The Connecticut GOP And The New Democratic Progressives

Below is an address given to the Westbrook Republican Town Committee on the occasion of the 15th annual John A. Holbrook Awards Dinner

It’s wonderful having the opportunity to speak with you. Lee wrote to me back in February inviting me here. I told him it would be a great honor for me and that the title of the talk would be something on the order of “Whither The Republican Party? And he wrote back a note: “Gee Don, I hope you don’t plan to whither us too much.” I knew then we could have a little fun tonight. However, I do want to advise everyone that to forestall confusion the title of this talk has been changed to “The Connecticut GOP And The New Democratic Progressives.”

I’ll post it on my blog site – Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes From A Blue State – for anyone here who nods off during the presentation. If you  Google “Don Pesci” in quotes, the site will come up. The quotes are important because, if you leave them off, you’re likely to get a bunch of stuff on Joe Pesci. He’s the guy with all the bodies in his trunk. For some reason, people sometimes confuse me with him.

One of the distinguishing marks of the Republican Party is that Republicans really do like to have fun. Democrats, as a rule, are too busy arranging the order of stars in the belt of Orion to pause to enjoy the good things of life. Has anyone in the past few years seen a more sober mug than that of Governor Dannel Malloy, Connecticut’s stand-in for that old progressive sourpuss Woodrow Wilson? I speak only of Mr. Malloy’s public persona. I’m sure he’s a barrel of laughs in private.

Tonight I hope to review the state Republican Party’s near past and then survey briefly some positive portents.

I’d like to begin with a little story about Bill Buckley and the media of his day. Things in the Northeast have not changed much. In Connecticut especially, beneficial change is agonizingly slow. Unlike Mr. Malloy, Bill was an Irishman who loved laughter, song, and ideas. Watching Bill playing with an idea was a little bit like watching Bach fingering a harpsichord keyboard. You just knew he was going to make celestial music out of his improvisations. Most of the music was wasted on the New York Times. The editors at the paper had little appreciation of stirring conservative political ideas, a failure of good taste that persists at the paper even today.

Someone persuaded Bill to run for mayor of New York against Abe Beame and John Lindsay, a left of center Republican who later drifted over to the Democratic Party. In due course, a reporter asked Bill what he would do if he actually won the contest. “I would demand a recount,” said Bill. Sure, sure. But if he were to be elected, what would he do? "Hang a net outside the window of the editor of the New York Times," to catch the falling bodies.

The French have a saying: “The more things change, the more they remain the same.”

The leeching of journalists into the Democratic Party continues apace. The percentage of full-time U.S. journalists who claim to be Republican dropped from 18 percent in 2002 to 7.1 percent in 2013, according to a recent study by Indiana University professors Lars Willnat and David Weaver. In 1971, when Bill released “Inveighing We Will Go,” a collection of his current columns, 25.7 percent of journalists polled had identified as Republican.

Some people in this room may think the seven percent figure a little high. In Connecticut, it feels like .007 percent.

Yesterday, the Big Apple had its Lindsays. Today, the state has its Cuomos – and, most recently, its Sandinista mayor of New York City, Bill De Blasio. And, of course, it retains its much less influential New York Times. And here in Connecticut we have our Weickers and our Malloys and, of course, our much diminished Hartford Courant. Taken all in all, this is why Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan’s red carpet, once said “If you lop off the Northeast and California, you’ve got a pretty good country.”

In Connecticut Commentary, I’ve gone to considerable trouble to point out the striking similarities between Mr. Malloy and former Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker – who once fittingly characterized himself as “the turd in the Republican Party punchbowl.” See: Republicans have punchbowls. They’re a happy group.

Both Mr. Weicker and Mr. Malloy came into office when the state was laboring under a weight of massive debt caused by – no one in this room will be surprised – massive spending. Both Mr. Weicker and Mr. Malloy arrived at the same remedy -- massive taxation.  Mr. Weicker draped around all our necks a burdensome income tax yoke. Mr. Malloy was content to raise all those niggling little taxes that Mr. Weicker’s more comprehensive solution to debt was designed to exorcise. Mr. Malloy ended up authoring the largest tax increase in state history, leaving even Mr. Weicker in the progressive dust. Connecticut’s equivalent of the New York Times, the Hartford Courant, sent up a rousing cheer. No need for a net there – not yet. The Malloy long term spending cuts, in turned out, were made of fairy dust. During the next post-election year, Connecticut is looking forward to a debt of some $1.5 billion, according to the bean counters in the Office of Policy Management.

Welcome back to square one. 

Both Mr. Weicker and Mr. Malloy are progressives. At the root of progressivism lies the sundering notion that if government is good, more government must be better. From here it is but a baby step to the equally absurd notion that government is the state. In fact, the state is all of us, the government merely an administrative apparatus designed, if you credit the U.S. and State Constitutions, to accomplish our reason informed will. Mr. Weicker, whose ego as U.S. Senator and Governor was infinitely expansive, took this absurd logic a step further and regarded himself as the state. I should like to call your attention to the hopeful tense in that last sentence: Mr. Weicker was, he regarded– past tense: There is a God.

But it never hurts to remind ourselves that there is a Devil too.

From time to time, Mr. Weicker shows up, most often at WNPR or in the op-ed section of the Courant, to advise Republicans what they must do to become a majority party. You will never guess: They must field candidates like Mr. Weicker. But these days only progressives pay him much mind, because they alone are interested in tossing turds into punchbowls.

You’ve heard the expression: It’s always darkest before the dawn? Over the past few years, it has become possible to hope that a Republican dawn may yet arrive. To be sure, the same old evil spirits hang like a dark aureole around the rising sun. The Courant is still the Courant. Progressives occupy all the heights in Connecticut’s political arena – including the governor’s office, a majority position in both houses of the General Assembly, the entire U.S. Congressional delegation and all Connecticut’s constitutional offices. What we used to call in the old days “the climate of opinion” is still a silly mixture of utopian fantasy and political palliatives.  The old political heresies – including the anticipated arrival of a political superman, the god of the polis who will with a stroke of his pen banish all our fears and inaugurate a long hoped for Eden – still persist, like the ragged ends of a recurring nightmare. Connecticut’s left of center commentariet would like us to believe that conservatives are responsible for this sad state of affairs – even though, asked to name one conservative governor or two or three conservative members of the General Assembly, they would be tongue-tied --  for once.

But – be of good cheer. There are rays of light, tokens marking the end of a long twilight slumber.

Let me tell you what some of them are.

First of all, the pinch is on, and people – proletarians, not the One-Percenters – are feeling the pinch. Nothing is quite as effective as a pinch to wake you up.

The Malloyalists may have noted with some alarm the Hartford Courant’s post-budget editorial, “Gimmicks From The Anti-Gimmick Governor,” in which the editorial board, usually friendly to all tax increases and gubernatorial spendthrifts, chastised Mr. Malloy for using “gimmicks to paper over deficits.” In his first campaign for governor, Mr. Malloy flailed former Republican governors for having done the same thing.

All the polls have turned into gibbets for Malloyalists. The latest poll shows an alarming 49 percent of Connecticut’s overtaxed and overregulated citizens would bolt the state for greener pastures elsewhere if given their druthers. In one of his recent columns, ominously titled “Will Connecticut Ever Get An Opposition Party?" Chris Powell writes:

“… advocacy groups purporting to represent the neediest just observe silently as state government finds billions of dollars to spend on pork-barrel projects like the bus highway from Hartford to New Britain, corporate welfare, binding arbitration of public employee union contracts that puts government's biggest single cost outside democratic control, defined-benefit pensions for government employees, subsidies for childbearing outside marriage, drug criminalization, social promotion in schools, what is called farmland preservation, and such.” Kowtowing to such special interests rather than representing the general good insures, Mr. Powell writes, “that spending is never cut.”

The progressive palliatives – most especially the notion that a dollar removed from the private marketplace and re-allocated by politicians adds to the wealth of the state – have run aground on the rocks of reality. A close reading of Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” might have dispelled this destructive fallacy. But progressives are more inclined to read “Dreams From My Father,” President Barack Obama’s “fact based” autobiography, than they are likely to read Adam Smith or Ludwig von Mises, the author of “Human Action,” or Friedrich Hayek, the author of “The Constitution of Liberty” or, for that matter, anything written by Bill Buckley.

