The Unbought Republican Nominating Convention

The hullaballoo that arose the last time Linda McMahon ran for the U.S. Senate against the sainted and irreproachable Attorney GeneralRichard Blumenthal was that the lady was attempting to buy the election.

She did spend $50 million, mostly on campaign literature and salaries for overpriced advisors, and the wife of then Republican campaign chairman Chris Healy was on her staff. Moreover, the lady had minimal political experience, and yet here she was attempting to leap into the U.S. Congressional pool where she would be swimming with such congressional sharks as former U.S. Senator from Connecticut Chris Dodd, who following his retirement flew off to Hollywood, there to become Tinseltown’s chief lobbyist, after having assured everyone that he would never – no, never – become a lobbyist.

Mr. Dodd himself leapt into the U.S. Congress without much political experience under his belt. He served as a volunteer in the Peace Corp, Dominican Republic chapter, from 1966 to 1968, joined the Army Reserve, serving until 1975, thus avoiding active duty service in Viet Nam, and was swept into Congress as a part of the "Watergate Class of '74." Mr. Dodd’s political lineage as the son of former U.S Senator Tom Dodd gave him an edge over his competitors that even the $50 million squandered by Mrs. McMahon could not buy.

As everyone knows, Mrs. McMahon, having secured the nomination of the Republican convention, lost her last campaign for the Senate to Mr. Blumenthal. Though Mrs. McMahon had a money advantage over Mr. Blumenthal, also millionaire from Greenwich, Mr. Blumenthal clearly had a media advantage over Mrs. McMahon. So frequent were Mr. Blumenthal’s press availabilities during his 20 year run as Attorney General that they gave rise to the often heard remark: there is no more dangerous spot in Connecticut than that between a TV camera and Mr. Blumenthal. In the U.S. Senate, Mr. Blumenthal has lost a great deal of his state notoriety sheen.

It is not at all surprising that Connecticut’s media, working cheek by jowl for decades with a left of center Democratic majority, has taken on a blue tincture. Not so much unfair as unwilling to operate out of the usual incumbent box, the media presents a problem for most minority candidates who fall to the right of, say, former U.S. Senator Chis Dodd, now a Hollywood mogul, or U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman, who reconfigured as an Independent after having served social liberals in the senate for more than 20 years. Mr. Lieberman was dumped by the Democratic Party in a primary, purportedly for conspiring with the enemy. He endorsed U.S. Senator John McCain for president and, though vowing to decouple himself from the current struggle for his seat, has professed warm feeling for former U.S. Representative Chis Shays, a congressional colleague of long standing.

This time around, Mrs. McMahon will face a tough primary opponent in Mr. Shays. The McMahon-Shays tousle has a déjà vu all over again scent to it. Mrs. McMahon’s last Republican Party primary opponent was former U.S. Representative Rob Simmons, whose campaign blinked on and off because Mr. Simmons, thought by some a tougher opponent of Mr. Blumenthal, was conserving his campaign cash. Despite the Democratic Party howl raised against Republicans as being the party of the rich, Republican state parties that have lost to Democrats the bulk of their moderate front line troops are the poor cousins of politics. During the last election, U.S. Rep John Larson, who holds the safest seat this side of Beijing, China, outspend his Republican Party opponent by a ratio of $7,871to $1.

Should Mrs. McMahon survive Mr. Shays in a primary, she will likely face the Democratic Party nominee for the U.S. Senate, current U.S. Representative Chris Murphy who, whatever his political merits, is no Dick Blumenthal. So teflon-proof was Mr. Blumenthal that he was able to survive a stolen valor charge that he had several times falsely claimed active service in Vietnam. Frequent media availabilities over a twenty year period in Connecticut politics do have their advantages.

The redoubtable Susan Bysiewicz will be a tough primary opponent for Mr. Murphy, driving him leftward in a state seemingly beginning to show a bit of buyer’s remorse over the hard-charging, sweet talking President Barack Obama.

