails is proportional to the vigor of his – or, in the present case, her – campaign. The more vigorous the campaign, the longer the coattails. That is the lesson of the highly successful Republican campaign associated with the “Contract with America”, a document cobbled together by Dick Armey from Ronald Reagan’s 1985 State of the Union address. The real danger in a lackluster campaign waged by Gov. Jodi Rell is that she may not perceive the connection between idea-based, vigorous campaigns and coattails. The temptation popular governors and other politicians fall prey to, with predictable results, is to use their popularity as a skate board to coast into office. It is generally assumed, wrongly, that a strong top ticket will pull lesser politicians into a winning orbit. That assumption may have been true in the glory days of political parties, when voters regularly pulled party levers and were guided by strong party leaders; but those halcyon days in w...

It didn’t take long for the snake to rear its corrupting head in progressivism’s Garden of Eden. Sadly, it would appear that everyone – even the white knights of Daily Kos, like their patron, billionaire supporter George Soros -- are in it for the money. The Hartford Advocate , a sister publication of the Hartford Courant, has noted in a story, “Just Kos?, that the struggle between the New Republic, a center left puiblication, and Daily Kos, the epitome of far leftism, parallels closely the division within the Democrat Party between primary challenger Ned Lamont and sitting Senator Joe Lieberman. The flare-up between the New Republic and dailykos.com has parallels with the Connecticut Democratic primary race between incumbent Senator Joe Lieberman and Greenwich businessman Ned Lamont. First, it exemplifies the conflict between the hawkish, centrist wing of the party (the New Republic /Lieberman) and the anti-war left (liberal blogs/Lamont). “But besides ideological similarities, allegi...

There is a scene in Jurassic Park in which the driver in a vehicle looks in his rear view mirror and sees for the first time a Tyrannosaurs Rex gaining on him; a little white message on the mirror informs us that “objects may be bigger than they appear.” Alfred Hitchcock would have loved that touch. Mayors John DeStefano and Dannel Malloy, both in hot pursuit of Democrat primary votes, have not glanced in their rear view mirrors lately. The one thing that Democrats despise -- even more than President George Bush -- is puffed up moralists; in this respect, one thinks of Sen. Joe McCarthy , beset with personal problems and an aggressive moralist, charging that one of Joseph Welch’s attorneys had ties to a communist organization. Welch, a Boston lawyer the Army had hired to represent it in the Army/McCarthy hearings promptly denounced McCarthy with the scorching words, "Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness." And when McCarth...

Tom D’Amore, who joined the Ned Lamont campaign a few months ago, is former Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker’s former major domo. At one point, Weicker shoehorned D’Amore into the chairmanship of the Republican Party. The party’s central committee swallowed hard and voted him in. D’Amore also is a stormy petrel, a bird whose presence announces the coming of a storm. Weicker is the storm. Weicker and his lovely wife Claudia held a well attended fund raiser for Lamont in Chester on Sunday. Claudia is a Democrat; Weicker is still an Independent Maverick-- which, translated into Connecticut-speak, would make him a Democrat. Weicker’s face has been popping up here and there in various venues for the last few months. Recently appearing with Mark Davis of WTHN channel 8, Weicker was asked whether sour grapes figured at all in his support of Lamont, who is challenging Weicker’s nemesis, Senator Joe Lieberman, in a Democrat primary. Lieberman hitched up with conservatives and battered Republ...

State Republicans in Connecticut must be a bit envious of their national party. Even ardent Democrats who believe that President George Bush is an imbecile – a dwindling number as more and more Republicans are added to the U.S. Congress – allow that the Republicans, led by uber-advisor Karl Rove, the putative brains behind the throne, did a magnificent job in showing Sen. John Kerry the door. While their national counterparts were expanding their political power, State Republicans were losing seats in the legislature. And only last week Lieutenant Governor Kevin Sullivan, formerly the President Pro Tem of the state senate, acting on behalf of Governor Jodi Rell, who was on a vacation not paid for by state contractors, unburdened himself of the following sentiment: "It is outrageous that our state would be seen nationally as the place to buy an illegal license. Worse still, it appears that state authorities failed to act for weeks after being informed by the media investigation tha...