Corruption in Corrupticut

Not all corruption is equal.

In a recent column, “A Kennedy Stirs Connecticut's Politics,” Kevin Rennie sideswiped departing Republican leader Larry Cafero, who is to the Republican Party what Rocky Marciano was to boxing, a hard slugger:

“Cafero got snagged in a 2012 federal investigation into campaign contributions and legislation. He was caught on video as an informant deposited $5,000 in cash into a refrigerator in Cafero's office. The money was converted into campaign contributions from straw donors, and the scheme was revealed last year during the criminal trial of a campaign aide to former Speaker of the House Christopher Donovan.

“What a mess Cafero leaves in his wake. His gelatinous, silent deputies, Reps. Themis Klarides and Vincent Candelora, have disgraced themselves beyond repair for failing to take a stand for honor during this long fiasco. They will wear Cafero's deep stains for however long they remain in public life.”

And the sins of the political father shall be visited upon the heads of his political children – yea, even to the tenth generation: “… gelatinous, silent deputies… have disgraced themselves beyond repair… They will wear Cafero’s deep stains for however long they remain in public life.”

And the stain that has dishonored Cafero and his gelatinous deputies is … what exactly?

An “informant,” Ray Soucy, tapped by the FBI as a singing canary, deposited an envelope containing $5,000 in cash “into a refrigerator in Cafero’s office.” Apparently – though we may never know for certain – Mr. Soucy was given the cash by the FBI and told – though we may never know for certain – to make use of it to incriminate Mr. Cafero. Mr. Soucy had earlier used money provided to him to incriminate several associates of then Speaker of the House Chris Donovan. The net cast over the troubled waters by the FBI snagged a few Donovan operatives, but the big fish, Mr. Donovan, got away. Mr. Donovan’s campaign for the 5^th District seat in the U.S. House collapsed in ruins under the hammer blows of the FBI investigation.

The attempt to ensnare Mr. Cafero failed when the Republican leader in the General Assembly noticed Mr. Soucy stuffing the cash in the refrigerator and rejected the FBI bagman’s fraudulent cash donation.

Speculation may and usually does run wild at this point. Did Mr. Cafero know when the cash was being stuffed in the fridge that Mr. Soucy was an FBI plant? Probably not, because following Refrigeratorgate, Mr. Cafero did accept from Mr. Soucy tainted donations in the form of checks that he apparently did not know were tainted. The FBI later would advise Mr. Cafero he was not a target of their investigation. Mr. Soucy, the FBI plant, was successful in delivering tainted campaign funds to several of Mr. Donovan’s associates, some of whom were convicted and sentenced to prison. But Mr. Donovan, his campaign for the U.S. House in tatters, escaped the prison noose. The play of events suggests – though, of course, we may never know for certain – that the sting operation, at some point, may have been compromised. In any case, the Big Fishes wriggled free, and the FBI was satisfied with smaller fry. None of Mr. Cafero’s gelatinous associates were arrested, very possibly because neither Reps. Themis Klarides nor Vincent Candelora had accepted tainted campaign donations.

Never-the-less, the two targets of Mr. Rennie’s outrage, Ms. Klarides and Mr. Candelora, are not merely gelatinous; they “have disgraced themselves beyond repair; they are dishonorable; they will “wear Cafero's deep stains for however long they remain in public life.”

So says Connecticut’s equivalent of Nathanial Hawthorne’s the Reverend Master Dimmesdale, Hester Prynne’s godly pastor in the Scarlet Letter. The Reverend Dimmesdale was a secret sinner always in good odor with his flock:

'People say,' said another, 'that, her godly pastor, takes it very grievously to his heart that such a scandal has come upon his congregation."

In any partisan commentary that has pretentions to non-partisanship, fairness equates to equal flailing. If you whip a Republican who richly deserves the whipping – say, a felonious governor – you must find a Democrat to whip, so that the pans of your justice scale will be evenly balanced. If you whip a Democratic Speaker of the House, you must find on the Republican side someone equally odious you must flail. And the weight of the accusation must appear to be equivalent – even when the justice pans bear different weights.

There is no indication – NONE – that Ms. Klarides deserves the letter “A” Mr. Rennie has pinned upon her. Mr. Cafero’s honor was not damaged by an FBI canary whose cash campaign contribution he rejected, as politely as possible. The sting operation is as old as Adam and Eve: The serpent in the garden is God’s advocate sent upon the earth, like the FBI, to seek the ruin of men’s souls. Sometimes the satanic advocate, the tester of men, succeeds, sometimes not.