At the conclusion of the Republican Party nominating convention, Mrs. McMahon received 61 percent of the delegate vote; Mr. Shays, who distained to ask delegates to vote for him and vowed prior to the convention to engage in a primary, received a more slender 32 percent. Mrs. McMahon’s advantage in delegate votes was the result of superior hustle. At the opening of the convention, Mrs. McMahon produced a list of supporters that included 95 Republican Town Chairs, 33 Republican Town Vice Chairs, 20 Republican Town Secretaries and 13 Republican Town Treasures, more than 250 “grass roots leaders,” she said in a press release. The lady put some miles on her boots to earn such support.

These figures, however, will not be sufficient to convince hard boiled opponents that Mrs. McMahon did not BUY the convention. Watch for it.

The Resistance, A Self Interview

Q: Whither the Connecticut Republican Party?

A: It’s good question. I put up a blog recently that was a review of a Chris Shays interview with Dennis House on “Face the State.”

Mr. House asked Mr. Shays whether he thought Connecticut had drifted so far to the left as to make it impossible for Republicans to win a seat in the U.S. Congress. Mr. Shays is running as a Republican for Senator Joe Lieberman’s seat. Mr. Shays said “Absolutely,” he thought the state had moved very far to the left.

The blog produced a response from Jon Kantrowitz, a liberal commentator who is himself an articulate unabashed progressive. “By the way,” Mr. Kantrowitz wrote, “it's true - the state has gone too far to the left to elect a Republican - and thank goodness for that!”

There are some few Republicans about who are not as thankful as Mr. Kantrowitz, though it is difficult to disagree with the major premise of his proposition -- namely that the state has moved very far to the left. The entire U.S. congressional delegation is Democratic. The state’s safer districts are occupied by unapologetic progressives like Mr. Kantrowitz, now moving up within the national Democratic caucus food chain. U.S. Reps Rosa DeLauro and John Larson are both pull-no-punches progressives. In what used to be called swing districts, congressional Democrats are a bit more cautious. In the General Assembly, state Democrats had until just recently a veto proof margin in both houses. And during the last election cycle, the Democrats captured the gubernatorial office, previously held by moderate Republicans and one ex-maverick Republican, former senator and governor Lowell Weicker, the father of Connecticut’s income tax. In addition, all the state’s constitutional officers are Democratic. So, I think it is safe to agree, along with Mr. Kantrowitz, that Democrats pretty much own the whole political kit and caboodle, while disagreeing with him sharply that we ought to thank God for this turn of events. While God may not be a Republican, one likes to believe He is no political plutocrat.

Q: Where does that leave Republicans?

A: In a resistance posture. The point of a party surely is to offer resistance to the reigning power. History has not dealt kindly with parties that have cooperated with the prevailing regime. The one party state, like a rolling stone, gathers no moss, but the single party state is an invitation to corruption; which is why, come to think of it, God created the two party system.

Q: Why haven’t Republicans been able to offer effective resistance to what you have characterized repeatedly in your Connecticut Commentary as Connecticut’s one party state?

A: Because Republicans have too often cooperated with the prevailing regime. You cannot cooperate without being coopted. It is important to understand that Mr. Kantrowitz is partly right. The Republican resistance has been washed away in Connecticut. Here and there, one finds brave blades of grass shooting through the concrete. During the last elections, two Republican conservatives – state senators Len Suzio and Joe Markley -- won office, both of whom may be considered part of a resistance vanguard. When Bill Buckley, who used to live in Stamford, started National Review, he proclaimed that the mission of the magazine would be to stand athwart history yelling “Stop!” Rolling stones don’t like that sort of thing.

I’ll give an example. Len Suzio, a conservative Republican who won his seat in a special election, has lately come out against deal made between Mr. Malloy and Jackson Laboratory. The Laboratory is to be attached to the UConn Health Center (UCHC), a business black hole that has absorbed millions of dollars in tax bailouts. Shortly after his budget passed muster with SEBAC, Mr. Malloy handsomely rewarded UCHC by giving it about a billion dollars.

