Race And Politics In Connecticut

The 2014 Democratic campaign for urban hegemony is now officially underway.

It will involve the usual tousle among Democrats for political prestige and power in Connecticut’s larger cities. During his first campaign for governor, then Mayor of Stamford Dan Malloy – on becoming governor, Dan requested that the media refer to him henceforward as Dannel -- easily captured the urban vote and slid past Republican gubernatorial nominee Tom Foley by the slenderest of margins. Mr. Malloy, once again in his reelection contest, may face Mr. Foley -- or some other worthy Republican champion; State Senator John McKinney has announced and Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton is teasing from the sidelines -- and the remembrance of slender margins past has caused some wonderment among the state’s left of center media concerning Mr. Malloy’s recent campaign endorsements.

A Hartford newspaper has wondered aloud editorially whether it is politically prudent for the governor to pick winners and losers in urban primaries. Mr. Malloy recently traveled to New Haven to offer a ringing endorsement of Toni Harp as mayor, even though it had been widely reported that Ms. Harp’s now deceased husband is the city’s most celebrated tax scofflaw.  Most recently, the former mayor of Stamford publicly rejected the mayoralty choice of Stamford’s Democratic Town Committee by endorsing a non-party endorsed candidate.  People took notice. This is not the way to gain friends and influence Democrats in Stamford. Then too, the governor’s primary endorsements feed the growing apprehension that Mr. Malloy just can’t restrain himself from upsetting apple carts and sticking his thumb in every warm pie.

The Connecticut Republican Party, unfortunately, has withered away in the state’s larger cities. Urban populations, fleeing urban problems, have left behind a minority residue wholly at the mercy of a party that has made no serious attempt to drive people at the economic margins of society into jobs and social configurations that would not leave them at the mercy of urban gangs and ubiquitous social service agencies. President Bill Clinton’s noble attempt to “end welfare as we know it” has in recent times suffered a perhaps irreversible decline under an increasingly progressive regime. Any attempt seriously to address the issue of social disintegration in cities – fatherless families or single parent families locked into a ridged and unalterable social service structure -- is hooted down as an indication of racist bias.

Republicans in Connecticut are so fearful of being thus tainted that they have simply surrendered the “social issues” front  to Democrats who, especially in cities, are finding it more and more difficult to quiet a restive population that wants what Martin Luther King said it wanted half a century ago – their piece of the American dream. Among African Americans in cities, fifty years after the “I Have A Dream” speech in Washington D.C., the traditional African American family, robustly restored in Northern cities after the Civil War, is now a byword.

The decimation of the African American family has accelerated at a rapid pace from the 1960s forward. The statistics are too astonishing to be any longer ignored.  The most recent Urban Institute Report finds that 17 percent of African-American children lived in a home with their mother but not their father in 1950. By 2010, the number had increased to 50 percent. Out of wedlock childbirths from 1965 to 2010 increased from 8 to 41 percent; the figure today has risen to an astonishing 72 percent. In 1950, the number of African American women married and living with their spouses was 53 percent. That figure has been reduced today to 25 percent.

Many of these figures have been in the public domain since 1965, when then Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan from New York released “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.”  The recent Urban Institute report updates the figures to 2010. The Moynihan report is not dated in its principal conclusion: “…at the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time.”

There is a Berlin Wall of silence surrounding these figures – and others: On average, 1,876 black babies are aborted every day in the United States, and black women, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, are more than 5 times as likely as white women to have an abortion; African Americans are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites. The conclusion that Mr. Moynihan has drawn in his earlier report is no less pertinent today than it was in 1965, two years after Martin Luther King had let loose his thunderclap before the Lincoln Memorial.

These figures, it may safely be predicted, will play NO part in any urban election in Connecticut – none. If you know what the problem is, hard solutions offer themselves. But politically, any effective remedy that disturbs the status quo causes a tighter breathing and chills the bones of politicians to zero. The road to Hell, as Martin Luther King well knew, is paved with cowardice; only courage can set you free. 

Clinton And The Weiner Roast

Hillary Clinton, her ambitious eye on the presidential prize in 2016, is said to be livid – LIVID – at comparisons drawn between Huma Abedin, one of Mrs. Clinton’s chief aides before she retired as Secretary of State, and First Lady Clinton during her husband’s groping and pawing years as president.

About 15 years ago, First Lady Hillary stood in defense of her beleaguered husband – despite her claims that she was no “stand by your man,” Tammy Wynette marriage rug – when jackals in the media were lobbing moral stink bombs at the inoffensive Bill. Abedin has appeared at her husband’s campaign rallies standing by her man, arms rigidly at her side, unsmiling.

To be sure, there are important differences between Huma’s and Hillary’s public humiliations.

Anthony Weiner is running for mayor of New York, while Bill, during the Monica Lewinsky years, was a sitting president. Mr. Weiner has given no indication of presidential ambitions, and there are some commentators who believe, quite apart from his moral imperfections, that Mr. Weiner had not yet acquired the right presidential stuff.

So then, right off the bat, the status and stature differences are significant. The First Lady slot is a position more exalted than that of the wife of a prospective mayor. In keeping with Bill’s superior status while in office, his satyriasis was more riotous, and his disposition to tell stretches while under oath was exceedingly refined; so much so that, two months after the Senate failed to convict him, he was held in civil contempt of court by Judge Susan Webber Wright. The president’s license to practice law was suspended in Arkansas for five years, a judgment upheld by the United States Supreme Court, and he was fined $90,000 for giving false testimony.

There are, as well, unfortunate similarities between the wives of the two stricken politicians. Both had hitched their wagons to unruly political steeds. The ruling political presumption concerning ambitious married politicians who stray, transcending the social mores that tie lesser mortals to their solemn vows, is that both sexual and political energy spring from the same source, a substantially impacted ego.

The force that through the green fuse drives the political flower and the irresistible devilish nudges that caused Bill Clinton to grope women – unsuccessfully attempting, at least on one occasion according to a molested victim, the rape of a grieving widow in the White House kitchen -- are one and the same. In the Freudian view, most cigars are subtle sublimations; moral and immoral energy have the same parentage.

