House Grills Donovan

“Embattled” is a word you do not want waltzing around with your name on the eve of a U.S. Congressional election. “Embattled 5th District Congress candidate Chris Donovan,” the Register Citizen reported, “in a taping of WFSB TV’s ‘Face the State’ Thursday, said he has no plans to quit the race even if his campaign’s troubles start to adversely affect other Democrats and party leaders urge him to leave.

Mr. Donovan is under scrutiny by the FBI for campaign financing irregularities. His campaign finance director, Robert Braddock, is under arrest for having conspired to hide the identity of certain donors allegedly involved in influence peddling; and other Donovan connected officials, two of whom are directly connected with his U.S. Senate campaign, have been named in an affidavit supporting the arrest of Mr. Braddock.

Thanks to some impressive digging and nagging by manyreporters, the influence peddlers –tagged anonymously in the affidavit as CC1, CC2 and CC3 -- have now been identified as: Ray Soucy, a labor union activist and a vigorous supporter of Mr. Donovan lately suspended from his position as a correction industries supervisor at Cheshire state prison (CC1); a former “roll your own” smoke shop worker in Waterbury (CC2); and Joshua Nassi, Mr. Donovan’s fired campaign manager (CC3).

As the story unfolded, an uppity Governor Dannell Malloy, who has managed to shove his finger in many political and judicial pies, at first called upon Mr. Dovovan to make himself available to Connecticut’s media for questioning, demanding in rather stern tones that Mr. Donovan give “a full explanation of what he knows." Eventually, the governor calmed down.

Mr. Donovan and all the co-conspirators promptly lawyered-up. Stan Twardy, best known for his service in the administration of former Governor Lowell Weicker, the father of Connecticut’s income tax, was hauled in to conduct an in-house examination of the tangled web in the House Speaker’s office. Mr. Donovan hired a criminal lawyer, who advised her client that he was to respond to every media inquiry concerning the FBI investigation by saying he did not intend to comment on such matters, except to say, as he did repeatedly during the interview with Mr. House, that he was innocent of wrongdoing.

Apparently content that Mr. Donovan had done everything possible to satisfy the curiosity of Connecticut’s media – the same persistent interrogators who had forced the resignation from office of former Republican state Senate leader Lou DeLuca in a previous FBI sting operation-- Mr. Malloy, once an empathetic prosecutor, took a nap, convinced that Mr. Donovan had sufficiently teffloned himself. If Mr. Donovan were to excite among senators and the media the same sense of outrage that nudged Mr. DeLuca from office, the General Assembly would be burbling at this moment with whispers of hearings and impeachment.

"He's met the test of dismissing the individuals,” the governor said of Mr. Donovan.“He has said he had no prior knowledge. He's come forward to speak to the public," Malloy said. "I think the rest of it is up to the speaker and the public” … And Mr. House, who found himself face to face on Face the State with a political armadillo.

When Mr. House noted that neither the governor nor U.S. Representative Chris Murphy, whose seat Mr. Donovan hoped to commandeer, had endorsed him, the Speaker replied that Mr. Malloy was drawn to his Democratic primary opponent Elizabeth Esty, whose husband Daniel is Mr. Malloy’s Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP), and then he tossed Harry Truman at Mr. House: “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.”

Off in the distance, Leo Canty, one of the best know union operatives in the state, could be heard chanting, “There’s always people and events that will trip you up. This is just a slight trip in this race. … This is a hiccup and a glitch.” At an earlier union rally in Hartford, Mr. Donovan invoked the shade of Franklin Roosevelt.

“’I have my head held high. No one bought my involvement or my influence on any legislation, period,’ the embattled Speaker said. Touching on the controversy only in passing, Mr. Donovan said he wanted to talk about “fairness, dignity, respect. You take the first letter of each of them and what you get?-- ‘FDR.’”

Mr. Donovan boasted to Mr. House that he would win his primary against his two Democratic opponents, neither of whom is under investigation for possible influence peddling. When Mr. House gently prodded the Speaker, asking what would happen to his best laid plans should he be arrested, Mr. Donovan, according to Mr. House, “bristled.”