The laboratory, apparently a successful non-profit enterprise that will itself generate no tax revenue, will absorb tax money from both federal and state grants. Mr. Suzio’s objection to the deal was forceful: “This is a lose-lose situation for Connecticut taxpayers. All the risk money is coming from the state of Connecticut. ... We don't get a nickel of interest in the technology that they develop. That is stupid."

Senior advisor and chief spokesman for the governor Roy Occhiogrosso responded that the project was a solid investment in personalized medicine and bioscience. This was a smart rather than a dumb risk: “There's a difference between taking a smart risk and a dumb risk. This is a smart risk. Taking a risk that 10 football games a year will turn the economy around is not that smart. The next thing you know, Senator Suzio will go on the radio to try and convince the people of Connecticut of his view on the flatness of the world. No matter how he tries to spin it, this is the best thing to happen to Connecticut in a long, long time.''

Mr. Suzio did not mention the “B” word on this occasion: Connecticut is broke, broke, broke. But the important political point is this: Even if Mr. Suzio is right, it will not matter – because Mr. Malloy has the votes in the General Assembly to do whatever he likes. If Mr. Malloy wanted to build a Ziggerat in Farmington – which, by the way, would produce a momentary spurt of jobs – he could do it, because the Republican resistance has no battalions. Napoleon’s quip to a pope who offered him a mild resistance was to ask: How many battalions has the pope? Answer: Not enough to resist the prevailing power of the day.

And THAT is the problem for Connecticut.

Mr. Malloy passed his budget through the General Assembly without being put to the inconvenience of discussing the matter with leading Republicans who, unlike union representatives, were wholly shut out of the process. The governor’s budget figures were such as to produce what I have called in the blog and in columns an artificial surplus of about a billion dollars. Real surpluses are produced when taxes are not increased but the state never-the-less realizes an increase in revenue owing mostly to increased business activity. Mr. Malloy’s artificial surplus is now flowing into a series of crony capitalist projects. Mr. Suzio is right about the UConn Health Center: It’s a budget busting black hole the state – which is broke, broke, broke -- can little afford to support. Attaching a non-profit, non-tax generating research center to the UCHC does not make the combination more profitable. This may be the first time in Connecticut’s history that a serviceable neck has been draped around an albatross.

Q: So, What’s wrong with crony capitalism?

A: Glad you asked. Anyone who is a proponent of the free market must be an anti-monopolist. I am here using the word “monopoly” to indicate existing monopolies, many of them stamped “Made in Washington D.C.” – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac come to mind -- as well as political systems that tend towards monopoly. This is why the free marketer must be an anti-monopolist: Monopolies, which are cornered markets, frustrate competition, and competition is the economic virtue par excellence of a truly liberal society.

In the modern period, monopolies have been facilitated by governments. In a truly free market that fosters competition, cornered markets are less possible. It is when companies are given an opportunity to use government as a tool to gain an advantage over their natural competitors that monopolies flourish.

The process that produces state sponsored monopolies is called “crony capitalism.” The crony capitalist and his facilitators tilt the playing field in favor of large monopolistic enterprises by using presidents, governors and legislators to gain an advantage denied them in a free and fair competition.

This unfair advantage has its analogue in the sports arena. Americans, who like to see the best man or team rise to the top in a fair competition, would react disapprovingly, I like to think, to any “fixed” competition in which the presumed impartial judgment of a referee has been purchased by one side or another; and yet this is precisely what happens when a single political party has captured control of a congress or an executive department or a city or a state or a town.

There are signs all about us that singe party states and governments are infested with corruption. Alert politicians and – as I like to think -- wide awake journalist will be able to read the signs of the times. There is no reason to suppose that reporters, editors and commentators in the legacy media are comfortable with monopolies of any kind, political or economic.

There is an old biblical saying: By their fruits shall ye know them. We are familiar with the bitter fruits of crony capitalism. What applies to business monopolies applies as well to political monopolies.