Here in Connecticut, Mr. Malloy has followed the same progressive campaign script as the one now being promoted by the Obama administration, a sort of updated version of Robinhoodism – with this important difference: Robin of Sherwood took from the idle rich – most of whom were made rich, it should be pointed out, by their close association with political power brokers – and gave to the poor. Mr. Malloy, masterful in fooling most of the people most of the time, has taken huge gobs of money from the working class and given millions of dollars to multi-million dollar companies that gratefully accept handouts from politicians hungry for campaign donations. Mr. Malloy was able to dispense these giveaways after having first broadening the tax base so that nail salon owners, who had previously escaped the taxman’s hang noose, would be able to participate in his “shared sacrifice.” I know of no Democratic politician who, following this imposition on the proletariat, has yet accused Democrats of conducting a war on women’s salons. A young man I know who left the state for greener pastures elsewhere told me that as soon as he heard the expression “shared sacrifice,” he knew he would be fleeced.   

In some columns, I’ve called Mr. Malloy “Connecticut’s crony capitalist in chief” and – I like this one -- “Governor Bling.” No Republican running for any office this year should fear that a charge of crony capitalism brought against Mr. Malloy or any of his Democratic associates in the Gener4al assembly, will boomerang and harm real capitalists. We arrest bank robbers because we are able to make the important distinction between bank robbers and bankers. It is because progressives cannot make reasonable distinctions that so many of our young people, the beneficiaries of very expensive tax supported colleges in Connecticut, are taking their diplomas to other states. Here in Connecticut, we appear for the moment to be satisfied with a progressive government; other less predatory governors and legislators are content with progress.

Here is another ray of sunshine.  More Republicans in Connecticut are identifying themselves publicaly as conservative – which means more Republicans have been moved by progressive whips and scorns toward a political position that might accurately be described by those who can tell their right from their left as “right of center.” And they are no longer persuaded by passé editors who think – absurdly – that Mr. Weicker was a “moderate Republican” or that Mr. Malloy can pull Connecticut out of its nosedive by taking taxes from nail salon owners and giving them to Aetna Insurance Company.  These are hopeful signs that the long Weickerian captivity of the Republican Party in Connecticut has come to an end.

Nationally -- and increasingly in Connecticut -- Democrats are attempting to refashion a new and winning coalition of voters. The political world is no longer divided only into the “haves and “have not’s.” Democrats have cut up the body politic into numerous pieces: women, against whom they suppose Republicans have made war; unionized teachers, traditional allies of the Democratic Party; minority groups; the permanent government, mostly unionized state and federal workers; malleable students caught in the briar patch of progressive academia; left of center media outlets; progressive billionaires who do not yet feel the ropes about their necks – remember Lenin’s promise that after the proletariat had seized the means of production, their victorious enemies would hang the bourgeois with the rope they had so obligingly given to them --  and other groups too numerous to mention.  The ambition of new progressives such as Mr. Obama and Mr. Malloy is to fashion a political credo that will capture the minds and hearts, not to mention the votes and political contributions, of all these disparate groups.

If you are able to meld these body parts into a political force, you needn’t worry too much about traditional political groupings such as churches, normative family configurations or political parties. Government, George Washington said, is force—which is why, he thought, it should be used sparingly. And force in a democratic republic involves the building of coalitions, temporary or not.  Think of the temporary coalition as a sort of Trojan Horse, an artful engine of destruction deployed to secure a desired political end. The end is the capture of the city or the state or the nation. And some who have been paying attention to the destructive progressive programs of Mr. Obama might well conclude that his end in view is the destruction of traditional and familiar coalitions of power. The Trojans were confident that the matchless walls and towers of Troy could withstand any assault. But wily Odysseus found a way.

There is one solid conclusion that may be drawn from a party of this kind that feeds on energy drawn from elliptical interests, and that is this: the Democratic Party – certainly nationally, and now within Connecticut as well – is no longer a centrist party. Still less is it a moderate party. It is, to use a word much in favor with demagogic progressives whenever they are inclined to hurl rhetorical thunderbolts at Republicans, an “extremist” party. And if the less than seven percent of journalists in Connecticut who are Republicans were, say, twice that figure, the obvious imposture would be twice as obvious.  

Twenty years ago, political commentators used to refer admiringly to the “vital center.” That center has all but disappeared within the new progressive Democratic Party – led down the road to perdition by utopian supermen such as Mr. Obama and, closer to home, Mr. Malloy.

Progressivism is a very old political creed; it sprang from the religion infused prairie populism of the post-Civil War period and found its earliest national expression within the Republican Party of Teddy Roosevelt, the Bull-Mooser. But the new progressivism of Mr. Obama, Nancy Pelosi, her Connecticut counterpart, U. S. Representative Rosa DeLauro and, so it would appear, U.S. Senators Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, really is a Trojan Horse of a different color. It is a movement pushed forward by hard leftists and some overly nostalgic Democrats who look back upon the depression and post-depression years of Franklin Roosevelt as the golden age of their party.

So then, once we have established, as I’ve briefly and inadequately tried to do here, a clear view of what used to be called the “correlation of forces,” the all-important question arises: What should Republicans do to right our state and country?

The short answer to that question is this: The party should become less like Mr. Weicker and more like Mr. Buckley; which is to say – the party should unapologetically and energetically embrace conservative ideas, the only effective antidote to a wayward and destructive progressivism.

The Republican Party in Connecticut has a rare opportunity to show others the way out of the progressive briar patch in which both the state and the GOP have lingered for nearly half a century.

We know where we are. In almost every important index measuring progress and prosperity, Connecticut lags far behind other states. We know how we got here. Democrats and moderate Republicans have led us into the Dark Forest of a Grimm fairy tale. We spend too much; we regulate creative capital too often, and destructively; we have become for all practical purposes a one-party state, and one-party states are notoriously corrupt enterprises; we have fallen into the crony capitalism trap; we have abandoned our cities to solicitous Democrats who have constructed gorgeous gilded cages for the poor; we have accepted uncritically such idiotic and false categories as “social conservatives” and “economic conservatives” – rather as if conservative economic prescriptions will never affect the nature of society; rather as if destructive progressive prescriptions will never effect our economic condition. If you surrender the social sphere to progressives, it will be only a matter of time before they claim ownership of the economic sphere, and that is exactly what happened during the last presidential contest.

In the thrice told fairy tale, it is most often the third son or daughter who leads the way out of the perilous forest – usually after marking the way into the forest by laying down a path of beans. The way out then becomes the way in – in reverse. It is the third son and the third daughter who is, of all the siblings, the most beautiful, the most courageous, the most resourceful, the most determined and the most intelligent.

You here in this room – every one of you – very likely have the courage, the fortitude and the intelligence to become that third son or daughter. The way we get out of a difficulty is to reverse the way we got into it, and let no wicked sorcerer on the way tell you that the way home is not forward progress.

It may be proper to end this retrospective and prospective view by quoting Bill Buckley crying out from the center of the Dark Forest, way back in 1955, immediately after he had launched National Review magazine:

“We have nothing to offer but the best that is in us. That, a thousand Liberals who read this sentiment will say with relief, is clearly not enough! It isn’t enough. But it is at this point that we steal the march. For we offer, besides ourselves, a position that has not grown old under the weight of a gigantic, parasitic bureaucracy, a position untempered by the doctoral dissertations of a generation of Ph.D’s in social architecture, unattenuated by a thousand vulgar promises to a thousand different pressure groups, uncorroded by a cynical contempt for human freedom. And that, ladies and gentlemen, leaves us just about the hottest thing in town.”

It’s always liberating, isn’t it, to hew fast to a view that places you on the cutting edge of real progress? 

Before I leave the rostrum, I’d like to fold in with your own my applause for Marilyn Giuliano, whom you are honoring here tonight. I don’t want to damn Mrs. Giuliano with extravagant praise – often the kiss of political commentators is the kiss of death – but I may say she is an extraordinarily bright and accomplished legislator who serves on very important committees: education, appropriations and program review. You already know that.  Westbrook, and the whole of the 23^rd House District, appears to be well represented. So too in the State Senate: Art Linares certainly has a promising career ahead of him. The rest of the state should be so fortunate.