Both Mr. Donovan and Mr. Cafero rejected the overtures of the FBI’s satanic advocate, Mr. Soucy, once a union leader in Connecticut’s prison system. Because Mr. Soucy  had co-operated with the FBI, he avoided jail time. Donovangate should put Mr.  Rennie in mind of a remark made by Bill Buckley following a failed 1957 coup plot against Indonesian strongman Sukarno: "The attempted assassination of Sukarno last week,” Mr. Buckley wrote in National Review, “had all the earmarks of a CIA operation. Everyone in the room was killed except Sukarno."

Measured by the number of top dogs upon whom the shadow of the prison fell, the Donovan sting operation was far from successful. Perhaps Mr. Rennie will devote one of his columns to explaining why and then demand that the General Assembly create an Inspector General Office to examine and prosecute future cases of corruption in Connecticut, the state that regulates everything but itself.

New Year Rip Van Winkle “Republicans” In Connecticut’s Commentariat

Around this time of year, prior to the elections, numberless political commentators become Republicans – if only in spirit – the better to advise leading Republicans in the Grand Old Party what they should think and say and do about the many problems besetting Connecticut. Their daddies voted for Goldwater in 1964, they tell us. Their mommies subscribed to National Review in the glory days of Reagan. They remember with some affection William Buckley’s attempt to snatch the New York mayoralty from the jaws of John Lindsey and Abe Beame. Asked by a New York Times reporter what he would do if he actually won the election, Mr. Buckley replied he would hang a net on the first floor of the New York Times building to catch the falling bodies. Virtually all of them used to vote Republican when the Republican Party in Connecticut was sagacious enough to put up moderates such as Chris Shays for office, hardly noticing that in the interim all the moderate Republicans in Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional delegation, including Mr. Shays, have been displaced by progressive Democrats. They genuflect whenever Lowell Weicker is among them. He was a Republican, wasn’t he?

But now…

Just as December 2013 was creeping towards the dust bin of history, Colin McEnroe, for 30 years a Courant columnist and now a radio talk show personality on public supported WNPR, penned a piece for the Courant lamenting the poor choices Republicans leaders will be offering to the general public as prospective governors in 2014.

It’s an old meme, as the leftists might say.

Way back in May 2011, Rick Green, the proprietor of a Courant blog “CTConfidential: What’s really Happening," since defunct, threw down the left of center gauntlet. Connecticut Commentary remarked on Mr. Green’s blog post at the time: What better way to introduce the New Year of Connecticut commentary by glancing back at a political “Dear Abby” of 2011:

Rick Green Advises Republicans To Become More Blue

Saturday, May 07, 2011

In a piece written on May 5 by Courant commentator Rick Green, proprietor of a Courant blog called “CTConfidential: What’s really Happening," Mr. Green asserts that the Connecticut Republican Party would be suicidal to follow the lead of conservatives elsewhere in the nation who delivered the U.S. House of Representatives and several state houses to the GOP.

A move to the right in Connecticut would, Mr. Green warns, drive the Republican Party right off a cliff:

“There's little evidence that Connecticut's vast middle of moderate-thinking unaffiliated voters are ready to embrace the sort of anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, Planned Parenthood-bashing message that plays well in Texas.

“But that's the modus operandi of a new group founded by Jack Fowler, publisher of the conservative National Review. Fowler, who lives in Milford, sees great hope in the General Assembly victories last fall of fiscal and social conservatives Joe Markley and Len Suzio.”

Mr. Green’s chief objection to Mr. Fowler and Tom Scott is that both, recent founders of The Roger Sherman Liberty Center, seem to be unwilling to toss social conservatives “right off a cliff.” Conservative advocates, Mr. Scott and Mr. Fowler persist in foolishly supporting such disturbers of the peace as Peter Wolfgang, the Executive Director of The Family Institute of Connecticut (FIC)), who does not consider abortion, gay marriage and transgender rights to be normative, desirable or politically useful for moderate Republicans.

Connecticut’s very blue legislature recently has passed or is considering the passage of bills that would abolish the state’s death penalty (Since done), fold transgenders into legislation that prohibits discrimination against disabled Connecticut citizens (Since done) and grants to gays marriage rights pressed upon the General Assembly by a Supreme Court that decided the issue in a case in which then Attorney General Richard Blumenthal pointedly did not choose to defend the state against the judicial imposition by stressing a connection between normative male-female marriage and child birth (Since done).