This view is little more than a plea before the throne of a pre-Christian Pan in defense of sexual libertinism. It expunges “sin” through a murderous assault on the will of men and women. If we are all helplessly in thrall to erotic urges, there can be no commanding instructions from the moral sense to the will. If we are, as some moral philosophers now insist, little more than fleshy robots, our “choices” are hard-wired into us, and we are no more responsible for them than for the color of our eyes or the curl in our hair. Without free will, freedom as well as “sin” is a philosophical categorical error. And so we tiptoe toward Christian forbearance in the shoes of a Freudian determinism every bit as commanding and controlling as Calvinistic predestination.

Concerning Weiner, there are two questions before the house: 1) Should his faithlessness be forgiven by voters; and 2) should he be running for mayor of New York? The answer to both questions will depend on whether voters think they are fleshy robots moved about in the world by little understood psychic forces. Ultimately, New Yorkers will decide what kind of a mayor and world they want. We are inclined to condemn the sin and forgive the sinner, but forgiveness does not inescapably entail the casting of votes for sinners.

Both Hillary and Abedin have problem husbands. In Hillary’s case, not all the ghost of infidelities past have been safely interred. Like deathless vampires, they rise from their midnight coffins. Most recently, a 26 year-old tape thought to be safely lost was recovered for posterity. The lead in a story that appeared in Britain’s “Mail on Line” reads: “'I could take all my clothes off': Never-before-heard tape released of ‘Monica Lewinsky pleading with Bill Clinton to meet her.’”

The tape is a record of the cooings of Lewinsky to then President Bill. It is, of course, embarrassing; but then shameless politicians quickly recover from these moments, sometimes far in advance of the people they urge to vote for them.

Clinton in Connecticut

Americans used to wait a decent interval before they set about re-writing history. An example of a recent re-write may be found in an op-ed written by Mark Bowen, who writes for the New Republic. The piece is a glowing review of Ben Affleck’s new film “Argo.”

In the course of his review, Mr. Bowen punctures what he understands to be two grave misunderstandings: 1) that former President Jimmy Carter was too weak to foresee and prevent the Iranian hostage crisis; “in fact, he prepared and launched one of the boldest covert military efforts in American history,” and 2) that President Ronald Reagan “proved to be a lot more willing to deal with the mullahs than Carter ever was.”

In other pieces written by Mr. Bowen, the author of “"Guests of the Ayatollah" is constrained to mention in passing some similarities between the Iranian crisis and recent difficulties in Benghazi, the site of the murder by terrorists of American Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

Despite the head fakes and feigns of the Obama administration, it is now apparent that the assault on the consulate in Benghazi was 1) a terrorist attack, 2) well prepared beforehand by salafists who 3) were likely connected with al-Qaida in the Maghreb to 4) remind the Arab world that the attack on the World Trade Center Towers in New York was but a beginning to a protracted war on Western institutions and the twin “Great Satans” of Israel and the United States.

Most recently,Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has bravely taken a howitzer shell for her team. For more than a week after the initial attack on the consulate, the Obama administration put out to public view a narrative of events in Benghazi that bore as little relationship to real events as does Mr. Obama’s putative autobiography “Dreams from My Father” to an authentic auto-biography. The president's understanding of the attack on the consulate is a prime example of historical revisionism in real time. Fortunately, some news outlets have corrected the record, also in real time.

The notion pedaled by the Obama administration that the attack on the consulate was inspired by an amateur film trailer that defamed the prophet Mohammed, blessings be upon him, is a fiction that now may be put to rest – because there was no protest crowd outside the embassy whipped into a murderous frenzy by the film (version 1), and the non-existent protest crowd therefore could not have been used by terrorists as a blind to cover their attack (version 2).

Not only was the attack on the consulate well-prepared and organized, it was preceded by several disturbing incidents that insufficiently disturbed the complacency of the Obama administration – including a prior attack on the same embassy that blew a forty foot hole into a perimeter wall and an attack on the British ambassador so severe that the Brits closed their embassy. Lt Col Wood, in charge of an American embassy security detail that was removed before the attack on the American consulate, regarded the removal of British diplomats and Red Cross workers as a warning to U.S. diplomats. "I almost expected the attack to come,” he said. “We were the last flag flying; it was a matter of time.”

Documents recently released show that Mr. Stevens had repeatedly requested additional security. On the very day of Mr. Stevens' murder, the ambassador had dispatched a message, literally a cry for help, requesting additional protection for the embassy. In a recent special investigation, Fox News developed a timeline of events that shows the Obama administration had withdrawn security forces prior to the attack.

In biting a very large bullet –Mrs. Clinton has said she alone is responsible for security at the embassies – former President Clinton’s wife may have rescued part of a tattered fictional narrative used by the president and his apologist so far to escape direct responsibility for the murder of four Americans on what even the Ayatollah Khomeini certainly recognized as American diplomatic territory in a foreign country.

Here is the open question: When Mr. Clinton visits Connecticut sometime around the 28^thof October, will he be asked by Connecticut’s fearless media any questions that might incommode him or Mr. Obama's re-election effort? Or can we expect, as usual, the usual fluff?

The Fleeting Pleasure of Republican Primary Endorsements

For Republicans in Connecticut, editorial endorsements from many papers – but most especially from the Hartford Courant – provide a momentary, fleeting pleasure.

In primaries, the Courant does tend to endorse some non-incumbents. But in general elections, the paper’s endorsements tend to favor incumbents who have, unsurprisingly, more practical experience in the contested office. For the most part then, incumbents have an insuperable advantage over challengers seeking the endorsement of the paper’s editorial writers and administrators. Whether this arrangement is pragmatic or not depends, to borrow phraseology from former President Bill Clinton, on what you mean by “pragmatic.”

The dark side of pragmatism is opportunism, a cold, sportsman like estimate of political possibilities.

When St. Thomas More accuses Thomas Cromwell of being a pragmatist in Robert Bolt’s play “A Man for All Seasons” he intends no compliment.

