Malloy vs. Pelto

The gubernatorial nomination on the Republican side is heavily, if politely, contested. In a few days, Republican nominating delegates will gather at Mohegan Sun Casino to sort out their ticket. On the Democratic side, the gubernatorial slot is a Malloy gimme – almost.

State employee union gadfly Jonathan Pelto continues to sting Governor Dannel Malloy.

Mr. Malloy’s temperament, like that of President Barack Obama, is sting averse. The Malloyalists who surround him sting back when stung. Both they and their chief have thin skins. And Mr. Malloy, when caught in a compromising position, has been known to throw a few elbows at his critics.

In the past, whenever Mr. Pelto had harpooned Mr. Malloy on his blog “Wait, What?” gubernatorial factotum Roy Occhiogrosso, who has parleyed his Malloy connection into a Vice Presidential slot with Global Strategy, leapt forward to answer Mr. Pelto with a box on the ear.

“No one cares what Pelto thinks,” said Mr. Occhiogrosso after Mr. Pelto had pelted Mr. Malloy for having joined the forces of darkness by attempting to purge Connecticut’s educational system of underperforming teachers who, Mr. Malloy felt, had only to “show up for four years” to achieve tenure, after which dismissal for rank incompetence becomes decidedly less frequent.

Even so, Mr. Malloy last January issued a letter underwritten by Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman, House Speaker Brendan Sharkey and Senate President Donald E. Williams that delayed, according to one report “an important component of the new evaluation system: linking a teacher's performance rating with students' standardized test scores. Malloy also said he would create a working group to make changes in the implementation of the new Common Core State Standards. The administration will also scrap a $1 million marketing campaign for the Common Core.”

The decoupling of teacher performance and test scores, as well as the canning of a million dollar marketing campaign for Common Core, strenuously resisted by both teacher unions and many conservative groups, certainly did not bode ill for Mr. Pelto.

Conservatives and teacher unions oppose the Common Core effort for quite different reasons. Teacher unions are rather touchy on standards of any kind linked to student performance that might be used to weed out non-performing teachers; conservatives, comfortable with the principle of subsidiarity, do not want the federal government to do to education what it has done to, say, the private insurance market.

We have here a case of political ends touching and producing unmanageable political sparks. Without abjectly retreating from his school reform efforts – not in the cards -- Mr. Malloy has bent himself into a pretzel shape so as to remain in the good graces of the powerful unions whose votes he needs to whip in a general election the Republican Party’s gubernatorial nominee. Once the election is in the bag, Mr. Pelto will have been politically neutered, and Mr. Malloy’s education reforms, momentarily put on the back burner, may be resurrected from the “working group” to which the reforms have been entrusted for safe keeping. To parody Mr. Obama in his pre-presidential election meeting with Dimitri Medvedev, Mr. Malloy will have considerably “more flexibility,” following his victorious election, to repair burnt bridges with unions and to deep six the annoying Mr. Pelto.

There are three reasons why candidates for office enter campaigns: They’re in it to win; they’re in it to make an exotic political point; or they’re in it to affect the correlation of forces, so that the candidate’s views will be upheld by the likely candidate in a general election.

At this point, only Mr. Pelto and his conscience knows which of the three reasons cited above has moved him to suggest, very coyly in an appearance on Eyewitness News’ “Face The State” with Dennis House that a) Mr. Malloy can’t win the race for governor, and b) he might primary Mr. Malloy, if the delegates to the Democratic nominating convention are not enlightened enough to choose him on the first ballot as their gubernatorial standard bearer.

WFSB 3 Connecticut

Lieberman Leaves The Building

Most seemingly endless U.S. Senate careers end with a whimper rather than a bang.