The government of China, for example, is as much a political monopoly as – just to reach for an example – the government of, say, Bridgeport Connecticut. Of course, the consequences of corruption in China are more severe because there are in that country no mediating democratic institutions, such as a critical press, to soften the iron fist of an unquestioned authoritative regime. The arc of monopolistic political regimes bends towards fascism; they corrupt absolutely because they needn’t worry that their political customers will be able effectively to demand a better service or a better product. Within the one party state, any hope of political competition has been effectively abolished. Political monopolies are nursery beds of corruption, because they permit governments to rent to favored groups instruments of government power that ought to be used for the benefit of all.

The legislature is overwhelmingly Democratic. And it may seem to some who are paying attention that the remarks made several times by Governor Dannel Malloy to unions to the effect that he will never forsake them – “Oh, my darling” -- indicate that unions need not tailor their interests to the general interest, so long as both the governor and the General Assembly have their back. Indeed, it seems that unions were not made for the state; the state, rather, was made for unions. The very last party to sign off on Connecticut’s budget was not the legislature, the preeminent organ of government in democracies and republics, but SEBAC, a coalition of state unions that one commentator has called Connecticut’s fourth branch of government.

So then, we have in Connecticut a Democratic governor, a General Assembly dominated by Democrats – one of whom, Speaker of the House Chris Donovan, himself unusually friendly to union interests, is running for the U.S. House in the 5th District – a media blithely undisturbed by the prospect of a one party state, and a U.S. congressional delegation composed entirely of Democrats.

That is a recipe for, among other things, crony capitalism and its attendant corruptions.

In connection with politicians – the crony capitalist makers – the age old question arises: Qui Bono? Or to put it in the modern idiom: What’s in it for them?

Lots. They are given an edge on their competitors, usually smaller fry, and they have arranged with the politicians to share sacrifices: Taxpayers will share in the paying of their debts when their companies fail; and they will take the lion’s share of profits. Given these arrangements, is it any wonder that the public has soured on businesses too big to fail and those politicians who have contributed their mites to the creation of monopolistic enterprises?

I’ve been amused by the notion that Republicans have a lock on millionaires. Within the Democratic Party, we are invited to think, there are no millionaires: no Dick Blumenthals or Rosa DeLauros, both of whom are millionaire Democrats coasting along in seemingly impregnable Democratic districts.

According to the myth peddled by Democrats, businesses in the United States prop up Republicans with generous campaign contributions – but rarely Democrats. Nothing could be further from the truth. The late Senator Ted Kennedy could depend on regular infusions of campaign cash from captains of industries in the United States: Ditto former Senator Chris Dodd, showered for years by financial groups that he was supposed to be regulating as chairman of the banking committee. Mr. Dodd has now cashed in on his many years of experience in the U.S. Senate by becoming a lobbyist for Tinsletown. Mr. Dodd’s Hollywood adventure began only a few weeks after he had shaken the dust of the U.S. Congress from his feet, about a month after he had told his supporters on the left that he would never, ever become a lobbyist.

Money continues to be the Mother’s Milk of politics, and mouths are everywhere. So long as crony capitalists feel that they can be assisted in cornering markets by politicians, they will continue to buy politicians. In the last Republican-Democratic campaign in the 1st District, the incumbent Democrat, John Larson raised $2.7 million, much of it from financial interests; his Republican competitor, Ann Brickley, managed to get along with a slender $250,000.

If one may be so bold as to measure the wealth of a politician by the contributions he receives, we should conclude that Mr. Larson was the millionaire, while poor Mrs. Brickley was in financial campaign rags. Mr. Larson was in this race – and indeed, in all his races – the Mr. Bumble of the Democratic workhouse, while Mrs. Brickley was Oliver Twist, begging for more workhouse gruel. It’s wonderful – to me anyway – how desperately people who have been writing about politics in the state most of their adult lives cling to these myths, the work, for the most part, of ideological ad-men and Orwellian spin-masters.