“ALICE: They say he's [Cromwell] a very penetrating lawyer.

“MORE: What, Cromwell? Pooh, he's a pragmatist-and that's the only resemblance he has to the Devil, son Roper; a pragmatist, the merest plumber.”

Need it be said that in the contest between Cromwell and the saint, it was the saint who lost his head.

The Courant’s charge in its editorial that Republican Party endorsed candidate for the U.S. House in the (2^nd District) Paul Formica should prevail over Ms. Novack in the upcoming Republican Primary is, therefore, a mixed blessing. Mr. Formica will not likely hold on to the Courant6’s endorsement through the general election, if past endorsements are any guide to the future.

In the past, the Courant has been in the habit of endorsing the leftmost incumbent candidate in general elections. As most Republicans have caught conservative sniffles over the years, and as most moderate Republican in the New England states have been dished by leftward leaning Democrats – there are no Republicans any longer in Connecticut’s Congressional delegation –the paper’s endorsement of 2^nd District contenders in the general election is likely to fall to present U.S. Representative Joe Courtney.

Apparently, the paper feels that one party states – think of Henry VIII – are more pragmatic than vigorous two party states.

Conservative Republicans in the 2^nd District are now congratulating Ms. Novak on her Courant non-endorsement.

Campaign Hooey

During the Abe Lincoln canvass, candidates for the presidency were much interested in bonding emotionally with the working class.

They were even more interested in displaying their military badges and ribbons. At one point, Lincoln became so put-off by the imposture that he openly ridiculed, as only Lincoln could do, the grand military hustle of the Democrats. Lincoln’s own military service in the Black Hawk War, three enlistments of about 30 days each, was refreshingly free of heroism. Following the hostilities, Lincoln’s horse was stolen. He and his companion, George Harrison, were compelled to walk and canoe back to New Salem.

Lincoln, of course, was born in a log cabin, though he managed to ease his way into a comfortable middle class berth as a fairly prosperous lawyer.

George Washington -- net worth: $525 million, a cool, half billion in in today’s mostly worthless currency – rates as America’s most wealthy president. Next in line is President Thomas Jefferson, net worth $212 million; followed by Teddy Roosevelt, net worth $125 million; followed by Andy Jackson, the father of the Modern Democratic Party, at a net worth of $119 million; followed by James Madison, net worth $101 million; followed by Lyndon Johnson, net worth $98 million; followed by Herbert Hoover, net worth $75 million; followed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, net worth $60 million; followed by Bill Clinton, net worth $38 million; with John Kennedy bringing up the rear as the 10^th most wealthy U.S. President. Mr. Kennedy did not inherit his daddy’s wealth; most of his income and property came to him through a family trust shared with his siblings. Among the top ten wealthiest Presidents, there are but two Republicans in the bunch, and none of this great wealth, much of it held by Democrats who married well, was a bar to the presidency.

If the Father of the Country ever felt the need to put himself forward to electors as a chip off the old middle class block, he manfully resisted the temptation. Jefferson thought of himself as an enlightenment aristocrat; ditto Madison, the father of the U.S. Constitution. FRD’s wealth came to him through marriage and inheritance, and when he ran into difficulties with creditors, his mommy bailed him out. For the notable Democratic presidents listed above, great wealth was no bar to public service.

Here in Connecticut, the state’s all Democratic congressional delegation is studded with multimillionaires. Like Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal married well; his wife’s father owns the Empire State building in New York, among other properties. Though U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro often points to her humble roots, she also is a multi-millionaire, and U.S. Representative Jim Himes made his millions on Wall Street not Main Street.

Military service remains for some politicians a springboard into politics. When Mr. Blumenthal sought to inflate his military record during his many campaigns as attorney general, he backed into a truth grinder, and it was discovered that, unlike the more modest Lincoln, Mr. Blumenthal had forseveral years been stealing valor from servicemen who had fought in Vietnam.

His opponent in the race for the U.S. Senate, Linda McMahon, financed her previous campaign from her private fortune. Mrs. McMahon’s great wealth did not come to her through marriage. She and her husband, both bankrupted at one point, earned their riches though enterprise and hustle. And though she never claimed to have been born in a log cabin, Mrs. McMahon’s hardscrabble trajectory does not resemble that of the one percenters who ascended to the presidency. Of course, the differences between Mrs. McMahon and Mr. Lincoln are too apparent not to have been noticed by Connecticut’s vigilant media: One was the CEO of a wrestling empire and the other was a politically astute lawyer from Sangamon County in Illinois well known in the frontier towns for his wrestling prowess.

Claims of modest birth still play well on the stump, even among millionaires operating outside the shadow of the largely mythical log cabin. A military record helps. The anti-authoritarianism lying at the center of libertarianism still tugs at the heart strings, as does an American as apple pie anti-clericalism, which lies at the center of the war on Catholicism being waged by Planned Parenthood and Connecticut’s Democratic congressional delegation, 100 percent of whom have received from the abortion provider a rating of 100 percent on votes important to Planned Parenthood’s money prospects.

Most political claims are gilded hooey, sometimes honeyed hooey, but always entertaining. It’s best during national and state campaigns to take the advice of Mark Twain and swallow the campaign braggadocio with “a ton of salt,” and then, when slipping into the slough of despond, reach for Henry Mencken: “A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in… A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.”

Sex And The Secret Service

For a righteous man falls seven times, and rises again,

But the wicked stumble in time of calamity.

Do not rejoice when your enemy falls,

And do not let your heart be glad when he stumbles – Proverbs 24

Let’s face it, America – or at least that part of the country enmeshed in the news-entertainment business – loves to condemn a sex scandal.

Politically, sex scandals are an chancy business. Republicans, for obvious reasons, would prefer their party to remain free of the taint of scandal, and Democrats would wish the same. Of course, when the sexually wicked stumble, partisans in either party, oblivious to Proverbs, rejoice when their enemy falls. For all the talk about sexual liberation, we lag moral miles behind Europe – especially France which, in matters involving sex between consenting politicians, pursues a laissez faire policy. But like the gentle rain that falleth on the just and the unjust, any political party can be stricken by sexual scandal.