I’d like to thank everyone for making it possible for me to speak to you tonight and, if you have not already had too much of me, I’ll take a few of your questions.

Blumenthal, Benghazi And The Difference It Makes

Dick Blumenthal, the nation’s first full time consumer protection senator, has now weighed in on merchants who “may be selling lower quality items produced specifically for outlet stores without properly informing consumers,” according to a Philadelphia television station.

The Senator has asked the Federal Trade Commission to examine claims that merchants have misled consumers in their ads. “There’s a lot of evidence,” Blumenthal breathlessly told the television consumer protection watchdog in Philadelphia, “that people shopping at outlet malls or at outlet establishments have no idea that goods and merchandise are made specifically for outlet malls.”

Naturally, preventive legislation is needed.

On foreign policy issues of national importance, Benghazi for instance, the senator has been less voluble. But that is because Mr. Blumenthal is not interested in regulating foreign affairs – just outlet malls. In fact, political consumers may be unaware that U.S. Congresspersons generally are uninterested in regulating foreign policy or budgets or administration officials who deprive Congress of the data the greatest deliberative body on earth needs to satisfy its Constitutional obligations or, of equal importance, its own ungovernable appetite for regulating everything that moves and breathes outside Congressional precincts. Mr. Blumenthal’s own Congressional site carries only a brief pro forma, seven line expression of “outrage and sadness” issued the day after the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi.

And you thought you sent your senator to Washington to hold responsible high administration officials who failed to protect or come to the aid of an ambassador to Libya murdered by – dare it be said? – Islamic terrorists.

Silly you.

In High School, your civics text – if you had the advantage of a civics text – mentioned a division of powers as a check on presidential presumption. The Constitution, an ancient but never-the-less useful document dating from 1787, invests the President with war powers and assigns to Congress auxiliary powers that also shape foreign policy. Constitutionally, Congress is the voice of conscience perched on the shoulder of any president who has Napoleonic ambitions.

Chris Stevens, the ambassador murdered in Libya by Islamic terrorists, was the personal representative of the President of the United States, as are all ambassadors.

Following the murder of the personal representative of President Barack Obama and the brave military personnel who came to his aid -- Sean Smith and two Navy Seals, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, all slaughtered by militant Al-Qaida connected terrorists -- members of the administration fanned out to spread the lie that those who led the assault on the annex in Benghazi were “protestors” agitated by a film that had insulted, peace be upon him, the prophet Muhammad.

Persistent investigations by oversight Congressional committees and a cache of e-mails  secured by Judicial Watch on a Freedom of Information demand has now shown that the Obama/Rice stage show was an elaborate pantomime designed to convey the message during a presidential campaign that Mr. Obama had dealt a death blow to Al-Qaida. As such, the deception was much more wicked – and deadly – than the ads that recently have excited the interest of Mr. Blumenthal.

Among the 41 documents pried loose from the Obama administration, is an e-mail from deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes that presents to then U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice four goals that were to be accomplished during Ms. Rice’s numerous television appearances days after militant Islamic terrorists murdered the ambassador and other Americans in Benghazi.

According to the e-mail, Ms. Rice was to: “… convey that the United States is doing everything that we can to protect our people and facilities abroad; To underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy; To show that we will be resolute in bringing people who harm Americans to justice, and standing steadfast through these protests; To reinforce the President and Administration’s strength and steadiness in dealing with difficult challenges.”

Only the last goal had been accomplished – temporarily – in the weeks following the terrorist attack. The attack on the U.S. Consulate did not arise from a spontaneous protest; it was not rooted in an internet video; the successful assault did point to a broader policy failure; the United States was and remains irresolute in bringing to justice people who harm Americans, particularly if they are associated with the Obama administration; and Mr. Obama’s strength and steadiness in dealing with difficult challenges – in Libya, Syria, Egypt, Iran and, most recently, Russia -- is very much in question.

Mr. Blumenthal, however, appears to be blithely unconcerned with the foreign policy mishaps of the Obama administration, preferring to focus his attention on misleading representations issued by Mall vendors. Unless he refocuses his attention pronto, history will hit him like a speeding passenger train. Mr. Blumenthal lately has devoted some of his attention to passenger trains.

Blumenthal And Lerner

U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal is not just your run of the mill senator. Mr. Blumenthal entered the U.S. Senate a little over three years ago after having spent twenty one years as Connecticut’s Attorney General.

The new Senator has had some difficulty shedding his attorney general’s skin.  Some critics in Connecticut – there are not many – occasionally refer to him teasingly as the nation’s first consumer protection congressman.

As Attorney General of Connecticut, Mr. Blumenthal often seemed to be a consumer protection firebrand armed with subpoena power. The statutory obligations of the Attorney General’s Office have little to do with suits brought on behalf of consumers such as Big Tobacco. The Connecticut Attorney General is charged principally with representing Connecticut in legal matters involving state agencies, duties and responsibilities of the office that are detailed in the Connecticut General Statutes, Section 3-125 as follows:

“The Attorney General shall have general supervision over all legal matters in which the state is an interested party, except those legal matters over which prosecuting officers have direction. He shall appear for the state, the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, the Secretary, the Treasurer and the Comptroller, and for all heads of departments and state boards, commissioners, agents, inspectors, committees, auditors, chemists, directors, harbor masters, and institutions and for the State Librarian in all suits and other civil proceedings, except upon criminal recognizances and bail bonds, in which the state is a party or is interested, or in which the official acts and doings of said officers are called in question, and for all members of the state House of Representatives and the state Senate in all suits and other civil proceedings brought against them involving their official acts and doings in the discharge of their duties.”

The transformation of the Attorney General’s office, engineered by Senators Lieberman and Blumenthal, from a sleepy constitutional operation representing state agencies in legal matters into a big-bite consumer protection watchdog, cast considerable glitter on both politicians. The lionization of the attorney general as the “people’s lawyer,” which began with Mr. Lieberman, became embarrassingly cloying during Mr. Blumenthal’s long and much publicized reign; so much so that it was often said of the ambitious Blumenthal that the most dangerous spot in Connecticut was between the attorney general and a television camera. Both former Attorneys General successfully launched their senate careers from their publicity rich springboard.

When Mr. Blumenthal joined the U.S. Congress as Connecticut’s “senior senator,” the tug of his former shtick proved irresistible. Most recently, Mr. Blumenthal has turned his efforts toward the regulation of electronic cigarettes. E-Cigs, as they are sometimes called, are non-carcinogenic, nicotine injection systems. Unlike real cigarettes, they are neither heavily taxed nor heavily regulated, and the electronic variant has moved many cigarette smokers away from a medically costly, often demonized product. To the extent that E-Cigs have weaned cigarette smokers off the weed, the unregulated product also has reduced federal and state revenue. Mr. Blumenthal’s intervention will for this reason be welcomed by tax gobbling legislators. Revenues lost from a product widely denounced as cancer causing must be replaced somehow: Why not tax E-Cigs as if they were coffin nails – even if they are not?

Ideally, one wants an official moving from the Attorney General’s office into the U.S. Senate to carry with him into his new position all his previous virtues, while leaving behind his grosser vices.

As a U.S. Senator with more than twenty years investigatory and prosecutorial experience, Mr. Blumenthal certainly is better able than other senators to defend the honor of the Congress when persons summoned by the U.S. House to offer testimony either mislead or deny to investigation committees the data congressmen need to discharge their responsibilities.

Which brings us to Lois Lerner, the head honcho of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) at a time when the IRS was effectively preventing conservative groups from exercising their constitutional rights to assemble for the purpose of engaging in political activity by subjecting such groups to extraordinary scrutiny.

Called upon by a congressional committee to give needed testimony, Ms. Lerner pronounced herself innocent of any wrongdoing and then, on the advice of counsel, proceeded to take the 5^th, thus denying Congress the data it needed to accomplish the committee’s purposes and violating both the spirit and the letter of the 5^th amendment, which does not allow testifiers to both proclaim their innocence and refuse to disgorge testimony on the grounds that doing so would tend to incriminate them.