Mr. Green, who changed his party affiliation some time ago from Independent to Republican,” considers these and other matters to be “social issues” and, freshly arrived as a Republican Party journalistic consultant, he councils the state GOP to avoid such divisive issues if the party wishes to elect Republicans to office. Once, in the long ago, moderate Republican giants strode Connecticut’s earth. Mr. Green calls the roll: Nancy Johnson, Chris Shays and Rob Simmons, all former U.S. House Representatives. He fails to mention Lowell Weicker, for many years a “moderate” though somewhat abrasive Republican.

Now, if in the interest of fair commentary the Courant were to open its pages to conservatives -- perhaps even courageously venturing to hire a few in order balance the consistent leftward tilt of its editorial pages -- those commentators might wish to dispute several of Mr. Green’s assertions and assumption, even at the risk of falling off a cliff.

The conservative point of view would not fail to note that all the Republican “moderates” mentioned by Mr. Green have been turned out of office, sadly having been replaced by Democrats who are considerably less moderate.

Moderation in Connecticut, like love, is largely in the eye of the beholder. The Courant’s ambition is to make sure that the preponderance of the beholders who write within its pages are, like Mr. Green, reliable liberals. Mr. Green can mention only two conservative politicians in the General Assembly, both of whom are recent arrivals, which suggest that conservative politics in Connecticut, far from being tried and found wanting, has not been tried at all.

Mr. Shays, in fact, was the very last Republican “moderate” – though some considered him a liberal on what Mr. Green perceives to be social issues – in all of New England. The species “moderate New England Republican” is, to put it in ecological jargon, now as extinct as the wooly mammoth.

Never-the-less, Mr. Green wishes to breathe some life into these dead dry bones, but Mr. Fowler, Mr. Scott and the sort of people with whom Mr. Green would never choose to break liberal bread are standing Mr. Green’s way and must be bowled over, if only rhetorically.

The sharp division of the political sphere into social conservatives and economic conservatives, while it may be convenient for liberal rhetoricians, is highly misleading, because in the real world, outside the fevered imaginations of utopians who wish to make it over, the two spheres leech into each other, even in that part of it in which liberals like Mr. Green attack social conservatives with rhetorical weapons forged in the smithy of social liberalism. Abortion on demand and what is now being called in Connecticut transgender rights, both urged by liberals, surely falls within the precincts of the so called social doctrine Mr. Green finds repugnant. In what sense is the struggle to make abortion more available not both a social and an economic issue?

Relatively speaking, abortion is the new kid on the block. Some of the oldest prohibitions affecting abortion were promulgated by the early Christian church in response to the widespread use of abortion in the Roman period. In that time, the paterfamilias, the Roman father of the family, enjoyed – if that is the word for it – life and death powers over children, born and unborn. Unwanted children, often females, were either aborted or exposed until they died. A similar situation may be observed today in China where the state, which regulates birth, determines precisely how many children will be born into each family.

Now, we can all agree to disagree on the utility and humaneness of abortion; some very late term abortions were repugnant enough to cause Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a respectable liberal, to characterize partial birth abortion as a form of infanticide of a kind once practiced by the Roman paterfamilias. But the question of abortion’s relatively recent arrival on the scene is not arguable. Laws prohibiting abortion are older by several centuries than the changes in the law – here in the United States mostly by judicial fiat – that allowed abortion, from which we may conclude that abortion, now legally permitted pretty much every stage of pregnancy, is the new normal. If Connecticut’s Democratic dominated General Assembly is successful in clothing transgenders with the same statutory protections it affords to, say, the blind, in time these statutory affirmations will become the new normal.

Mr. Green is free to marshal his arguments in favor of abortion at every stage of pregnancy or transgender rights or the abolition of the death penalty or any other issue he chooses to champion in his columns and blogs. We are still a free country, sort of. But when Mr. Green says that conservatives who uphold the traditional view of the family against those who would change it have ruptured tradition, he should be vigorously challenged on the point. Opposition to abortion certainly is less extreme than partial birth abortion if for no other reason than that it does not involve the destruction of life.

Mr. Fowler is the publisher of National Review, the magazine founded by Bill Buckley, who was a conservative and a close friend of Mr. Moynihan. It is true the magazine is not unattached to economic or political theory: Bill Buckley described himself as being somewhat addicted to ordered thought. But political philosophy alone does not an extremist make.