A scandal that in some sense involves a president is the most troubling. It was not until well after the manufactured fantasy of John Kennedy’s Camelot ran aground on the rocks of reality that people began to realize the extent of the president’s sexual athleticism – even though he had a really, really bad back. At one point, the young and charismatic president had become involved with a lady, a potential Morgan Le Fay of Camelot, who had been connected to Chicago mafia boss Sam  Giancana. In the course of Mr. Kennedy’s three year extramarital affair with Judith Exner, Mr. Kennedy’s bed partner was used to pass on to Mr.  Giancana classified CIA plans for the assassination of Fidel Castro. An ensuing Bay of Pigs invasion involving Mafia assistance proved to be a spectacular failure.

Democrats this year are waging a rhetorical war on Republicans who they insist are waging a war on women; yet in the recent past, it is Democratic presidents rather than their Republican counterparts on the other side of the political aisle who have tended to use women as their sexual footstools. Somehow, one cannot imagine President Richard (Nietzsche) Nixon, whose political ethics certainly were pragmatic, or other Republican presidents such as Gerald Ford or the Bushes, père et fils, or Ronny Reagan … you know… fooling around in the White House.

Back in the good old boy days, when the media thought it improper to comment on the sexual exploits of presidents, the chief business of the Secret Service was to protect the president from bullets and what used to be called in the administration of President Bill Clinton“bimbo eruptions.” Until a stained blue dress hit the public fan in the midst of an impeachment hearing, Mr. Clinton vehemently insisted that his relationships with his several Morgan Le Fays were strictly platonic or the result of the fevered imaginations of his sexual targets.

The role played by Senator Joe Lieberman in the Monica Lewinsky affair is generally forgotten by all but an appreciative Mr. Clinton. It was Mr. Lieberman, by roundly condemning Mr. Clinton in the accents of an appalled Cotton Mather, who saved Mr. Clinton’s presidential hide.

In the wake of the Secret Service scandal involving agents whose principle business it is to protect the president from bullets and bimbo eruptions, Mr. Lieberman once again helpfully has stepped forward. The president himself, it must be said, so far is free of taint; the funny business between agents and Colombian prostitutes occurred well before Mr. Obama arrived in Columbia to spread cheer among Latin Americans. Still, congressional committees are on the prowl. Questions have been raised; in particular, did the White House advance team know about the hanky-panky with legal prostitutes some of whom may have been… well, younger than past Democratic presidential consorts?

The investigation of the secret service has now uncovered a twelfth agent who, significantly, was not staying at Hotel Caribe in Cartagena, where eleven other Secret Service personnel stayed, but at the Hilton, the president’s hotel in Cartagena.

Said Mr. Lieberman, "The Hilton is significant because that's where President Obama was going to stay. Now we don't know at this point that what the twelfth agent is being charged with and why he's been put administrative leave. It just gets more troubling. To act as these people did in Cartagena as if they were college kids on spring break, it is reprehensible."

While adamantly refusing to supply details of an internal investigation, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney has announced that White House legal counsel has concluded no White House staff engaged in any "misconduct" in Cartagena.

Here is Mr. Lieberman hashing the matter over with Bob Schieffer, the host of CBS’s widely watched "Face the Nation" Sunday broadcast:

When Mr. Schieffer asked Mr. Lieberman whether the White House Office of Advance staff might be involved in the scandal, Mr. Lieberman that he had no indication of such involvement but suggested that the office “ought to be launching their own internal review of all white house personnel, advance teams and the rest, who were in Cartagena."

It’s better in these matters not to be blindsided by the unknown.

Shays The Spoiler?

A recent poll by Public Policy Polling indicates that Chris Shays may have a certain value, among Democrats mostly, as a spoiler candidate.

The poll shows Linda McMahon leading former U.S. Rep. Shays in a Republican Party primary by an unsurpassable margin of 60-27 percent. Since primaries were first introduced into party politics, more or less as a democratic instrument to pry decision making from party bosses, primaries have been the gateway to general elections.

The 60-27 spread is a hurdle that would inspire second thoughts among most supermen politicians who are used to leaping tall buildings in a single bound. The spread among those in the state identifying themselves as “very conservative”, 81-14, is even more daunting.

Is it possible that Mr. Shays has agreed to play Rob Simmons to Mrs. McMahon in her second bid for the U.S. Senate?

Very early in the campaign for U.S. Senator Chris Dodd’s seat, Mr. Simmons was leading the senator in some polls. Mr. Dodd’s prospects had run aground on several sandbars, one of which involved a pricy cottage on an 11 acre spread in Ireland the senator bought for a song, only $160,000, along with William Kessinger, a business partner of Edward Downe. Mr. Dodd and Mr. Downe, who pleaded guilty to insider trading and securities fraud in 1993, once owned a Washington condominium in partnership. Before President Bill Clinton left the White House, Mr. Dodd successfully lobbied the president to secure friend Downe a pardon, according to a story in the Wall Street Journal.

Mrs. McMahon entered the race and was chosen as the nominee of her party at the Republican Party convention in Hartford, at which point Mr. Simmons, following party protocol, might have gracefully withdrawn. This he did not do.

Sensing a vulnerability in then Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, the Democratic senatorial nominee, Mr. Simmons decided to primary Mrs. McMahon. Mr. Blumenthal had several times falsely claimed he served in the Vietnam War, an imposture exposed by Mrs. McMahon and the New York Times. Mr. Simmons had served honorably in Vietnam, and several political commentators thought at the time that Mr. Simmons would be able to exploit the issue much more effectively than Mrs. McMahon. Serving honorably in Vietnam for 19 months, Mr. Simmons had been awarded two Bronze Star Medals.