In late September, as FBI agents were carting boxes of information from Solyndra -- the environmentally friendly, technologically advanced, politically correct, and now bankrupt company into which the Obama administration had poured its heart, soul and taxpayer money – administration officials, including the president, were avoiding comment. We may wonder why. The media, so far, has focused its attention on the vast sum of money “invested” in the now bankrupted solar panel producer. That focus is not misplaced. But we ought not to forget several other important points.

The e-mails now pouring out of the scandal suggest that the whole business was an improperly vetted photo opportunity for the president and vice president. Any kid selling lemonade from a lemonade stand might have told any one of the financiers in the Obama administration now busing themselves with ending a seemingly intractable recession that when a product’s cost of production exceeds the amount of money one expects to receive through sales, the company is incurring a risk of bankruptcy. In an S-1 filing a year ago, Solyndra reported its average sales price was over $3.20 a watt, about 65% more than leading crystalline-silicon PV manufacturers. Its cost of manufacturing was an astounding $6 a watt. These figures are irreconcilable.

Solyndra was not one of those companies in the United States deemed too big to fail, and so it failed – which means, a bankruptcy judge will be assessing the company’s assets and selling them off, parceling out a portion of redeemed value to the company’s investors. In Solyndra’s case, about a half billion dollars of tax money was frontloaded into the collapse. The Solyndra loan was part of a $38.6 billion program to aid green energy that the Washington Post says has created exactly 3,545 jobs, about $10,888,575 in loans per job – all vanished. Perhaps, with the FBI on the case, someone will go to jail. In the case of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the tax money was both frontloaded and backloaded; the company is now bigger than ever, and no one went to jail.

The government financing of select companies it chooses as prospective winners in a competitive market place is wrong for multiple reasons. Government intervention in decisions generally made by consumers distorts demand signals and creates moral hazards for investors. Government is notoriously inept at choosing winners; increases in the price of stamps have not prevented the U.S. Post Office from painful consolidations. But the most objectionable feature of Crony capitalism is this: It funnels profits to private investors and shifts debts to taxpayers.

Somehow, something in my bones tells me that millionaire Democrats in safe districts like Mr. Larson, or private business- punishing former attorneys general like Senator Dick Blumenthal or tax the millionaire proponents, who continually deny that our country and state are beset with a spending rather than a revenue problem, do not pass their days worrying about such things. But the people of Connecticut should – because we are living in a time in which our problems will kick in our front doors if we ignore them. They are coming to sleep with us in our beds; they will be sitting in a chair next to us at our work sites. They will be sitting in the passenger seats of our cars.

We no longer have the comfort of ignoring them.

The chief difference between Republicans and Democrats in the coming campaign will be this: Republicans are interested in increasing prosperity through a series of painful but necessary reforms. They want small, efficient and responsive federal, state and municipal governments and an expanding economy. Democrats want to expand the range of influence the government has over our lives. One party would shrink the private sphere and expand the public sphere; the other would do the opposite. We must never forget that in democracies and republics the citizenry gets the kind of government it votes for. Having crossed the bar to the 21st century, we should wonder and worry whether the challenge thrown down by Ben Franklin at the founding of the republic will be properly answered. When asked by a woman what kind of government the founders at the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 had given to the country, Franklin said, “A republic madam – if you can keep it.”

We are under a moral obligation to those who came before us and to those who will succeed us – to keep it.

The Endorsements

There have been very few unexpected endorsements from Connecticut’s media, and the almost universal endorsements of Attorney General Richard Blumenthal by the state’s opinion makers were entirely predictable. The status quo media likes status quo candidates.

The status quo candidate will always stress his experience over that of his opponent who, of course, may have little direct experience in politics. Such was the case with Ann Brickley, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate running against Sen. John Larson, a Beltway familiar. The proposition that voters should choose experience in office over inexperience is, of course, fatal to good government. The very existence of an election process argues against cradle to grave politicians. But the settled opinion among many editorial writers in the state is that political experience should be determinative.