Progressive Educational Reform

Governor Dannel Malloy is attempting valiantly to upgrade Connecticut’s ancient union encrusted educational establishment. Naturally, he ran into problems with those in the state who defend the status quo, Connecticut’s powerful teacher’s union among them. In a politics of narrow interests, settled opinion is king, because those who have secured their interests, sometimes at the expense of the general good, are understandably reluctant to surrender the golden favors showered upon them by a bought government. God help the man who unsettles settled opinion.

Mr. Malloy has proposed to attach teacher tenure to measurable performance, according to Zach Janowski. As in most businesses, including the sports arena, those who do not measure up will be let go. Among those ardently defending the status quo is once radical Big Thinker Jonathan Pelto, whose associations with teacher unions are warm and cordial. These days, whenever Mr. Pelto attempts to throw his two cents into the conversational ring, he is vigorously assaulted by one or another fervid Malloyalist.

Most recently, gubernatorial Senior Advisor Roy Occhigrosso, dubbed by humorist Colin McEnroe “The Hammer”, took off after the inoffensive Mr. Pelto following a critical piece Mr. Pelto had written on his blog, “Wait, What?” Concerning one of Mr. Pelto’s recent productions, Mr. Occhiogrosso responded, “Jonathan’s screeds have become increasingly delusional as time has gone on. He’s an unstable individual, who’s bitter that he didn’t land a job in the Administration. Although I’m hard pressed to see why anyone would hire him to do anything, he does describe himself as a ‘consultant.’ Is someone paying him to peddle information that’s not true?” One detects in Mr. Occhigrosso’s snake spittle the venom of a competitor. Mr. Pelto and his “screeds” have been rattling around in Democratic politics for about thirty years, during which time he has managed to sound like the choral leader of the Chorus of Crying State Unions (CCSU). But if during this time he had exhibited signs of instability, delusion and bitterness, someone other than Mr. Occhiogrosso would have noticed and perhaps had him committed, as Mr. Occhiogrosso evidently is, to the Malloy administration.

Upon joining the Malloy administration as a senior adviser, Mr. Occhiogrosso resigned as partner in charge of the Hartford office of the Global Strategy Group, a national polling and communication strategy group with a stable of political, corporate and non-profit clients.

Mr. McEnroe, unfailingly effervescent, noted that while Mr. Occhiogrosso’s boss, Mr. Malloy, was “an edgy guy himself… Occhiogrosso — and I say this with love — is proof of the maxim that when you're holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Roy isn't holding a hammer. He is one. It's as if Newt Gingrich went looking for someone to soften his angry, aggressive side and hired Bill O'Reilly.”

Oddly enough, Mr. Pelto and Mr. Occhigrosso started their political lives on the same side of the progressive barricade. In one of his earlier incarnations, Mr. Occhiogrosso was associated with a UConn Health Center union. His ideological nursemaid was Leo Canty, the Second Vice President of the American Federation of Teachers in Connecticut and a member of AFT Local 3837, University Health Professionals. Mr. Canty, also the Vice President of the Hartford Labor Council, described himself in his campaign literature when he ran for state Representative in the 15th district as “a strong progressive politics activist.”

The real difference between Mr. Pelto and Mr. Occhiogrosso lies in who rather than what they serve. The cleavage apparent between them turns on two questions: Should tenure be used to protect incompetence, and to what extent should some of the functions of public education be privatized?

The partial privatization of a sclerotic public education fiefdom is the great bugaboo of those who would preserve the status quo, however harmful its effects on the public good. In this regard, Mr. Pelto is determined that no progress in this direction should be made. Mr. Occhiogrosso and Mr. Malloy presently appear undecided how they may best exploit the possibility of a partial, carefully controlled privatization of the public education behemoth. Teacher tenure appears to be on the ropes, but Connecticut’s powerful teacher unions have friends inside important General Assembly committees. In the past, it may be recalled, unions have been adept at rope-a-dope feints and surprising recoveries.