Conducting a poor man's campaign, Mr. Simmons put his active campaign on hold but left his name on the ballot, in effect imprisoning for the duration support that might have gone to Mrs. McMahon. And so Mr. Simmons hung in there and hung in there and hung in there, while Mr. Blumenthal hit the mattresses, hiding out from prying journalist and coasting into office on his reputation as the nation’s most fervent consumer protection ad-man. Mr. Simmons’ challenge was, shall we say, sporadic, but disabling enough to shuttle a few votes in the direction of the Democratic Party’s camp. Mr. Simmons’ malingering was no help to Republicans, who still wince whenever his name is mentioned in polite circles.

Recent elections have been career enders for once seemingly impregnable incumbent politicians: Mr. Dodd left the congressional premises more or less under an order to vacate issued by both Democrats and Republicans. Mr. Lieberman, still doubtful about who he may endorse for his soon to be vacated seat, has had his day. National Democrats in the U.S. House, palsied and unable to produce a budget during the years they enjoyed a veto proof margin in the U.S. Congress, were given the heave-ho in the last election and replaced by combative conservatives. Surely, the recent flow of politics suggests that voters have taken a dark view of professional politicians who have passed along to a generation of Americans a legacy of unsupportable debt and joblessness, not exactly what former President John Kennedy had in mind when he announced the passing of the torch to a new generation of nation builders.

One senses in the air the fragrant odor of Jeffersonian gunpowder: Said Tom Jefferson, very much in a revolutionary mood, “The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive.” The Jeffersonian spirit – “I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.” -- does not run hot in the veins of politicians who have spent a good part of their public lives in the middle of the road dodging commitments and principles.

Left And Right In Connecticut

The touchstone for liberals, as everyone including liberals may be aware, is the future, largely an imaginary construct. The hope and change mantra of the Obama administration occurs in a future those living in the present are busily constructing. It’s a work in progress.

Former President Bill Clinton constructed his successful campaign on hope not only because he claimed to be from Hope, Arkansas. The theme song of Clinton’s Camelot was Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” with its refrain, “Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone” – and good riddance to it. Mr. Clinton’s boast that he was “the man from Hope,” technically true since he was born in the hospital there and lived in the town for a very short while, was later lampooned by political docudramatist Michael Moore.

Mr. Clinton’s formative years were spent in Hot Springs, a town with a far different cachet. Dee Brown, the author of “Wounded Knee,” was interviewed in Mr. Moore’s film on the possible connection between Hot Springs, well known as a stomping grounds for gamblers and mob figures, and the former president:

“Well, I think Bill does have a hard time making up his mind. And I think he picked it up growing up in Hot Springs. Hot Springs has always been an ambivalent town. Their view towards the gangster people was – Well, these are bad guys, but they’ve got a lot of money; so, just let them come.”



It’s doubtful whether any modern president would wish to construct his political campaign around the Christian pillars of faith or charity. But, if tomorrow -- which we should never stop thinking about -- should deliver to us such a president, he likely will be a Democrat, some of whom have in the past been faithful to fanciful imaginative constructs and more than charitable with other people’s money.

The touchstone for conservatives is the past, what G. K. Chesterton used to call “the democracy of the dead,” also a fertile field for roving imaginations. Conservatives consult Edmund Burke because Burke was an important small “d” dead larval republican, as were the founders of the republic some constitutionalists are trying so desperately to keep. Supreme Court justices who have escaped deconstructionist legal studies sometimes tip their hat to the founders and the constitution in their decisions.

Those on the left and those on the right have their political saints and heroes. The grand fete most Democrats in Connecticut attend together each year is called the Jefferson, Jackson, Bailey dinner for good reasons. Republicans have their own party gathering, the Prescott Bush dinner, the title of which suggests a lamentable lack of imagination. On the other hand, since Republicans do not spend much of their time constructing in their minds political utopias that are afterwards deployed as fantasy political programs, perhaps the title of the dinner may be in some sense appropriate. Prescott Bush was a nice man – quiet, inoffensive, harmless as a political theorist, the beau ideal of commentators wedded to limp-wristed moderation.

Too much should not be made of all this. Touchstones are touchstones, not anchors. One touches them and moves on. But these orientations do determine to a great extent one’s direction, and in politics direction is more than half the battle. It matters a great deal which hand, the left or the right, is resting on the tiller and, more importantly, the ideological disposition of the mind directing the hand.

In Connecticut, the sharp liberal-conservative divide elsewhere in the country has been palliated by a penchant for what some commentators have called pragmatic solutions. Of course, there are two kinds of political pragmatists: left leaning Democratic pragmatists, and right leaning Republican pragmatists. In the nutmeg state, pragmatism is little more than a mask used to disguise political orientations.

As used by many commentators, the term “pragmatic” is a synonym for “compromising political insider.” But multi-term political operatives also come in two flavors – left and right. The so called political “middle” is not a descriptive political term; it is a halfway house between two philosophies, liberalism and conservativism, a comfy spot for timorous legislators who fear decisive action.

According to the current mistaken view, pragmatism is little more than compromise. Cutting the baby in half to solve a problem of paternity would be regarded in Connecticut as a pragmatic solution. But real pragmatism is a method, usually scientific, of testing theories through their practical applications, and any genuine pragmatist would reject the Solomononic solution on the grounds that such a compromise could only end with a dead baby. In some quarters in Connecticut, the man who arrives at practical consequence through a logical thought process, would he hooted down as an ideologue. In the Biblical story, the real pragmatist is the real mother of the baby who rejects compromise because Solomon’s theoretical solution will lead ineluctably to murder.

Ambivalence is not pragmatism.

Obama Off Message, America In Decline

Hillary Clinton, the present Secretary of State and ex-President Bill Clinton’s better half by far, spent Election Day a safe distance from the epicenter of what appears to be a Republican Party awakening. In a massive shrug, the nation shucked off the Democratic Party control of congress, taking back the U.S. House of Representatives and putting a large dent in the U.S. Senate. The seismic event bypassed Connecticut.

The day after the political earthquake in Washington, President Barack Obama traveled with his retinue to India, where he gave a few stirring speeches that appeared to be fatally off-message.

