Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders has been puttering in politics only four years longer than U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, and the two may have more in common than most suppose. Both were born in New York and entered politics about the same time, Sanders in 1981 as Mayor of Burlington, Vermont, and Blumenthal in 1985 as a member of Connecticut’s State House of Representatives. Neither political career has been marred by service in the private marketplace. Both are East Coast, secularized, cultural Jews. That is, they are Jews who have shaken the dust of orthodoxy from their feet. Religious discipline is too confining for either, and their attitude toward heterodoxy parallels that of Ahab in Melville’s Moby Dick: “Speak not to me of blasphemy, man. I’d strike the sun if it dared insult me.” Blumenthal, in particular is well known as a champion of abortion provider Planned Parenthood. An orthodox Jewish Rabbi once was asked what the position of cultural Jews on abortion was. “...

“Embattled” is a word you do not want waltzing around with your name on the eve of a U.S. Congressional election. “Embattled 5th District Congress candidate Chris Donovan,” the Register Citizen reported , “in a taping of WFSB TV’s ‘Face the State’ Thursday, said he has no plans to quit the race even if his campaign’s troubles start to adversely affect other Democrats and party leaders urge him to leave. Mr. Donovan is under scrutiny by the FBI for campaign financing irregularities. His campaign finance director, Robert Braddock, is under arrest for having conspired to hide the identity of certain donors allegedly involved in influence peddling; and other Donovan connected officials, two of whom are directly connected with his U.S. Senate campaign, have been named in an affidavit supporting the arrest of Mr. Braddock. Thanks to some impressive digging and nagging by a host of reporters , the influence peddlers –tagged anonymously in the affidavit as CC1, CC2 and CC3 -- have now bee...

Former Speaker of the state House Jim Amann, the Wicked Stepmother to Gov. Jodi Rell’s Snow White, has decided he would rather not be governor. The road to this decision for Amann has been a winding one. As Speaker Amann was regarded by some as a “fiscal conservative,” a vanishing breed within the Democratic Party. He stepped out of the House in favor of the present Speaker, Chris Donovan, once and forever a union leader and not, even his most ardent admirers may admit, a conservative anything. "I'm just a beach kid from Milford, Connecticut,'' Amann told the crowd that saw him off. "Never in my wildest dreams did I think I could run for governor.'' A dwindling number of moderates in the Democratic Party regarded Amann, a plainspoken man, as a Harry Truman type. Truman was, of course, the Stalin bashing president who launched the United States on the road to containment of the Soviet Union, a steadfast course pursued by several presidents whose determi...

There is no log cabin in Lieutenant Governor Mike Fedele’s biography, but it’s an interesting read anyway: Born in Italy, Fedele came to the United States as a tot, worked hard and made good. He was plucked by Jodi Rell from the State House of Representatives to run as her Lieutenant Governor following the dark days of the John Rowland administration. Fedele now is running for governor on the Republican Party ticket, and there are some perilous cliffs he must negotiate along the way. The position of Lieutenant Governor is not the brightest spot in the political heavens. It is comparable on a state level to the Vice Presidential office, famously defined by John Nance Garner, Franklin Roosevelt’s Vice President, as being (a clean translation follows) “not worth a warm bucket of spit.” Garner ran for the presidency and lost to Roosevelt but was chosen by the Democratic convention to share the ticket after he had released his pledged delegates to FDR. Garner later opposed Roosevel...

In the first few weeks of his presidency, Barack Obama has been, true to his word, an active president. He produced a “stimulus package” that represents a massive intrusion of the federal government into the private market place, an extension of a program hastily developed during the last frenetic days of the Bush administration. He has taken steps to keep his campaign promise to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, though it is still undecided what do with “detainees” such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed , the mastermind of the 9/11 attack on New York. The President has sent former diplomatic wunderkind George Mitchell to the Middle East to broker a peace between warring factions in Israel. And he has shown that his Middle East policy prescriptions during the campaign were serious by opening an entente with the Arab World. Iran, very much a part of that world, promises to be his stone of stumbling. The US-based International Institute for Strategic Studies on Wednesday conclud...

As seen from the left, both in the United States and in Europe, Barack Obama’s recent trip was a signal failure. What, it may be asked, did the left expect of him? They expected a clear repudiation of President George Bush’s war policy. But Obama is subtle, and it is too much – especially in the midst of a presidential campaign – to expect clarity of him. The left has already chosen sides: Palestinians against Israel; peace, almost at any price, against war; anti-Americanism against pro-Europeanism. When Obama returned to the United States, American reporters reminded him that he was so warmly greeted in Europe because he was the anybody-but-Bush candidate, and Bush is loathed in Europe. Obama went on to explain that he had been selling unity in Germany, England and France. He had been harsh on the terrorists. He was calling upon Europeans to embrace the horror, the United States, in unity, one of the reasons he was so generously endorsed by Carla Bruni’s husband, French President Nic...

Whenever liberals in Connecticut get in trouble – not often – they like to drape the “moderate” mantel around their shoulders and strut and preen, Chanticleer-like, before Connecticut’s largely liberal press. Just look at me! This cocky imposture puts me in mind of a story told by Bill Buckley, I think at a gathering at his house in Stamford. Traveling in Ireland visiting pubs, Buckley noticed that no matter where a conversation began, it ultimately was steered in the direction of religion. Someone had mentioned a prominent local atheist, and Buckley, taken aback, remarked, “You mean to say there are atheists in Ireland!!!” Oh yes, he was told – “But you have to understand: There are Catholic atheists and Protestant atheists.” In Connecticut, there are liberal moderates, many of whom write for newspapers, and conservative moderates. But really – wink, wink – the whole lot is programmatically liberal. Colin McEnroe, a talk show gabber, is instinctively liberal, as is his sometime gues...