Both Mr. Fowler and Mr. Scott are comfortable with traditional views of marriage, religious precepts and the economic ideas of Ludwig Von Mises and Fredrick Hayek, the author, among other books, of “The Constitution of Liberty.” Mr. Hayek, Mr. Von Mises, Mr. Scott, Mr. Fowler, Mr. Wolfgang – whom Mr. Green attempted unsuccessfully to “friend” on Facebook – would all of them resist the notion that social conservativism and its opposite, social liberalism, do not impinge on economic matters.

One hopes Mr. Green would agree on the point.

Abortion, which Mr. Green considers a social issue, was instituted in China principally for economic reasons: Fewer people, if they are productive, allow higher salaries and a more manageable population. Once a government is able to manage what one might call the social DNA of a society, it will be able to bend and twist the economic fabric to its liking. Under a totalitarian socialist dispensation, less is more. Constitutions are unknown in China, and organized faiths are ruthlessly abolished. The assault on women in China through abortion, rarely noticed here in the United States, is an essential part of China’s new fascism. Birth rates have a direct and profound impact on the economy. In some sense, nearly every social issue is an economic issue as well, and the reverse is also true: The social thigh bone is connected to the economic hip bone. Conservatives are those who perceive connections that liberals, for tendentious political reasons, prefer to ignore.

Virtually all the nations in Europe that gave birth to Western civilization are now incapable of sustaining their populations because birth rates in Britain, France, Italy – that’s where the Vatican is – Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands have dipped below the replacement figure necessary to sustain population growth. The United States shortly will join the group. Is the disappearance of Western civilization through birth attrition a social problem or an economic problem? Is it reasonable to suppose that people who wish pass on their culture to a future generation should not concern themselves with low birth rates or the deteriorating financial and social condition of the traditional family unit – mom, dad and two and a half kids?

In a commentary published in the Chicago Tribune, not a conservative media outlet, an author of indeterminate ideology, managed to smuggle into his piece the following statistic: “According to the Census Bureau, the rate of abortions in 2006 among black women was 50 per 1,000, compared with 14 for white women and 22 for "other" women.”

Surely Mr. Green will agree that this is an astonishing figure. It is not a conservative figure, it is not a liberal figure, it is merely a true figure.

In days gone by, a robust African American demagogue -- I use the word here in its positive sense -- such as Malcolm X might easily have deployed that figure to show that abortion has become one of the most successful instruments in the tool box of new white racists. But this is not a whisper one is likely to hear from the progeny of those brave few who marched on Selma with Martin Luther King to kill Jim Crow. Jesse Jackson, the liberal preacher politician, used to warn African Americans that abortion has its dark side, but he has since reformed. Mr. Jackson is more placid now, more manageable. Faced with figures of this kind, the silence of the leftist lambs is simply shattering.

In poor inner cities, the traditional family structure has all but disappeared. Is poverty among African Americans in inner cities related in any way to the kind of social structure one is more likely to find among wealthy brats in Hollywood or supremely wealthy but stressed commodities traders in blue chip Connecticut: out of wedlock children, multiple marriages and multiple divorces, a high incidence of drug use, narcissistic fixations. African American fathers in poor inner cities have all but disappeared which, come to think of it, is one of the reasons why the inner cities are poor, flooded with gangs and lawless young men. Is this a social phenomenon or an economic one?

When Mr. Wolfgang defends the sanctity of marriage in the same tones that Sam Adams once defended the sanctity of natural rights, is he making a religious point, an economic point or a sociological point?

When Martha Dean, whom Mr. Green in an uncharitable lapse of judgment compared to a cyborg, says that the state and federal strictures embodied in constitutions really should CONSTRICT the authoritarian hand of those who govern us, is she making a sociological point, a constitutional point, a religious point or an economic point? Dean, whose manners are exquisite but whose crap tolerance level is refreshingly low, would say -- and indeed she has said it in nearly all her pronouncements -- that the human being is indivisible; that religious rights, constitutional rights and human rights all hang together in the sanctity of personhood.

Among some people on the left the indivisibility of the person is a doctrine that must fall on deaf ears: The doctrine is incompatible with a rigid statism. Leftists know that if they can persuade others, as they have persuaded themselves, that this doctrine is the special preserve of a despicable interest group, they can more easily dispense with it and get along with producing a brave new world from the rubble they have made of an old world in which first things – the family, organized religion, constitutional rights and the sanctity of the individual – have been relegated to the dust bin of history.