Harley Davidson, the American maker of the iconic motorcycle, is building a plant in India. Ordinarily, the un-American drift of jobs and business offshore would excite the interests of senator-elect Dick Blumenthal and other members of Connecticut’s Democratic congressional delegation, all of whom made much ado in their campaigns over the leeching of jobs to foreign countries.

Mr. Blumenthal, Mr. Larson et al made “Made in American” a central pillar of their campaigns and promised to bring home jobs. Mr. Blumenthal stressed during his campaign that, once in Washington, he would staunch the leeching. Ditto Democratic U.S. congressional representatives Mr. John Larson, Ms. Rosa DeLauro, Mr. Jim Himes, Mr. Chris Murphy and Mr. Joe Courtney.

Concerning the creation of jobs, Mr. Blumenthal was particularly amorphous in his response to a question from then Republican Party nominee for the senate Linda McMahon:

“A job is created, and it can be in a variety of ways by a variety of people, but principally by people and businesses in response to demand for products and services. And the main point about jobs in Connecticut is, we can and we should create more of them by creative policies. And that's the kind of approach that I want to bring to Washington… I know about how government can help preserve jobs. And I want programs that provide more capital for small business, that are tax policies that will promote creation of jobs, stronger intervention by government to make sure we use the Made in America policies and Buy America policies to keep jobs here rather than buying products that are manufactured overseas.”

If Mr. Blumenthal stumbled a bit in his response, perhaps it was because he had not sufficiently rehearsed the script supplied to Democratic campaigners by Washington insiders, one of whom, the illustrious Rahm Emanuel, has now departed the Obama administration to run for mayor of Chicago.

In 2008, India was somewhat alarmed by the message of then presidential campaigner Obama, according to Express India:

“Taking a tough stand against outsourcing, the presumptive Democratic nominee Senator Barack Obama said that the choice is between giving tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas or give benefit to those corporations that keep jobs domestically.

"’We can keep giving tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas, or we can give tax benefits to companies that invest right here in New Hampshire,’ Senator Obama said at a joint appearance with Senator Hillary Clinton in Unity, New Hampshire.”

It turns out that current Democratic members of Connecticut’s congressional delegation have fallen behind changing times.

In his recent trip to India, an outsourcing post utilized by Big IT firms and others in the United States, Mr. Obama, his 2008 campaign far behind him, put ancient Indian fears to rest. Announcing new business deals between the U.S. and India, the president said the deal could result in as many as 50-thousand new U.S. jobs.

“Now,” the president said, “our two nations have a chance to do what many also thought was impossible, and that is to build a global partnership in a new century.”

In Mumbai, the Times of India reported, the president implicitly acknowledged the decline of American dominance:

“Speaking at a town hall meeting in Mumbai, he [President Obama] said, ‘I do think that one of the challenges that we are going face in the US, at a time when we are still recovering from the financial crisis is, how do we respond to some of the challenges of globalization? The fact of the matter is that for most of my lifetime and I'll turn 50 next year - the US was such an enormously dominant economic power, we were such a large market, our industry, our technology, our manufacturing was so significant that we always met the rest of the world economically on our terms. And now because of the incredible rise of India and China and Brazil and other countries, the US remains the largest economy and the largest market, but there is real competition.’”

A possible visit to the president's childhood haunts in Jakarta, Indonesia, the world’s most populist Islamic country, was put in doubt by the eruption of the country’s most volatile volcano. Mr. Obama moved to Jakarta when he was 6, after his divorced mother remarried an Indonesian, and lived there until he was 10.

Connecticut’s congressional delegation, on its return to Washington, will face a disturbance of a different order, one made in America.

The Bridgeport Pile

Doug Schwartz has done some digging in the Bridgeport pile, and he has thrown up a few truffles. It’s a pity he is not an investigative reporter for one of Connecticut’s drowsy newspapers – because he is asking all the right questions.

By Doug Schwartz

Date: Friday, November 5, 2010, 4:19 PM

I conclude there was pre-meditated vote fraud in CT, and the reason CT's largest city (Bridgeport) is so slow to report their results is the classic motive behind vote fraud cases: they needed to wait until they learned how many votes they were short, and then they went out and found them. As I show below, if you run the numbers on the quantity of ballots ordered and received and do the timeline of the judge's ruling, this reeks of pre-meditated fraud. This conspiracy began long before Tues. There are a host of basic questions below we need answers to, and which the press is not being too curious about finding -- Recall that it is the Mayor of Stamford who is running for Governor -- ". . . specific complaints filed in October 2008 by Lucy Corelli and Joseph Borges, Republican Registrars of Voters in Stamford and Bridgeport, Connecticut, respectively, during the 2008 election season.

According to Corelli, on August 1, 2008, her office received 1,200 ACORN voter registration cards from the Secretary of State’s office. Over 300 of these cards were rejected because of “duplicates, underage, illegible and invalid addresses,” which “put a tremendous strain on our office staff and caused endless work hours at taxpayers’ expense.” Corelli claimed the total cost of the extra work caused by ACORN corruption was $20,000. Likewise, Borges contended that: “The organization ACORN during the summer of 2008 conducted a registration drive which has produced over 100 rejections due to incomplete forms and individuals who are not citizens…” Among the examples cited by Borges was a seven-year old child who was registered to vote by ACORN through the use of a forged signature and a fake birth certificate claiming she was 27-years old.

The FBI and Department of Justice opened an investigation. However, the Obama Justice Department, while noting that ACORN had engaged in “questionable hiring and training practices,” closed down the investigation in March 2009, claiming ACORN broke no laws."

I took the time to wade through the FOI'ed documents that JW received from the FBI in this case (available from a link to a .pdf from the link above), and there is zero doubt there was outright fraud. Examples included things such as an inmate being registered without his knowledge, number bogus addresses and registration of children.

Recall also that Obama [on his next to last day of campaigning this year] and Clinton made last-minute appearances in Bridgeport right before the election, so we know they had big plans for the place.

Malloy also ran on the Working Families party line, gaining 24,755 votes.

Working Families is simply an ACORN front group. So we know they have a significant impact on this race, accounting for about 4.5% of Malloy's total votes, not including the Bridgeport totals which are not yet available but which will likely increase his ACORN percentage. Note that in Hartford, Malloy's WF line votes were almost as high as Foley's Republican line totals.