For this reason it was a little unsettling, in a positive sense, to read the Register Citizen’s endorsement of Brickley over Larson. The paper reasoned that Mr. Larson had been swallowed up by the Washington whale. His attention, which should have been directed toward his failing state, the paper argued, had been too often directed towards Beltway status.

“We are in the midst of a huge national backlash against Pelosi’s management of taxing and spending policies that affect the economy,” the paper said, “and against the federal health care reform bill that Pelosi and Larson shepherded through Congress… We feel she [Brickley] would bring the 1st District seat back around to being about Connecticut’s interests, after years of having a congressman who long ago got caught up as a key lieutenant in an inside-the-Beltway partisan war that has very little to do with what is good for Torrington, Winsted, New Hartford and our state.”

The paper also noted that Brickley has devoted her efforts in private enterprise to helping companies become more prosperous, not a bad resume line at a time when many Connecticut companies have for years been moving to greener pastures elsewhere. Endorsements of this kind, however, are the exception to the rule.

Mr. Blumenthal has no direct experience as a U.S. Senator, but he has had considerable practice in stroking the media, which had not looked closely at some of the cases he prosecuted in Connecticut. Mr. Blumenthal has been taken mostly at his word, as reflected in those ubiquitous press releases that, for 20 years, have rained down on Connecticut’s media like confetti at a wedding. The indespensible critical attitude one expects in a healthy adversarial media never showed up at the wedding. Many people suspect this is the case because Mr. Blumenthal’s world view, iterated endlessly in his ideologically partisan press releases, dovetails with that of Connecticut’s left of center media.

Mr. Blumenthal’s harrying of businesses, sometimes justified, has been a boon to unions and editorial writers advocating left of center views. It simply is not true that Mr. Blumenthal has directed the bulk of his fire at Big Business. It is not true that his office is capable of representing adequately both the interests of state agencies -- a statutory requirement he labors under, except in those cases in which he declines to do so for ideological reasons – AND the interests of whistleblowers employed in the agencies he is charged with representing. The Dickman case throws this discordant representation into bold relief, a point that should have been an issue in Mr. Blumenthal’s senatorial campaign. It wasn’t.

Throughout his campaign, Mr. Blumenthal continued to pelt the media with attorney general releases touting his own moral rectitude. In one of those releases, he advised that he would continue to harry an ADVERTISER – unless the advertiser withdrew from its site notices that might have been placed by prostitutes disguised as masseuses, an obvious First Amendment issue Mr. Blumenthal was successful in forcing the California company to adjust its advertising in such a way that it would become more difficult for police to monitor prostitution activity. Significantly, Mr. Blumenthal reached all the way to California in his effort, leaving similar Connecticut advertisers free to ply their ads unmolested.

The suppression of First Amendment rights by an attorney general not authorized by statute to engage in criminal cases should have alarmed the state’s media, if only because all media has a dog in every First Amendment legal tousle. It didn’t. And Mr. Blumenthal’s assault on the First Amendment succeeded, in large part, because Connecticut’s timid pro-Blumenthal media was unwilling to defend an issue that had been a tar baby since the days of Chautauqua and Temperance societies.

Mr. Blumenthal carefully chooses his targets to comport with liberal orthodoxy. His attorney’s general media releases, far more numerous over a 20 year period than his competitor’s campaign ad brochures, were sent out while Mr. Blumenthal was running for the U.S. Senate. Indeed, his role as attorney general was, oddly, the central pillar of his senatorial campaign. Mr. Blumenthal had chosen his marks well. His successor, possibly George Jepsen, the preferred candidate of the state’s media, will not be able to resist the temptation to follow in his predecessors footsteps. Jepsen, politically and emotionally attached to unions and the traditional Democratic Party agenda, has said he would do so, though in a lower key. The attorney general office will be impervious to media criticism that never arrives at its doorstep.

And the absence of such criticism certainly was no bar to media endorsements of Mr. Blumenthal.