After the IRS Inspector General reported that the once impartial Internal Revenue Service had targeted 248 conservative Tea Party organizations for extra scrutiny, Mr. Blumenthal issued a ritualistic denunciation of the agency, but he has been mum ever since, an unusual posture for the media-seeking Blumenthal. One can only imagine the rhetoric that would have flowed from Attorney General Blumenthal had any witness he summoned for interrogation publically announced their innocence of wrongdoing and then retreated behind the 5^th amendment.

When Mr. Blumenthal was given an opportunity to vote in favor of an amendment that would have declared it “unlawful for any officer of the Internal Revenue Service to, regardless of whether the officer or employee is acting under the color of law, willfully act with the intent to injure, oppress, threaten, intimidate or single out and subject to undue scrutiny for purposes of harassment any person or organization of any state – (1) based solely or primarily on the political, economic or social positions held or expressed by the person or organization; or 2) because the person or organization has expressed a particular political, economic, or social position using any words of writing allowed by law” the senator’s starched scruples gave way, and he voted, along with eight other Democratic Senators, none of whom were up for election in 2014, to kill the amendment.

In any contest between scruples and party loyalty, the usual congressman would not hesitate to bury his scruples. Mr. Blumenthal, it was sometimes thought, was above party flackdom.

Not anymore.

The Permanent Opposition

On April 5^th, a year after Connecticut’s predominantly Democratic General Assembly had passed into law the most restrictive gun legislation in the nation, opponents of the legislation rallied on the North side of the Capitol in Hartford.

The event was well attended: Capitol police estimated the crowd at 3,000; those hosting the event, the Connecticut Citizens Defense League (CCDL), placed the figure at 5,000. None of those present at the rally had been called upon by the General Assembly to offer testimony on the final bill, which itself was billed as an adequate and necessary response to a mass slaying at the Newtown Sandy Hook Elementary School. The final bill was passed without a public hearing by a legislature operating in the absence of information contained in a much too delayed criminal investigation.

Governor Dannel Malloy – once a prosecutor who, Mr. Malloy has often said, had tried criminal cases – declared at the time that the data contained in the criminal report was quite unnecessary; Mr. Malloy and the legislature knew enough about the events surrounding the massacre at Sandy Hook to write legislation that would in the future serve to prevent such occurrences everywhere in the state. The gun regulation bill would advance the public safety, the public was assured, public safety being the primary responsibility of both national and state governments.

That was not all the governor said. Early on, Mr. Malloy, the complete politician from head to toe, seemed to understand, almost intuitively, that gun regulation might be a useful prop in the coming political campaign. Indeed, Mr. Malloy’s campaign howitzer was pointed directly at the National Rifle Association (NRA), what he regards as unreasonable defenders of the U.S. Constitution’s 2^nd Amendment, Tea Party zanies and -- a bit surprising for the head of a state that has produced few jobs since 1991 -- gun manufacturers in what had been called since the American Revolution “the provision state.” Not only gun manufacturers but large corporations such as Pratt&Whitney still provide the U.S. government with war material. Even now, Connecticut is, to turn a phrase coined by Mr. Malloy, “still revolutionary.”

And yet here was the governor of a still revolutionary state telling gun manufacturers that they cared only for profits. “What this is about,” Mr. Malloy said on one of his frequent national television appearances, “is the ability of the gun industry to sell as many guns to as many people as possible -- even if they are deranged, even if they are mentally ill, even if they have a criminal background. They don’t care. They want to sell guns” -- meaning the flinty hearts of gun manufacturers did not bleed for the innocent victims of a mass murder in Sandy Hook. These sub-humans were interested only in filthy lucre.

Compassion for the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre, the people of Connecticut were to understand, was a rare and tender emotion cherished only by politicians such as Mr. Malloy and U.S. Senators Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, all of whom were determined to blunt the outsized influence of the NRA. To date, more than a year after the slayings, Connecticut Senators Blumenthal and Murphy have not been successful in persuading U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to bring a gun restriction bill before the Democratic controlled Senate. We are given to understand that Mr. Reid is not uncompassionate; he simply lacks votes in the Democratic controlled chamber to pass a measure mirroring Connecticut’s highly restrictive gun law.

It is the insulting obduracy of Mr. Malloy and Mr. Murphy in particular  – Mr. Blumenthal has been slightly more cautious in his language – that has created what is now a permanent political opposition Connecticut. The trick in politics always is to slide your proposals, particularly pointless ones, past the noses of those deleteriously affected by them, not to bash them with inept demagoguery. Mr. Murphy and Mr. Malloy have made it impossible for their most virulent opponents to shrug off their persistent attacks as political posturing, the principal aim of which is to attract votes.

The CCDL rally in Harford, four months in the making, was by any measure a success. The large crowd -- rallying around the U.S. and State Constitutions, the flag and what they consider misguided legislation -- were animated and goal directed: Their goal, of course, was to flush anti-constitutional demons from the building they faced and to prevent further legislative encroachments on liberties hard won by the architects of the American Republic. The statues of the founders of Connecticut looked down upon them from the heights of the building. Quotes from Jefferson and Madison adorned their signs. There were scores of women and children in the crowd -- and out of state participants from New Jersey, New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Mississippi, West Virginia, about a dozen states in total, according to CCDL organizers. Most of the speakers mentioned, in one way or another, the bountiful fruits of a politics of limits: Governments were not created to put men in chains, but rather to permit men and women to guard with their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor the God given fruits of liberty heralded in the founding documents.

Himes, Blumenthal, Ukraine And The Soviet Re-Union

Speaking at ^th District U.S.  Representative Jim Himes commiserated with Ukraine, still struggling under the boot of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

St. Vladimir's Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral, 4

"The senator [U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal] and I are thrilled to be able to take a moment this morning at this very momentous and frightening time for the Ukraine to be here to express our solidarity and support for the people of the Ukraine and our unwavering support for the principle that people not just in the United States but around the world will always have the right to determine the way in which they are governed," Himes said.

Mr. Himes may not know it but placing the article “the” in front of Ukraine is a throwback to the Soviet era when Ukraine (no article) was a part of the Soviet Union: As such, it was referred to – most often by Soviet oppressors, but also by historically inattentive reporters and commentators in the United States and Europe -- as THE Ukraine.

Prior to his Stamford visit, Mr. Blumenthal had appeared before two other Ukrainian groups in New Haven and Willimantic. Mr. Blumenthal’s remarks in Stamford were general and inoffensive: "This morning and every morning, politicians may be seeking power, but the people want peace and the right to determine their own future. That has been the aspiration and dream of so many who have come to this country."

Mr. Blumenthal did not mention Mr. Putin, Russia or the Stalin induced Soviet famine in Ukraine in 1933-34.

Before Stalin’s withering hand touched Ukraine, the nation – It IS a nation – had been known since Roman times as “the breadbasket of Europe.”

Stalin wanted to bring Ukraine within the Soviet orbit, and he seized upon famine as a means of doing so. More than five million Ukrainians died in the famine caused and sustained by Stalin, whose communist storm troopers shot all the intellectuals in the country, gathered up and exported the seed grain used to plant future crops and entered small villages to destroy ovens used to produce meals. In starving villages, Ukrainians desperately fighting off famine stripped the trees of leaves and boiled them as soup. Stalin destroyed all the small farms in Ukraine and sent the kulaks, small farmers and landowners, to the Gulag later disclosed by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his book “The Gulag Archipelago.” 

The most influential reporter in the United States during the famine was Walter Duranty, whose reports on Stalin’s “Five Year Plan” earned Mr. Duranty and the New York Times a Pulitzer Prize that, even today, hangs on the Times’ wall of Pulitzers.

Mr. Duranty was, said British author Malcolm Muggeridge, the most accomlished pathological liar he had met in all his years in journalism. While Ukraine was starving, Mr. Duranty was writing in the influential Times that there was no famine in Ukraine, only spot-shortages of food. It was Mr. Muggeridge and Welsh journalist Gareth Jones who courageously defied Stalin and released news of the famine to the West. Both Mr. Muggeridge and Mr. Jones boarded trains traveling through the countryside and witnessed the famine at first hand.  Mr. Muggeridge thwarted Soviet press censorship by smuggling his stories out to The Manchester Guardian, a British newspaper, in diplomatic pouches. Mr. Jones, later murdered by communists bandits while reporting from China, also managed to penetrate the wall of silence and obfuscation best represented by Mr. Duranty’s Pulitzer. Several years ago, Ukrainians attempted to shame the Times into removing Mr. Duranty’s Pulitzer from what should have become for the paper a wall of shame.