Then there are the illegal reverse 911 calls which went out in Bridgeport on election night.

This was both an illegal use of the 911 system and an equal protection violation in how it was administered.

I looked it up, and in the 2008 Presidential election, there were 40,682 votes cast in Bridgeport. Yet they only ordered 21,100 in 2010 to "save money." How likely is it that Bridgeport political hacks were truly concerned about saving money? How much money would they have saved if another 20,000 ballots were printed? A few grand at most. Where does the number 21,100 come from? This is nuts, nobody orders anything in other than a round number. How many ballots were ordered in 2008? It must have been greater than 40,682, because they did not run out. Yet two years later they order half as many?

There is now some double talk from Mayor Finch et al, claiming that it was all a clerical error, that saving money was not the issue. I believe Bysiewicz said something about this is the first election when municipalities had to pay for the ballots themselves.

The Bridgeport registrar said the number of ballots printed was based on the number voting in the past 3 elections. I checked: 2007 municipal election around 13,000. 2006 state-wide election (comparable to this year's) 19,954. Yet they only ordered 1,146 more ballots, to be distributed to all of the polling places, each of which would have required extras to avoid running out. I would love to know the ballot orders for each of the past 3 elections.

If you read the judge's order extending voting hours, there are several anomalies. Why were the Republicans ordered to receive notice and not the Democrats? It was because it was the Democrats who obtained this from the judge, the same judge, in fact, who gave Secretary of State Susan Byseiwitz a pass on her qualifications to run for attorney general, a judgement found wanting by Connecticut's Supreme Court. . Note the time of the order, 7:54 PM. What time did they run out of ballots? Would this order have been valid 6 minutes later? Almost certainly not. How was word conveyed to each of the 12 polling places listed on the order in that 6 minute span? By phone? If so, how many people made the calls and what was the phone number list they worked from? This works out to 30 seconds per phone call if 1 person called 12 polling places. Did all polling places receive word of this order prior to the 8:00 closing? If not, do votes from them count? Note the final line or the order, which unlike the rest of the document, has blanks with handwritten date and time inserted. What gives? How far in advance had this been drafted? Days? This makes no sense to draft a custom, one-off document and then leave blanks. I can maybe see a blank for the time, but for the date??? Was the last-minute nature of this court order to preclude a Republican challenge? The ballots ran out many hours earlier, and if so, a 7:54 ruling smells. How many photocopied ballots were produced in those two hours, where was this done and how were they then distributed to the polls? Who applied for this court order? Had photocopying of ballots commenced prior to the order? How many photocopied ballots had been cast prior to 8:00? It took time to make an application for a court order, obtain a judge, hear the case and draft the decision. This whole timeline needs to be known to the citizens. Amazingly, all this gets done in the nick of time.

This whole thing makes zero sense. On Tuesday evening, Bysiewicz reports that they were able to get another 10,000 ballots from the printer, and that the hearing before the judge took about 20 minutes. So we know they waited hours to go to the judge. Was it to present him with a deadline he had to meet, or was it to keep the Republicans in the dark and denying them time to appeal? Note that it does not appear to be an adversarial hearing, and no Republican attys. were present. So about 10,000 additional printed ballots, plus who knows how many photocopied ballots, which means a total of at least 31,000 ballots. Note the reporter's question which informs us that at 5:00 Bysiewicz had told him that she had already ordered photocopying of ballots. Yet today we learn the vote total in Bridgeport was only 22,072 for the two leading gubernatorial candidates combined, plus maybe 2 or 300 more for Marsh. So where did all these extra ballots they printed go?

Foley reports: "the numbers keep changing around. In last twelve hours, the Bridgeport number has swung over 900 votes.”

Healy on Oct. 20 filed a complaint alleging that two individuals obtained and distributed more than 250 applications for absentee ballots listing a vacant lot on North Avenue as their address.

Watch the video from inside a polling place. It's not pretty. More smelly stuff.
How many of the people in this video are involved in cooking the books?
FRIDAY UPDATE

 Now we learn that "a very small number" "less than 100" ballots were cast after 8:00. Why did Bysiewicz state that it was around 500? Conveniently, most questionable post-8:00 ballots have vanished, now appearing in the pre-8:00 column. in a 6:20AM press conference, Finch says it was absolutely not a financial decision to print so few ballots. He has already appointed a 3-person whitewash commission [even going so far as to bring in a Maryland resident!] to explore the subject of the number of ballots printed. The reason they bring Finch out for the presser is that he is slick enough to pull it off. He claimed, in answer to the question from a reporter, that the reason he was giving the presser, rather than the registrar, that he had "no idea" where the registrar was. If they brought out the registrars, the impression would be one of vote fraud.

Mayor Finch Taps Three Professionals To Assess Election Procedures.

So citizens are supposed to take comfort that a former Bridgeport mayor (and current Maryland resident) is going to conduct an honest investigation because he was a Republican. Why not bring in former mayor Ganim, released in June after a 7 year federal prison sentence. He surely has plenty of time on his hands. Ganim got VIP treatment at the Obama rally last Saturday:  Or what about Finch's predecessor as mayor, a known coke head.
Bridgeport has a long history of vote fraud. And none of this is new to Connecticut's media which, in the present case, appears to be suffering froim aphasia.

What we have is a cascading sequence of suspicious events leading to a conclusion of a pre-meditated conspiracy:

• DOJ drops the FBI's solid case against ACORN in Bridgeport and Stamford (and surely elsewhere in CT)
• Obama and Clinton visit right before the election.

• A little more than half of the ballots required in the previous election are ordered printed in Bridgeport.

• Bridgeport conveniently runs out of ballots, allowing an unusual [drafted days earlier?] court order to keep the polls open 2 extra hours.

• Many thousands of PRINTED, let alone photocopied, ballots remain unaccounted for.

• Reverse 911 calls are made to select portions of the Bridgeport electorate, both illegally and unconstitutionally.