Truly, there is nothing new under Connecticut’s left of center sun. People in the state’s commentariate change, but the progressive message moves deathlessly on.

The Spending Problem

A number of conclusions may be drawn from the presidential campaign. Republicans, led by Mitt Romney, lost, and Democrats, led by President Barack Obama, won. That datum you can take to the bank.

Republican Party internecine quarrels arise over the “why”questions. Why did Mitt Romney lose? Why did Mr. Obama win? What are Republicans doing right, and what are they doing wrong?

Within the Republican Party, there are two schools of thought. The schools are as old and venerable as the modern Republican Party, which sprang, pretty much full-blown, from the brain of the late Bill Buckley.

One school holds that Republicans are not moderate enough to appeal to moderate Republicans and Democrats. This premise founders on the following datum: In Connecticut, centrist Democrats have been routed by progressives, a progressive being a liberal raised to the 10^thpower. There is no longer a live and effective middle to Connecticut’s state Democratic Party. Most of the Democrats enjoying power positions in their party have abandoned the liberal ship for the progressive dinghy.

Some few commentators who continue to speak reverently of“the vital center” are simply remembering with great affection a political order that has vanished in Connecticut and, perhaps more broadly, in New England.

An opposing school holds that Republicans are not conservative enough. Moderate Republicans in the Northeast, they point out, are a vanishing species. In Connecticut alone, moderate Republicans have fallen to Democratic opponents in numbers too astonishing to ignore. U.S. Representatives Nancy Johnson, Rob Simmons and Chis Shays all were defeated in office by purportedly moderate Democrats who now style themselves progressives. Indeed, Chris Shays was the last moderate Republican U.S. House member in New England.

The fallen Republican bodies seem to cinch the argument of those on the right who say that moderatism – if one may invent a word – is responsible for Republican losses in the Northeast. A robust conservatism elsewhere in the country continues to produce congressional and gubernatorial winners. In Connecticut, the entire U.S. Congressional delegation is Democratic and progressive. Both houses of the General Assembly are dominated by Democrats. And in 2011, Dannel Malloy, for many years mayor of Stamford, became the first Democratic governor in the state since former Governor William O’Neill hung up his spurs more than 20 years earlier.

Running on a “shared sacrifice” slogan, according to which everyone in the state should bear their fair share of misery, Mr. Malloy was able, by cutting Republicans out of budget negotiations, to push through the Democratic dominated General Assembly the largest tax increase in state history. Some Republicans quipped at the time that Mr. Malloy, always an aggressive political competitor, may have felt himself in competition with former Governor Lowell Weicker, a self-styled “maverick” Republican who had imposed upon Connecticut the state’s secondlargest tax increase. The Weicker income tax had been resisted vigorously by previous Democratic governors William O’Neill and Ella Grasso.

Mr. Malloy’s promised savings were largely amorphous, which hardly seems a fair shared sacrifice. Even after he had imposed the largest tax increase in the state’s history, Mr. Malloy has had great difficulty balancing his budgets.

Recently Mr. Malloy has been criticized by Republican state legislators – two of whom, Larry Cafero, a member of the state House for 14 years, and John McKinney, a member of the state Senate for as many years -- as having adopted discreditable budget balancing methods, a charge deployed effectively by Mr. Malloy during his first campaign against his two Republican predecessors, Governors Jodi Rell and John Rowland. Like President Barack Obama, Mr. Malloy inherited his red ink.

Both Mrs. Rell, often criticized by Connecticut’s left of center media as an indolent governor, and Mr. Rowland, were styled as Republican “firewalls” who thwarted improvident spending. In truth, neither was effective in preventing the Democratic dominated General Assembly from readjusting Republican budgets to accommodate more spending. Taxation and consequent spending have increased under a Democratic regime that regards firewalls as momentary obstacles to be overcome.

Indeed, spending is a problem Republicans, both nationally and in Connecticut, seem powerless to confront. The rhetorical ammo that might be effectively discharged in a campaign against improvident spending is simply absent. The central pillar of the Romney campaign was not improvident spending but rather over taxation and consequent economic anemia.