In June 2005, Mr. Jones's niece, Dr. Siriol Colley, and her son Nigel Colley wrote a letter to the Pulitzer committee that was reviewing its previous decision and which had committed itself to a serious review of the Duranty award.

"The Pulitzer Prize should be revoked from Walter Duranty," Jones' relatives wrote, "not just for his falsification of Stalin's ruthless execution of the Five Year Plan of Collectivization, but also for his complete disregard for journalistic integrity. Through abusing his position of authority as the New York Times' reporter in the Soviet Union, he villainously and publicly denigrated the truthful articles of my uncle, and ashamedly did so, whilst being fully aware of the ongoing famine."

None of these efforts bore fruit, largely because neither the Pulitzer committee nor the publisher of the Times was capable of feeling the cleansing effects of shame. Mr. Duranty’s Pulitzer remains a bloody blot on the escutcheons of both the Pulitzer Prize Committee and the New York Times.

The weapon Mr. Putin may use most effectively against the grandchildren of Stalin’s victims is oil piped across Ukraine to Europe, which may be shut down at his whimsy. The foreign policy of Mr. Obama’s White House is feckless because Mr. Obama seems either incapable or unwilling to distinguish properly between foreign friends and enemies, the single most important determinant of any foreign policy worth the name. It does not appear from the remarks make recently by Mr. Himes and Mr. Blumenthal that either congressman has a solid understanding of the history of Russia and Ukraine, and neither Europe nor Ukraine nor any of the Baltic States nor Poland should rest comfortably in post-Cold War sanguinary expectations. The Soviet re-Union may very well begin with the humiliation of Ukraine, but it will not end there.

Governor Bling And Connecticut’s Malingering Recession

Governor Dannel Malloy, it would appear from recent news accounts, is frantically attempting to put himself right with unionized teachers.

The Malloy-teacher romance hit a rough spot when a few months ago Mr. Malloy said of teachers who were resisting his pedagogical reforms, “All they have to do is show up.”

Mr. Malloy meant that teacher tenure tended to protect failing teachers from any and all attempts to displace them. The Malloy pedagogical reforms were designed to overleap tenure and displace poor teachers by setting standards against which the effectiveness of teachers in the classroom could be objectively measured. Teachers falling below the set standards would be given the opportunity of taking remedial courses. After a certain point, if the inadequate teachers failed to measure up, they would be dismissed. Whole school systems were put on notice that similar standards would be employed to measure the performance of principals and superintendents.

The usual objection to standardized testing of teachers is that teaching itself is an art, not a science. As an art, its effects on the consumer of the pedagogical product are subtle, too evanescent to be measured with precision. The proposed tests and standards, so the objection goes, are insufficient to gauge quality teaching or, for that matter, quality education.

Mr. Malloy was having none of this. His counter argument was that the educational product can be measured; indeed, teachers measure student performance daily by means of objective tests. The inevitable effects of inadequate teaching -- thousands of uneducated students, many of them locked by circumstances into poor performing urban schools – would no longer be tolerated in a Malloy administration; such was the message Mr. Malloy managed to convey in not a few “town hall” meetings. Here, at last, was an administration prepared to put first things first.

Having settled the problem of poor education, at least theoretically, the fleet-footed Mr. Malloy “moved on,” as politicians sometimes say, to other pressing issues. Were small businesses in the state, overburdened by excessive regulations and taxes that diminished their already slim profit margins, in agony, largely as a result of new taxes imposed on them by Mr. Malloy and the progressive Democrat dominated General Assembly? Very well, Mr. Malloy would establish a program – “First Five,” later expanded to “First Whatever” – that would allow Mr. Malloy to dispense tax money to businesses, some of which were multi-billion dollar corporations in need of moving their operations a few towns away. Subtle signals were being sent to Mr. Malloy that, in the absence of tax handouts, even large businesses might move some operations to other states more welcoming than Connecticut. To these signals, Mr. Malloy responded with tax dollars.

In the crony capitalist state, such a naked attempt at polite bribery is viewed by co-conspiring politicians as a cri de coeur. They are more than happy to oblige multi-million dollar companies with crony capitalist “investments,” because such measures will not permanently deprive the politicians of tax receipts, as would reductions in business taxes. Permanent business tax reductions really would create a “level playing field,” an expression favored and overused by former Attorney General Richard Blumenthal whenever he sued a company that he supposed had gained an unfair advantage by flouting an arcane regulation.

A good part of Mr. Malloy’s strenuous effort to save the state from the logical consequences of his tax increase, the largest in state history, falls into the category of political bling.

If the state of Connecticut – and remember, l'état, c'est Malloy plus the Democrat dominated General Assembly – wanted to rid itself of poor educators and poor education, especially in urban areas, it could establish a voucher system. Under a voucher regime, money spent for education would be attached to education consumers in the form of vouchers that students, in consultation with their parents or parent, might use to purchase quality schooling anywhere in Connecticut. Over time, good schools would flourish and expand as students invested their vouchers in them, and poor schools and inadequate teachers would whither on the vine, a prospect that would nudge poorer schools towards reform.

The polite bribery of public officials by outsized corporations – gimme a tax break and I won’t bolt – could be avoided altogether through reasonable and PERMANENT business tax reductions. And a state that pruned its briar patch of sometimes pointless regulations would make itself an attractive business hub for out of state corporations that might consider moving to Connecticut once our malingering business slow-down ends. The national recession ended four years ago, but not so much here in progressive Connecticut. Additionally, such measures would “even the playing field.” Large corporations awash in lobbyists and small Mom and Pop operations would receive exactly the same business saving benefits.                 

These measures, though effective, are bound to be rejected by tax hungry progressives. A governor poor in tax receipts has little to give away. Bling is not unimportant for politicians who wish to be perceived as important, if not self-important. The thoroughgoing progressive would rather change the world than save it -- inconspicuously. Mr. Malloy feels the pressing need to reinvent Connecticut, and he wants to be seen reinventing it. So he slings the bling around. The UConn Health Center, for years a failing enterprise, was wonderfully changed by Mr. Malloy when he attached to it some bling he had pulled out of his hat, the tax absorbing Jackson Laboratory. A maintenance governor intent on returning the state to normalcy might have invested his tax money in bridge repairs rather than a blingy fast speed bus line from Hartford to New Britain, but there is little political profit in performing expected and routine gubernatorial chores.

Bling’s the thing that keeps politicians, if not the state, “moving forward.”

A Primer On Connecticut Politics: Pesci On The Media, The State Of Connecticut, Notable Politicians Past And Present

Q: Before we get to the particulars, the details where the devil lives and breathes, let me ask you some general questions.

A: Sure.

Q: When did you first start writing for newspapers?

A: I remember my first or second column for the Journal Inquirer. I’m not sure of the date. It was a column on Thurman Milner, who was then running as mayor of Hartford. Mr. Milner won the contest and became the first black mayor of a major city in Connecticut.

Q: Do you remember what the column was about?

A: I do. It has long since been consigned to the newspaper morgue at the JI…

Q: Curious that you remember.