• Only about 500 photocopied [printed?) ballots were cast in the extra two hours, but it takes 3 days to count them?

• Conflicting values circulate for the number of photocopied ballots cast. Now we are told it was less than 100, conveniently removing the issue of a substantial number of post-8:00 votes.

• News reports indicate voters helped themselves to more than one photocopied ballot.

• A slime-bucket whitewash commission is immediately appointed, before the votes are even counted, to cover up the mess.

Some of the reader comments on The Day's web site are instructive.
1. There was not one vote for the independent candidate in the city of Bridgeport, according to the town by town lists of voting numbers. That is statiscally impossible to happen with that many voters. You mean to say that out of over 20,000 voters, not one chose to vote against Malloy or Foley?

2. The reverse 911 call was used, but only to certain parts of the City of Bridgeport. I would like to see the voting statistics from previous elections on how these "areas" typically voted.

3. Absentee ballots were counted for addresses that turned out to be vacant lots.

Channel 3 had a report this AM of people in Bridgeport voting without showing their driver's licenses [APPARENTLY NOT REQUIRED BY LAW], and in some cases, people taking more than one ballot.

The mayor now claims only 100 votes cast between 8 and 10 pm Channel 3 [VS. BYSEIWICZ'S CLAIM OF ABOUT 500] had a report just before 9am and now the registrar of voters in Bridgeport states the tally is still not correct and mayor over step his bounds giving them. I would suggest people see the video channel 3 showed of people grabbing ballots off the table in Bridgeport!

Let's do the math. The Bridgeport mayor says there were 17,800 votes for Malloy and 4,075 for Foley making 21,875 total, less the 21,100 printed, leaving 775 short, less the around 500 cast between 8-10 Pm which leaves, at best, 275 short during the day. Long lines for only 275 ballots short spread throughout the city ? I don't think so. This doesn't add up.

Let me get this right. Bridgeport ran out of ballots between 1 and 2 pm. They ordered 21000 ballots. So between lets say 2pm and 10pm only 875 people in bridgeport voted, but it took them 36 hours past the deadline to count those votes.

One of the local news station just reported that at one voting place in Bridgeport people were given double ballots, names were not checked to make sure the person voting was a registered voter and ballots were misplaced. This is all on videotape.

And none of it is ancient history.

Dodd's Legacy

We think we know what made Dodd not run, but what makes him run? Over the last few months, U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd has been waving goodbye to the senate, a bittersweet farewell occasioned, some think, by plummeting polls and the perception on the part of some of his constituents that he stuck around too long, like some disintegrating, punch-drunk boxer dreaming of his glory days in the ring.

Then again, in the last few months, Dodd has been “born again” – this time as a reformer. Prior to his born-again experience, he was what Roll Call calls “the consummate insider.”

The senator after whom Dodd patterned himself, “lion of the senate” Edward Kennedy, was, to be sure, more “consummate,” beltway lingo indicating the congressional “virtue” of getting your way by playing between the keys of the political organ.

It is said by the chattering class that Dodd is “working on his legacy.” A politician’s legacy is what remains of him after he has left office, history’s verdict on his multifarious career. Someone who has served long in the senate acquires twists and turns that later, when he begins to assemble his legacy, prove useful in guiding the myth makers.

It helps a great deal if the politician is what flappers in the 30’s might call a “smooth talker.” Nixon was not a smoothie, though his career had in it more useful turns than the Mississippi.When Nixon left the presidency in disgrace, he immediately started work on his legacy. He stayed off the firing line and wrote books; soon headhunters in the media were heaping praise upon him, and he died buried under a mound of plaudits. Here and there a few commentators scattered critical remarks over the bones.

Bill Buckley once was asked what the real Nixon was like.

“Which one,” he answered. “There are about four of them.”

Dodd has had what funeral directors might call “a good run.” There were no drowned women in his life, no misplaced cigars. He had an easy time of it with Connecticut’s liberal-to-a-fault media, running afoul of the jaws that bite only when commentators feared he was romancing the right. He was divorced only once, falling far short of Lowell Weicker’s record. Even his fiercest critics would agree Dodd – not to speak of him overmuch in the past tense -- was a nice enough chap. The Ortega brothers appreciated his attentions in Nicaragua; Fidel Castro tossed no barbed words in his direction; and had Castro wannabe Hugo Chavez taken power in Venezuela when Dodd was off schmoozing with the Sandinistas, Chavez would have sniffed no odor of brimstone pouring off the sainted senator.

Dodd will be safe in the hand of his biographers. He need not fear his legacy will be less flattering than that bestowed on Weicker by his biographer in “Maverick,” once reviewed by Managing Editor of the Journal Inquirer Chris Powell under the critical title, “Mr. Bluster Saves The World.”

If the liberal Dodd faltered when he helped to dissolve any remaining restrictions imposed by the Glass-Steagall Act on large financial firms, he recovered somewhat by aggressively supporting President Barack Obama’s Health Care initiative. If he faltered when he supported President George Bush’s war in Iraq, after first opposing intervention in the Persian Gulf, he recovered somewhat by supporting Obama’s often stated campaign promise to bring the troops home from Iraq when doing so would have doomed to failure the military effort in that country -- Bush’s military effort. In yet another political pirouette, Dodd cautiously supported Obama’s war in Afghanistan, sometimes called by disappointed world conquerors “the graveyard of empires.”

The senator's cozy connection with Countrywide was a scar on his reputation. But few seemed to realize that his invaluable assistance to Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac, mortgage lenders too big to fail, may have been equally if not more problematic: One of the reasons large mortgage lenders were too big too fail was that congressional watchdogs such as Dodd and U.S. Rep. Barney Frank winked at their destructive lending practices. Indeed, Both Dodd and Frank rashly encouraged mortgage lenders to dole out tax dollars to recipients who could not afford mortgages.

We are told victory or utter collapse lie ahead of us, depending upon who is doing the telling. But history is not always a tale told by the victors. Sometimes it’s a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. That is more often the case when the powerful among us are permitted to shape their own legacies.