When Dennis House, the moderator of “Face the State” on WFSB Channel 3, asked Senator Joe Lieberman how he would like to be remembered by history upon his retirement, Mr. Lieberman said the question put him in mind of Winston Churchill who, when asked a similar question, said he thought he would be well remembered because he himself intended to write the history of his time and place. Immediately, Mr. Lieberman, perhaps familiar with Mr. Churchill’s voluminous writings, said he didn’t know about writing history himself, but…

Mr. Lieberman, the author of seven books -- The Power Broker (1966), a biography of the late Democratic Party chairman, John Bailey; The Scorpion and the Tarantula (1970), a study of early efforts to control nuclear proliferation; The Legacy (1981), a history of Connecticut politics from 1930 to 1980; Child Support in America(1986), a guidebook on methods to increase the collection of child support from delinquent fathers; In Praise of Public Life (2000); An Amazing Adventure (2003), reflections on his 2000 vice presidential run; and The Gift of Rest: Rediscovering the Beauty of the Sabbath (2011) -- can turn a phrase, and he is a close student of history. In that sense, while by no means as prolific as Mr. Churchill, Mr. Lieberman could be, out of office and free to roam the historical range, a man as dangerous as he is thoughtful.

So given to cogitation is the senator, that someone here in Connecticut once flung at him the sobriquet “The Hamlet of the Senate,” which stuck.

Some of Mr. Lieberman’s more recent hobby horses are term limits -- he likes them --the extreme partisanship that has made co-operation in the U.S. Senate less possible -- he hates it -- and the Electoral College --he’d prefer the president be elected by popular vote. In the course of his 23 years in the Senate, Mr. Lieberman has changed his mind or emphasis on all three issues; but, as the transcendentalists tell us, to become perfect is to have changed often. Extreme partisanship destroys collegiality, in Mr. Lieberman’s view, and the Electoral College distorts the sovereignty of voters. Out of office, Mr. Lieberman’s preferences are not likely to carry much weight. Term limits are a positive good because they prevent congressional sclerosis; of course, you must have some people in the Senate who know what they’re doing, Mr. Lieberman hastened to add.

One senses the senator has not thought deeply on the question of partisanship. Suppose – just to suppose – that one of the two major parties dedicated itself to a daily revision of the U.S. Constitution, so that the Constitution could once and forever be rescued from autodidacts who insist that the document strengthens the liberty of the people by imposing restraints on fashionable ambitions. Given such a circumstance, would not Mr. Lieberman yearn for a principled partisan opposition?

During his retirement, removed from the congressional theatre of action and inaction, Mr. Lieberman may in time produce something worthwhile on such enduring subjects. Distance clears the mind wonderfully, and a thing seen from the outside often wears a different appearance than the same thing seen from the inside, as Churchill well knew. Partisanship is related to political parties. A certain measure of partisanship must be allowed if one is to have parties at all. The abolition of political parties, some argue, would usher in political anarchy rather than the utopia envisioned by radical thinkers in the United States who continue to believe, apparently sincerely, that parties are a bar to right reason and efficient government.

Political parties are, in fact, a bar to tyranny as understood by the vanishing breed of Republicans in the age of the Caesars, many of whom longed for a restoration of the old Roman Republic. While the most representative form of government, democracy is also the weakest, subject always to popular demagogues and populists soon lifted aloft to tend the Republic and make the trains run on time. Like constitutions, vibrant political parties are a bar to overweening ambition. For those who do not believe in a politics of limits, the weakening of political parties opens the door to what one might call magical political thinking, rooted in the immodest notion that for congresspersons and presidents, as for God, all things are possible.

Weicker Faces the State

Like most professional politicians, former U.S. Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker tends to filibuster journalist’s questions. And, solipsistic by nature, Weicker has a way of relating all questions to his own personal experience.

Dennis House of WFSB’s Face the State opened his interview with Mr. Weicker -- "the only man alive to serve as both governor and senator of our great state” – by asking what he thought of the U. S. Senate race so far.

Mr. Weicker had recently endorsed Democrat U.S. Representative Chris Murphy over Republican challenger Linda McMahon. Mr. Weicker and Mrs. McMahon have a shared past together. Mr. Weicker served on the board of WWE, pulling in, according to one press report $150,000 per year for his no doubt invaluable services. Mr. Weicker was forced off the board, after which his change in salary led to a corresponding change of heart. In his introduction, Mr. House referred to Mrs. McMahon correctly as Mr. Weicker’s “former colleague.”