A: No one forgets the circumstances involving the birth of their first child. The mayoralty race was well underway when the JI stumbled upon some questionable credentials presented by Mr. Milner. He had flourished a certificate from “Roachdale College.” The paper discovered the certificate was produced as a result of a dormitory scheme. In due course, a story appeared, but no other newspapers were picking up on it. Journalism, as you know, is ten percent thought and ninety percent repetition. I wrote a letter to the JI and received back a note from Chris Powell, the paper’s Managing Editor – also, at the time, the JI’s Editorial Page Editor – asking if the paper could print it as a column. I assented. Mr. Powell requested other columns, and a career of sorts was launched.  Sometime later in 1992, Mr. Powell ran for the state senate on the Republican ticket against a strong incumbent Democrat from Glastonbury. He was disappointed, but not shocked, when he lost the race. Connecticut is as blue as Herman Melville’s inscrutable blue sky. I recall joking with Mr. Powell at the time that he was setting himself up for a painful defeat because he was a journalist, and many people in the state were just itching to hang all the state’s journalists on hooks in Hell. Anyway, not to stray too far from your question, Mr. Powell later left the editorial page because someone else had been hired to take his place on the page  while he was campaigning, and perhaps he was weary wearing too many hats. He had been writing columns in the JI under his own byline since 1969 and distributing to other papers commentaries that were appearing as unsigned editorials in the JI. The new Editorial Page Editor was, I had supposed, not too comfortable with an excess of conservative opinion on his pages, and I lapsed into a hiatus of a few months. Up to that point, I had been writing for the paper for about ten years.  My temporary absence from Op-Ed pages in Connecticut was cut short by Mr. Powell, who suggested that I send future columns to a series of Connecticut papers. He was sending his column to the same papers under his own byline.  And so, here we are.

Q: I notice you chuckled twice so far: first when you said that journalism was ten percent thought and ninety percent repetition, and again when you said editors supposed their papers were non-ideological and non-partisan. What’s so funny?

A: I see I’m not going to be allowed to get away with much here, but it would be pointless to insist on a less inquisitive interlocutor. Repetition of a story lies at the very heart of journalism. Stories unfold, and essentials are always repeated. A big story – Watergate during the Nixon administration may serve as an example – is picked up by a host of papers and the elements of the story are always repeated. I’m not convinced that the tern “non-partisan” is all that useful; a paper that is partisan would not consider itself so. We should recall the birth of modern American newspapers in the post-Civil War period. Many of the leading papers of that day were unabashedly partisan, and quite a few were little more than party organs. You may have noticed that there is a synergy, shall we call it, between newspapers and politicians. One of the reasons Connecticut is called “the land of steady habits” is because its newspapers have been habitually left of center.  As incumbent politicians drift to the left, they carry the media with them; and as the newspapers go, so go remaining politicians as yet untouched by ideological imperatives. I can think of only one newspaper editorial page in the state that might reasonably be styled conservative. That would be the Waterbury Republican American.  Most of the rest are left of center. The preferred term today is “progressive,” though there are some important differences between progressives and liberals. I am speaking here of editorial opinion and perhaps the editorial prerogatives of publishers and editors.

Q: Let me interrupt you. Wouldn’t the editors of most papers in Connecticut insist their papers are moderate?... Another smirk!

A: That defense might have been true in Connecticut a few decades ago. Times change. I would argue that the very standard by which one may calculate the ideological posture of the media in Connecticut has shifted to the left. But it is true: Most reporters, editors and commentators working today might consider themselves moderate. They have said that, and they are wrong. The claim to moderation is a conscience salve. You just rub a little “moderation” on your editorial page and you have proofed yourself against the charge that you are left of center. Most newspapers in Connecticut allow national conservative commentators to ventilate on their Op-Ed pages. This is a painless concession to moderation and “fair-play.” There may be a conservative Op-Ed writer or two ventilating about state politics in Connecticut newspapers; if so, they have not yet disturbed the political universe. Presently [This self-interview was conducted at the end of January, 2014], Connecticut’s gubernatorial office is held by a Democrat who appears often as possible marching energetically in union picket lines. Governor Dannel Malloy has gone to some trouble to identify himself publically as a progressive Democrat. Most of his PR initiatives are readily identifiable as progressive. He is comfortable with the progressive policy prescription of President Barack Obama. All the leadership positions in the General Assembly are held by progressives. The state’s entire U.S. Congressional delegation is Democratic, and Democratic voters in the state, many of whom are not progressive but who reflexively vote the party line, outnumber Republicans by a ratio of two to one. The old Democratic Party apparatus one associates with Tammany Hall is still very strong in Connecticut’s cities. The operative axioms that underlie Mr. Malloy’s first two budgets are progressive, and none more so than the tax increase in his first budget, the largest in Connecticut history, as well as his venture into crony capitalism. Moderate Democrats in the state have long since been consigned to the dustbin of political history. Moderate Republicanism -- as represented by the three “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” past members of the state’s U.S. Congressional delegation -- is a desiccated corpse. The same is true in the Democratic Party. All moderate Democrats have been put out to pasture. A Bill O’Neill or an Ella Grasso today would be moldering on the back benches of Connecticut’s progressive Democratic Party. This is the real universe of decisive political facts that shapes Connecticut politics. The liberal to progressive mass has a strong gravitational pull on the media. If we ask ourselves -- “How did things get this way? Why is Connecticut, for all practical purposes, broke?”  -- it seems to me proper to lay much of the responsibility on the shoulders of Connecticut’s left of center media. A stronger resistance to the progressive, leftward drift might have given us a more moderate configuration, but Connecticut’s media has for the past few decades simply succumbed to the gravitational pull of Democratic and progressive interests. I think it may have been Chesterton, himself a repentant journalist, who pointed out that no great struggle is needed to float downstream; even a dead body eventually reaches that point at which rivers dump effulgent into the ocean. The media in this state has too often cooperated with the ruling regime. The vigorous and healthful antibodies one expects from a media in opposition – the only kind of press that deserves respect -- simply are not in evidence.

Q: That seems a little harsh. Let’s go back to some of the political characters in the state. Connecticut is full of them: former Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker; former U.S. Senator Chris Dodd, now a shill, as you think, for Hollywood; former suit-prone Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, now a U.S. Senator; former U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman; Governor Dannel Malloy, whom you’ve called the most progressive Connecticut governor since Wilber Cross -- a curiosity shop of characters, including Mr. Powell, whom you seems to respect.

A: Mr. Powell is among the best newsmen in Connecticut, and his impatience with nonsense is refreshing. It was Mr. Powell who styled Mr. Weicker a “gasbag” in his review of Mr. Weicker’s fact-based autobiography, “Maverick.” I reprinted the review, with Mr. Powell’s permission, on my blog site, “Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes From  A Blue State." I’ve also interview him several times on the blog.

Q: What makes a good newsman?

A: He must have an intuitive grasp of the nature of a good story and the will to pursue it to the gates of Hell. There’s a little bit of Alexander Pope in every good journalist:

“Am I proud?

Yes, why should I not be,

When even men who do not fear God

Fear me?”

To arrive at Pope’s rather generous estimate of himself should be the ambition of any reporter or journalist who relishes his own independence. And I’m using the word “independence” here to indicate a sharp separation between journalists and politicians. Mr. Powell is fond of quoting Joseph Pulitzer on the point:  A good reporter should have no friends.  And then too, anyone who appreciates Fredrick Bastiat has his foot firmly planted on the right path.

Q: In understanding the drift of Connecticut politics during the last few decades, how important is Mr. Weicker? He’s retired now, but still a bit of a live wire.

A: Yeah. He pops up from time to time, most recently in an Op-Ed piece in the Hartford Courant in which Mr. Weicker advises the Republican Party to become more like Mr. Weicker. The shape and destiny of the Republican Party – very much on the downslide these past few decades – cannot be understood without a careful consideration of Mr. Weicker, the last Jacob Javits Republican in the Northeast.

Q: Javits… there’s a name that is not likely to ring a bell in the memory of people younger than 30.

A: Mr. Weicker is not younger than 30. Mr. Javits, a Republican U.S. Senator from New York who professed a progressive brand of Republicanism, left politics in 1980. Mr. Weicker has identified himself on a few occasions as a “Jacob Javits Republican.” Mr. Powell, in his review of Mr. Weicker’s autobiography, identified Mr. Weicker as a gasbag who used his own party as a campaign foil to assure his re-election in a state dominated by Democrats.

Q: And you?