The last president who put a sizable dent in spending, budget reduction and taxes was Calvin Coolidge, styled by Amity Shlaes, the author of“Coolidge,” as “the Great Refrainer.” Even the sainted Ronald Reagan spent money like a class-warfare intoxicated Democrat; the federal budget rose by over a third during his administration. Connecticut’s Yankee Institute will host Ms. Shlaes, who believes Mr. Coolidge may serve a model for a reinvigorated Republican Party, at the Stamford Sheraton on March 28. Information is available here.

Of Capitalism I Sing

The driving force behind Western styled capitalism, “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” says George Gilder, the Walt Whitman of Capitalism, is – hang onto your hats here – altruism. Or, to put it in terms that might best arouse the fierce antagonism of socialists, progressives and “Occupy Wall Street” san culottes, the primary notes of capitalism are: methodological experimentation, creativity and a concern for others – not greed.

The very notion that altruism, a meeting of the wants and needs of others, rather than greed is the spark that sets the entrepreneurial spirit aflame is anathema to the ardent followers of Ayn Rand, the author of“Atlas Shrugged,” apart from the Bible one of the bestselling novels -- or, as some would insist, polemical tracts -- of all times.

The Moving Middle, Or Why Republicans Should Not Listen To Weicker

Some years ago Bill Buckley, the founder of National Review, was traveling in Ireland and found himself in a pub talking to a few convivial Irishmen – Is there any other kind? – about religion. Mr. Buckley later noted that many of his conversations while in Ireland, no matter on what topic they started, sooner or later ascended to religion. Ireland was, after all, the nursery bed of Christianity following the collapse of the ancient pagan regime.

In the course of the conversation, someone mentioned a prominent Irish atheist, astonishing Mr. Buckley, who asked, “Do you mean to tell me there are atheists in Ireland?”

“There are, indeed,” he was informed. “But you must understand that in Ireland there are two kinds of atheists – Protestant and Catholic.”

Mr. Buckley is rightly credited with having launched and shaped the modern American conservative movement. Within the conservative movement, there are now many mansions: traditional conservatives, neo-conservatives, paleo-conservatives, fiscal conservatives, religious conservatives, bio-conservatives, social conservatives, libertarian conservatives, and more.

Over the course of the last half century, conservativism has transformed the Republican Party, and that transformation has changed the meaning of some political terms. We think of the terms left, right and center as ideological constants. But these terms also evolve. Unfortunately for some, memory does not evolve.

Just as the modern Republican Party is not your daddy’s Republican Party, so the center of Republicanism is not what it was in your daddy’s day. Within the modern Republican Party today – even here in a reliably left of center state – there are different kinds of moderates, but nearly all the moderates are conservative moderates.

The same general evolution has occurred within the Democratic Party. The steady drift of the party towards progressivism has moved the traditional center of the party to the left. When Senator Joe Lieberman's term expires, Connecticut will have bid goodbye to its last moderate or centrist congressional Democrat. Within Democratic Party precincts, the center has moved to the left. Within the Democratic Party in Connecticut, nearly all moderates are progressive moderates.

The distance between the party ships passing in the night is greater than it was in your daddy’s day. When a modern progressive Democrat thinks of a moderate, Mr. Lieberman, a Scoop Jackson Democrat, does not come to mind. When a modern conservative Republican thinks of a moderate, former Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker, a self described “Jacob Javitts Republican,” does not come to mind.

Commentators within Connecticut’s left of center media, bowing and scraping before the idol of centrism, the holy and imperishable “vital center,” sometimes forget to tell their ideological parishioners that even centers move.

That is why Republicans in Connecticut should take Mr. Weicker’s advice with a ton of salt – and not just because Mr. Weicker during his day was a left of center Republican who shamelessly used his party as a political foil to curry favor with the more numerous Democrats in his state.

During a recent gathering of independent centrists in Hartford, Mr. Weicker cautioned Republicans that they must move to the center if they hoped to win elections. Connecticut, Mr. Weicker said, is a blue state. He might have said, more clearly, that the Connecticut Republican Party must become more like the Democratic Party to win elections; that strategy was, after all, the secret of Mr. Weicker’s own success in politics, until both Democratic and Republican centrists tired of Weicker and voted for his Democratic Party opponent, Mr. Lieberman, who fancied himself, like Mr. Weicker, a centrist.

It should surprise no one when members of the ancient regime are smitten with nostalgia for the familiar ancient order of things. But the order of things has changed. Mr. Weicker’s cast off party little resembles Connecticut’s new Republican Party – because the center of things has changed. Had the center not changed to allow for changed circumstances, it could not hold.