The Unpleasantness At The Bridgeport Club

There has been some mild grumbling from Connecticut’s status quo media over the Bridgeport vote count.

The Day of New London, pointing to “the debacle in Bridgeport,” said it was an inauspicious beginning to the Malloy administration. Malloy’s “rush to Hartford to declare himself the next governor before any official result was inappropriate and smacked of a power grab.”

George Washington Plunkitt, the Tammany Hall boss, would have prospered in Connecticut’s modern day Democratic Party. If the old boy, honest to a fault, were writing editorials, he might say, “What’s the beef? The Democrats stole the election fair and square.”

The Day’s editorial answered its own objection: “Yet as votes continued to trickle in from New Haven and Bridgeport on Thursday, it became increasingly apparent that the Democrat would emerge from the process with a narrow lead over Republican opponent Tom Foley.”

What we have here is a political indelicacy, anxious Democrats perhaps too ready to rule, bad manners at worse. It will all disappear after Dan goes to Hartford. Tomorrow or the next day or the day after, we’ll all look back on this unfortunate incident and laugh. And there will be plenty of editorialists in the state, the majority of whom write for papers that endorsed Malloy, to make sure the laugh is on Bridgeport. In any case, the right people got in. And that’s what matters isn’t it?

According to Capitol Report, ex-Republican senator and Independent Governor Lowell Weicker has favored us with a comment:

“Weicker says Bysiewicz, Malloy wrong

'No matter what ensues, it's an affront to our Democratic principles and to the State of Connecticut that a Democratic Secretary of State declared an unofficial winner, only to have that unofficial winner enter the State Capitol announcing his Governorship and staff.

p.s. I did not vote for Tom Foley.'”

P.P.S. Go away.

So distraught was Weicker, who did not vote for Tom Foley (Translation: He voted for Malloy) that he rang up his friend Colin McEnroe, the humorist, and thundered in his ear, “I never thought I'd see the day when a candidate who hadn't been officially elected would show up at the State Capitol and claim he had the job!"

P.P.P.S. Please, go away.

Connecticut’s only state-wide newspaper, The Hartford Courant, groused, “… there sure has been a lot of uncharacteristic bumbling by officials in the Land of Steady Habits this election season.”

Yup. Sure enough.

Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz bumbled herself out of a gubernatorial slot because she wanted to be attorney general – which is to Connecticut politics what bling is to high fashion – then she bumbled herself out of that spot into the state supreme court, which ruled she didn’t have enough court experience to be attorney general. But before leaving office, Bysiewicz managed to perform one last service for her party by blinking while some cretin shorted Bridgeport of ballots. On orders from an obliging judge – the same overruled judge, it happens, who found Bysiewicz fit to be attorney general -- the polling doors in Bridgeport were left open in certain sections of the city so that Democratic Party operatives could quickly harvest just enough votes to swing the election to Malloy, who no doubt will be grateful as governor and give Bysiewicz a buss on the cheek and a refrigerated spot in state government until she is ready to decide what she wants to do with the rest of her political life.

Mark Pazniokas of CTMirror presented a straight faced account of the Bridgeport bumbles that put Malloy over the top.
 
Dennis House of WFSB has shown a video inside a Bridgeport polling place that captures the chaos, along with a spot featuring Mayor Jason McCoy of Vernon who was present at the polling place.. McCoy detailed several irregularities – multiple ballots given out to voters, bags of ballots left unattended -- every one of which should have triggered a recount and a thorough investigation by authorities unconnected with status quo politics in Connecticut.

In the meantime, some Republicans have compiled an unofficial count of all the commentators in the state of steady Democratic habits who voted in their editorials for Malloy and who, like Weicker, did not vote for Foley.

Foley: 3

Malloy: Everyone else.

These quibbles aside, the main thing is – the right guy stole the election fair and square. The only people who have a problem with that are not in office and not affiliated with members of the state's status quo media, most of whom would not be able to find Al Capone if he were hiding under their beds.