Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

“If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.” The saying was attributed to President Harry Truman by a playwright, but just because Truman may not have coined the phrase does not make it any the less true. Washington DC can be a cutthroat corner of the world. This is not to say that all well-mannered pols have cashed in their chips and left the casino in the hands of brutes. Some U.S. Senators still feel that politics should not be a murderous affair. If you do catch your enemy in a compromising position, it would be prudent to leave open a back door through which he might escape with his honor intact. Your enemy will appreciate the graceful gesture and, perhaps in some future encounter, pause and consider before he draws the knife across your throat”  

                                                                                    Q: Who are the Trump supporters? A: Right now, they are, for the most part, people who are unattached, emotionally or ideologically, to either of the two major parties. The Obama administration has abandoned altogether what used to be called moderate, Reagan Democrats. Some of these people, left in the lurch by progressives, have crossed over to vote for Trump. He is running very strong among Republican, Democrat and unaffiliated white males. Within the narrower category of alienated moderate Republicans and Democrats, there are numerous sub-groups: resentment Republicans and Democrats, people who have, in one way or another, been slighted by what they refer to, disdainfully, as the party ...

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.