Larson-Brickley-Krayeske-Hutchinson Debate

Two weeks before Connecticut voters are due to troop to the polls, U.S. Rep John Larson debated his opponents – Republican Ann Brickley, Green Party candidate Ken Krayeske and Socialist Action candidate Chris Hutchinson – at the West Hartford Town Hall. According to one report, Mr. Larson appeared “annoying.” The journalist who turned in the report surely meant to say that Mr. Larson looked “annoyed,” though it is unclear from the report which of the three burrs under his saddle irritated him most.

Those who could not attend the debate may find it on Ameriborn News. Following the debate in West Hartford, three more are scheduled.

Lately, and most surprisingly, Mrs. Brickley has crept up on Mr. Larson in the polls, a mere seven points separating the two.

Mr. Krayeske is best known for having been arrested by over-exuberant Harford police some years ago while innocently interrupting a parade and taking some pictures of Gov. Jodi Rell. He also confronted UConn coach Jim Calhoun with questions concerning his salary, and this produced some verbal fireworks during which the coach advised Mr. Krayeske to “Shut up.” Far from shutting up, Krayeske, a lawyer recently admitted to Connecticut’s bar, threw his hat into the ring in the First District.

Brickley’s resume is much fuller than those of Mr. Krayeske or Mr. Hutchinson. Mrs. Brickley is a licensed engineer, former employee of United Technologies and General Electric who now owns her own business consulting firm. Larson, one of the goodest of good old boys in the U.S. Congress, is the present executor of a seat that has been held by Democrats for the last five decades. Before Larson, the seat was owned by Barbara Kennelly, daughter of the last real Democratic Party boss in Connecticut. Mrs. Kennelly held the seat for 17 years. After the passing of her father, John Bailey, certain traditional party functions were outsourced: Anti-Republican and anti-Democratic crusher ads are now being shown and financed by extra-party functionaries; incumbent politicians are expected to raise their own campaign funds; and campaign strategies tend to be written by beltway Hessians.

This year, some incumbents – partly owing to the rise of the much reviled Tea Party movement – are having a rough go of it, and Mr. Larson’s sense of unease is shared by many. Among active voters, both Democrats and unaffiliateds each outnumber Republicans by a more than two to one margin. Mr. Larson’s slippage in the polls is directly related to dissatisfaction with Beltway solutions to the lingering recession, high taxes, out of control spending, bottomless deficits, malingering foreign wars and President Barack Obama’s drooping ratings among Independents and some Democrats.

On a sliding scale from socialist to capitalist, Mr. Hutchinson, who favors a 100% tax on rich people, would rank first, followed by Mr. Krayeske, Mr. Larson and Mrs. Brickley.

Mr. Hutchinson did not reveal in the debate in which town he plans to locate his gulag to house dispossessed kulaks, but West Hartford, a relatively wealthy town, dotted here and there with houses that reek of ill gotten riches and fortunes to be confiscated under the Hutchinson dispensation, would seem to be an obvious choice. In the matter of taxing entrepreneurial profits, Mr. Krayeske favors turning back the clock to the Reagan era in which taxes on the redundantly rich were at 50% of income. The problem with wealth confiscations is this: Under Mr. Hutchinson’s 100% plan, wealth can only be confiscated once. Wealth having been confiscated and dispersed, possibly to teachers, what is the Mr. Hutchinson’s Second Year Plan? When all the cows have been butchered and eaten, when there is no more milk in the udders -- when there are no more udders -- whence comes the milk? If I rob everything Peter has and give it to Paul in year one, how do I satisfy Paul’s expectations in year two? How do you share the wealth when there is no wealth to share?

The enduring problem in politics is how to milk the cow gently and in such a way that the cow, after the taxing process, will thank you for the stroking. Mr. Larson would tax robustly – probably not the best idea in a recession -- while Mrs. Brickley would tax more prudently. Even Huey Long, from whose progressive program Franklin Roosevelt borrowed heavily, reduced taxes during the depression.

And the cows? If the stroking is brutal, they will move elsewhere, where the shadow of the gulag does not disturb their peaceful grazing.

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