A: Mr. Powell has the better and more objective view. I think it was Bernard Shaw who pointed out that most autobiographies take liberties with the truth. Mr. Shaw said the most truthful biography of Napoleon would have been one written by his butler. In his own party, Mr. Weicker was the spreading oak in the shade of which nothing vital could grow. He also famously – and accurately -- called himself “the turd in the Republican Party punchbowl.” When he was chased out of the Senate in 1989 by then Connecticut Attorney General Joe Lieberman  -- a “Jacob Javits” Democrat, be it noted -- Mr. Weicker’s home party breathed a huge sigh of relief and began earnestly to attempt to dig itself out of the rubble. Mr. Weicker later ran as an independent for governor of his state and won. He imposed an income tax on Connecticut and then high-tailed it out of town, declining to run for a second term on a ticket of his own invention.  Democrats in Connecticut learned from the Weicker-Lieberman race that any Jacob Javits progressive Democrat could defeat any Jacob Javits progressive Republican, and they’ve been winning office ever since. In the past 16 years, beginning with U.S. Representative Nancy Johnson and ending with U.S. Representative Chris Shays, all the Republicans in Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional delegation have been replaced by progressive Democrats. And in 2004, Republicans surrendered the gubernatorial office to Danell Malloy, who is every bit as progressive as President Barack Obama. The ruination of the Republican Party is Mr. Weicker’s legacy to his state – that and the state income tax. When Mr. Malloy in his first budget imposed upon the people of Connecticut the largest tax increase in state history, Mr. Weicker commiserated. He had been there, done that.

Q: You believe Mr. Lieberman and Mr. Weicker were leading political parallel lives.

A: Sort of. There are astonishing correspondences between the two. Through two bruising races – the Weicker-Lieberman race for the U.S. Senate and the Lieberman- Lamont race for the U.S. Senate – the two senators were pretty aggressive antagonists. It was Mr. Weicker who encouraged Mr. Lamont to challenge Mr. Lieberman. Of the two races, the Weicker-Lieberman contest was the more interesting to me.  Mr. Weicker, during his 18 years in the Senate, had staked out for himself large swaths of political territory that belonged to Democrats. He was friendly with Edward Kennedy and Chris Dodd, whose father, Tom Dodd, he had defeated in 1971 when Dodd the elder was reeling from scandals largely of his own making. David Koskoff wrote a fairly good book about Tom Dodd, “The Senator From Central Casting: The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of Thomas Dodd,” which I reviewed for one of the newspapers. Mr. Weicker’s campaign against Tom Dodd was, he later acknowledged, rougher than it should have been.  I made a record of Weicker’s comments on Tom Dodd when he was invited to appear on a radio show to say some soothing things about U.S. Senator Chris Dodd. He said, “In 1970, I made my first run for the U.S. Senate. It was a unique event in that I was pitted against a Democrat, Joe Duffy (sic), and an Independent, Tom Dodd — a beginning for me but an end to the distinguished career of Sen. Dodd. Though happy to win, I wasn't particularly proud of the tough verbiage I had landed on Dodd.” He also left some knuckle marks on Joe Duffey’s face.  Mr. Duffey was the anti-Vietnam political candidate of the moment. Mr. Weicker, who had called upon President Nixon to campaign in his corner, said Duffey and other protestors like him should be in jail. Later on, during the Watergate period, Mr. Weicker was to change his mind about the war. Mr. Lieberman was familiar with Mr. Weicker’s campaign methods. During the 1989 senatorial campaign, he attacked Mr. Weicker both from the left and the right. Much to Mr. Weicker’s dismay, Mr. Lieberman was indirectly assisted in his campaign by staunch conservatives such as Bill Buckley. The much abused Connecticut GOP, it seemed, was in full scale revolt against the “turd in the Republican Party punchbowl.” Mr. Weicker, at long last, was shown the door by his party. Today, Mr. Weicker says the Connecticut GOP booted him out, presumably for infidelity. But it was Mr. Weicker who had initiated divorce proceeding many years earlier; the final and fatal break was merely formalized with his loss to Mr. Lieberman. No one – not even he, it must be supposed – was surprised. During the Lieberman-Lamont race, Weicker and the Weicker-likers in the Democratic Party teamed up against Mr. Lieberman, but to no avail. Mr. Lieberman slipped the noose. Mr. Weicker and Mr. Lieberman were both liberals. A liberal group, the Americans for Democratic Action, rated Mr. Weicker in 1986 the most liberal Republican in the Senate. His rating was 20 points higher than that of Senator Chris Dodd. The bizarre notion of Mr. Weicker as a centrist was, even then at the apex of his senatorial career, preposterous. It was a fiction promoted by liberals who no doubt appreciated Mr. Weicker’s service in rendering harmless anyone in his party who displayed toxic conservative symptoms.

Q: Mr. Weicker declined to run again as governor. Had he done so, would he have won?

A: No.

Q: But he did say in an interview that ran in Connecticut magazine that he thought he could win.

A: Politicians are people whose whole lives are lived in the intersection of “yes” and “no.” The piece you’re referring to is called “Final Say: Lowell Weicker,” published in 2012. There is no final say with Mr. Weicker. There are no “last words,” and may never be as long as he has breath in him and there are Republican careers yet to destroy. The interviewer asked Mr. Weicker to justify his choice of Barack Obama over Mitt Romney in the presidential election, and Mr. Weicker doubted that a Republican moderate could survive a Republican primary, which is pure fantasy: Mr. Romney was hardly a fire breathing conservative, and he survived the Republican primary. The Republican Party in Mr. Weicker’s own state has never nominated a conservative for high office. Mr. Weicker’s nuisance value has ebbed since he left office. A re-election would have forced an awkward defense of the income tax in a general election. That tax was popular only among progressives in Mr. Weicker’s state. The tax changed the character of Connecticut and opened the flood gates to improvident spending. By the time Mr. Malloy was elected governor, spending in the state had tripled -- and the coffers were empty. Interestingly, the amount of the deficit faced by Mr. Malloy in the post-income tax period was, almost to the dollar, the same as it was when Mr. Weicker inaugurated his income tax. No one from O’Neill to Malloy had seriously addressed the spending side of the budget. A few months after Mr. Malloy was installed as the first Democratic governor since O’Neill had declined to run again as governor, Mr. Weicker lamented, “Where did it all go?” And I replied in a column, “Into the black hole, you ninny.”

Q: Mr. Weicker’s right hand man, Tom D’Amore, died recently and suddenly of a heart attack. His funeral drew quite a few people.

A: Yes, deservedly so. He was a nice man. During the height of the Cold War, a British agent was asked whether he could defend another agent who had gone over to the enemy. He said that if he were ever forced to choose between his country and his friend, he hoped to God he would have the good sense to betray his country, so imperious are the claims of friendship. The same might be said of Mr. D’Amore’s relationship between his friend, Lowell Weicker, and the Connecticut Republican Party. After he had been more or less appointed Republican Party Chairman by then Senator Weicker, Mr. D’Amore assured  the Republicans who had confirmed him as Chairman that he was not interested in presiding over the demise of the Republican Party. But he did -- he and Mr. Weicker. Rebuffed in his senatorial campaign with Mr. Lieberman by the very Republicans he had scorned over the years, Mr. Weicker had a second act as governor, in the course of which he imposed his income tax on the state that had rejected him. Some people at the time suspected that spite of some kind was roiling in Mr. Weicker’s veins. But it is equally likely that Mr. Weicker felt he was tying a knot in his loose legacy by imposing an income tax on the state. Within the space of two succeeding Republican governors, the state budget tripled. After Mr. Malloy had become governor, the first Democratic chief of state in Connecticut since the departure of Mr.O’Neilll, he imposed a massive tax increase to discharge a massive deficit, the result of profligate spending made possible by the Weicker’s income tax. Mr. Weicker was asked to comment on the new Democratic governor’s massive tax increase, the largest in Connecticut’s history, during a function attended by elder statesmen at the Hartford Club. Mr. Weicker heartily commended the governor for his steely courage and said he understood the necessity of tax increases. So, one imagines, did Mr. D’Amore.

Q: Senator Joe Lieberman ran aground on the same rocks, you believe.

A: Not quite, but the political Odysseys of both Mr. Weicker and Mr. Lieberman were eerily similar. Both were senators of long standing: one, Mr. Lieberman, a liberal Democrat whose foreign policy views were shaped by years of opposition to Soviet communism in its various shapes and permutations; and the other, Mr. Weicker, whose politics were shaped by a politically profitable resistance to what one might call Reagan Republicanism. Both took a bridge too far, Mr. Weicker far more often and more exuberantly than Mr. Lieberman.  Both were sensible that they were operating in New England, about which Barry Goldwater said: If you lop off California and New England, you’ve got a pretty good country. Mr. Lieberman endorsed John McCain for president over Democratic nominee Barack Obama, causing Democratic heads back home to explode. Mr. Weicker’s sleights to his party nominees are perhaps too many to mention.  One of U.S. Senator Chris Dodd’s Republican opponents, Republican Party nominee for the U.S. Senate Roger Eddy, popped down to Washington to secure Mr. Weicker’s support and was assured by Mr. Weicker that he could count on him 100 percent. Mr. Eddy returned home whistling “Happy Days Are Here Again,” only to hear, on the eve of the election, Mr. Weicker’s radio endorsements of Mr. Dodd – the revenge of “the turd in the Republican Party punchbowl.” Mr. Weicker was punished for his party lapses when liberal Democrats in his state and Republicans tuned towards Lieberman in his senatorial race. And progressive Democrats in Connecticut attempted similarly to punish Lieberman by flocking to Weicker preferred candidate Ned Lamont in a Democratic primary. Mr. Lamont won the primary but lost the general election to Mr. Lieberman, who by that time had discovered the benefits of party independence. Mr. Lieberman ran as an independent senator and won; Mr. Weicker ran as an independent governor and won.  But that history is not likely to repeat itself.

Q: Why not?

A: It takes a politician full of years in Congress to pull it off, and the present members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional delegation are – what shall we say? – light-weights. Both Connecticut U.S. Senators Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy are new arrivals. It takes a good long time for a U.S. Senator to grow a beard and, at least in Connecticut, all the long beards have drifted off to greener pastures elsewhere. Mr. Weicker hung himself with an income tax. Mr. Dodd is now lobbying in Hollywood. Mr. Lieberman has attached himself to a prominent law firm as a lobbyist. Before they had kicked the dust of the Senate from their feet, both Mr. Dodd and Mr. Lieberman had vowed, but not on a stack of Bibles, to eschew lobbying. It’s sure a strange world, isn’t it?

Q: But all that is in the past, so much water under the bridge. Can we talk a bit about the present and the future?

A: Yes. But remember, the past exercises a gravitational pull on the present.

Q: How would you describe the correlation of political forces in Connecticut today?

A: There is no enemy to the right in Connecticut, never has been. And in the absence of strenuous opposition, the state has moved very far to the left. Most Democratic politicians, who were alive and kicking in, say, 1990, the last year of the O’Neill administration, would be dismayed at the leftward drift. President Richard Nixon, shortly after he had taken the country entirely off the gold standard, used to say, much to the annoyance of the late Bill Buckley, “We are all Keynesians now.”  Similarly, it might be said by Mr. Malloy, “We are all progressives now.” Mr. O’Neill’s first term saw a rapid increase in spending, owing mostly to the boom period in the 1980s that had produced successive budget surpluses. The surpluses spurred spending, which resulted in a higher budget ceiling. When the boom ended, as all booms must, no serious attempt was made by O’Neill administration Democrats to lower the ceiling through spending cuts. Improvident spending had produced a deficit, which in turn led the way to so called “tax reform.”  The O’Neill deficit opened the door to an income tax. Mr. Weicker waltzed through the opening, and his “tax reform” relieved all state legislators at the time of a mounting pressure to reduce spending. Facing a similar set of circumstances in 2011, Mr. Malloy “pulled a Weicker.” The Malloy tax increase, the largest in Connecticut’s history, raised the spending ceiling. Connecticut is now the highest taxed state in the nation, and as such it is poorly positioned for a quick recovery if  the rising tide mentioned in a memorable speech by President John Kennedy ever does lifts all the boats.  I do say “if” because progressive proposals adopted both in Washington and at home in Connecticut have delayed a national and state-wide recovery. All this is background music, but the correlation of forces in the state, including a compliant, left of center media, is such that these harsh notes reach the ear as bewitching music, a song of sirens.

Q: But the Republican response to what you call the siren song has more or less fallen on deaf ears here in Connecticut. Are Republicans not shouting loudly enough?

A: I think the alternative message promulgated by Democrats, part of the siren song, is more alluring. Theirs is a bread and circus remedy. The Republican message is that wealth, real wealth, is created wholly in the private marketplace by entrepreneurs who are free to create products people want. The free flow of marketable intelligence is curtailed when the government aggressively, unnaturally and unnecessarily directs the flow. Democrats say: Not to worry, there’s nothing we can’t fix; and they proceed to offer a series of fixes, sometimes involving their political cohorts, that worsens matters. Long term solutions imposed from above on a quasi-free market rarely produce beneficial effects. The progressive is a Chanticleer convinced the sun cannot rise in the absence of his crowing.  

Q: These would be the crony capitalists.

A: Yes, progressive crony capitalists. Honore Balzac used to say that behind every great fortune lies a great crime. If he had lived in the 20^th and 21st centuries, he might have amended his apothegm. Nowadays, behind every great fortune lies a politician dispensing favors. And please don’t think that purist Democrats have no blood on their hands. It has been common among Democrats in Connecticut, champions of the proletariat, to launch rhetorical missiles at rich Republicans during campaigns. Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate Linda McMahon’s leaky boat was sunk by commentators who never failed to mention her self-financed $50 million dollar sputtering campaign. That’s fine: All’s fair in love and politics. The victor in the race was Dick Blumenthal, now the 6^th richest Senator in Congress. Mr. Blumenthal’s campaign suffered a bump in the road when he was shown several times in several different venues saying or strongly implying that he had served as a marine in Vietnam. These were bald-faced lies; Mr. Blumenthal said he had misspoken, and the bump was quickly surmounted. U.S. Representatives Rosa DeLauro and Jim Himes are millionaires, both Democrats. Mr. Dodd exchanged his Senate chair for a $2 million a year salary as a Tinsletown hawker, and if Mr. Lieberman has ever suffered proletarian want in the Senate, he is about to be richly rewarded for it. Mr. Weicker, whose grandfather was a successful business man, earned most of his money the easy way. Now that Mrs. McMahon – who ought not to have been elected to the Senate for a fistful of reasons – has been got out of the way, one expects to hear little in the future concerning the corrupting influence of personal wealth. How can you urge that point of view when three of the seven members of Connecticut’s all Democratic U.S. Congressional delegation are millionaires? The real corrupting influence in politics today lies in mutually beneficial  political exchanges between powerful politicians and crony capitalists on the right or left who prosper because of their efforts. These efforts always create disabling distortions in the market place and rarely help the majority of creative wealth producing entrepreneurs unattached to large corporations.

Q: But you can’t fit all that on a bumper sticker.

A: Right. “Raise the minimum wage” fits. It’s a campaign battle flag rather than a useful proposal.  The flag indicates that those in favor of the proposal have chosen to place themselves in the trenches with the poor and dispossessed. How many heads of household in Connecticut make no more than minimum wage? Probably not many. You are not likely to come upon that statistic in your local paper, and why not? It is the very first question that should be put to any politician in the state who is advocating for a boost in the minimum wage. Most minimum wage earners are part time workers in households with an average annual income of $50,000, some of them kids socking away a few bucks to defray the cost of their increasingly expensive college loans. After Governor Malloy gave UConn millions of tax dollars, the university boosted its tuition fees. The minimum wage raises the cost of labor for employers who either will or will not be able to recover sometimes slight profits by increasing the cost of his product or service. That loss may be recovered by reducing the hours of full time employees, laying off workers or reducing the quality of the product or service rendered, unintended consequences none of which are likely to help aspiring college students or, say, a child in poor section of a city who would like to contribute his fair share to the upkeep of his household. The minimum wage in Connecticut is also connected to union salaries by means of contractual escalator clauses; so any increase in the minimum benefits a powerful special interest group in the state that, some say, provided the edge to Mr. Malloy during his second run as governor.

Q: Are people so easily fooled?

A: Some are, enough are. It was Lincoln who said “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time; but you can’t fool all the people all the time,” though that would seem to be the ambition of many politicians.

Q: Thanks. It’s been fun. Let’s do it again.