Malloy On The Stump, An Orwellian Perspective

A few weeks after announcing he would not officially begin his campaign until the General Assembly had shut down its short three month session in May, Governor Dannel Malloy officially opened his gubernatorial campaign in Stamford, his old political stomping grounds. Mr. Malloy had been mayor of Stamford for four four-year terms before becoming governor.

In Stamford, Mr. Malloy explained his “early” announcement to reporters who long ago had exploded the absurdity that he was not running for governor. He had in fact been campaigning behind the veil for some time; like his counterpart in the beltway, President Barack Obama, Mr. Malloy is a perpetual campaigner. And like most politicians, he is given to telling what Mark Twain used to call “stretchers.”

The Stamford Advocate reported on the switcheroo:

“Malloy said that, in part, his rationale for waiting to make his re-election effort official was to avoid distractions during his recent successful effort to get the General Assembly to enact legislation to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour.

"’I didn't want to politicize that issue unduly,’ Malloy said. ‘I talked to Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman several times about when is the right time to start the campaign, and this seemed like the right time.’"

The General Assembly, some reporters know, is Mr. Malloy’s Pomeranian, the Connecticut legislature having been dominated by Democrats ages ago, long before some of the state’s younger reporters were wetting their diapers. Perhaps one of them is keeping a record of Mr. Malloy’s politically opportune fantasies. If so, he or she will understand the full import of George Orwell’s remark that “To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.”

In an essay that ought to be required reading in all journalism schools titled “Under Your Nose,” Mr. Orwell wrote:

“The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: The only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”

Mr. Malloy’s official Stamford announcement gave Mr. Malloy the opportunity to stop road testing his campaign and launch his vehicle.

Mr. Malloy’s 2014 campaign appears to be a replication of President Barack Obama 2012 presidential campaign. Connecticut has been battered by a rough economic climate, Mr. Malloy told the Democratic in Stamford. He was careful not to draw the connection between Connecticut’s sluggish economy and Obamanomics. Hey, sluggish economies happen. The national recession ended in 2009. However, about three in five jobs added since the recession’s end pay less than $13.83 per hour. Lower-wage occupations were 21 percent of recession losses and 58 percent of recovery growth, while mid-wage occupations were 60 percent of recession losses and only 22 percent of recovery growth. Connecticut still lags behind the nation in job growth. As of August 2013, the New England Economic Partnership (NEEP) reported, “Connecticut had regained 62,200 jobs, or 51.3% of those lost. By comparison, the U.S. economy had recovered 78.2% of the 8.6 million recession jobs that it lost.”

During his first term as president, Mr. Obama commanded the heights: The presidency and both houses of Congress had fallen to Democrats. Instead of focusing the energies of his office on repairing the collapsed housing market – which would have been a painful ordeal for the progressive president – Mr. Obama reached for the stars and pulled Obamacare out of his hat. He also engaged in corporate cronyism on a massive scale and managed to pull off a win against moderate Republican Mitt Romney by capturing the “social issues” battleground from which Republicans had retreated with their tails between their legs.

Mr. Malloy’s campaign strategy may be deduced from the remarks he made in Stamford. The Malloy program no doubt has been laboratory tested by one of the many strategy groups in the business of winning campaigns. Global Strategy, whose Vice President Roy Occhiogrosso continued to speak in news reports in favor of Mr. Malloy long after he had disassociated himself from the Malloy administration, likely will play some behind the curtain role in Mr. Malloy’s re-election effort. But as governor of a northeast progressive state, Mr. Malloy will be able to draw upon a vast reservoir of political magicians, some tied by progressive political umbilical cords to the Obama administration, many of which are not formally associated with political parties.

In Stamford, Mr. Malloy said that Connecticut’s economy was on the mend, largely owing to his programs. Connecticut’s pre-Malloy “$3.6 billion deficit, the greatest deficit in the nation on a per-capita basis," has been liquidated. In fact, the deficit has been resilient to Mr. Malloy’s ministrations.

Connecticut’s non-partisan Office of Fiscal Analysis (OFA) and the Governor's budget office, the Office of Policy and Management (OPM), have both projected a deficit of about $1 billion in the next 2016 biennial budget. 

Mr. Malloy reduced a major portion of his “inherited deficit” through the imposition of the largest tax increase in state history, a $1.5 billion tax on entrepreneurs and business people who might have used the dollars appropriated by a Democratic Governor and a Democratic dominated General Assembly to invigorate Connecticut’s painfully slow, nearly jobless recovery.

Mr. Malloy’s tax increase was not mentioned during his re-election stump speech in Stamford, which is on a par with offering a history of the Elizabethan period in Britain that does not mention Queen Elizabeth. Neither did Mr. Malloy mention that Republican Governors Jodi Rell and John Rowland did not have at their command a Republican dominated General Assembly. Although it is the legislature that shapes and affirms budgets presented to it by the executive office, Mr. Malloy was content in his Stamford re-election announcement to lay at Mrs. Rell’s feet the debt he inherited. Mrs. Rell is likely to play in Mr. Malloy’s coming campaign the same opéra bouff role played by outgoing President George Bush in Mr. Obama’s first – and second – presidential campaigns.

Mr. Orwell noted in his “Under Your Nose” essay that political fantasies eventually bump into reality, at which point, usually too late, those who have been lulled to sleep awaken with truth-blistered eyes:

“In private life most people are fairly realistic. When one is making out one's weekly budget, two and two invariably make four. Politics, on the other hand, is a sort of sub-atomic or non-Euclidean world where it is quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same place simultaneously. Hence the contradictions and absurdities I have chronicled above, all finally traceable to a secret belief that one's political opinions, unlike the weekly budget, will not have to be tested against solid reality.”

Connecticut, the Canary in the National Mineshaft

Such are the parallels between the Malloy and Obama administrationsthat it might almost be said President Barack Obama is now replicating on a national scale The Malloy Way, with one important exception.

When Governor Dannel Malloy first came into office, Connecticut was facing a daunting deficit of about $3 billion in a biennial budget of about $20 billion. Hoisting the flag of “shared sacrifice,” Mr. Malloy raised taxes, imposing on Connecticut the largest tax increase in state history. Mr. Obama’s most recent gambit is to raise taxes immediately on the country’s malefactors of great wealth in a special session of the congress, saving until tomorrow – “which creeps in this petty pace to the last annals of recorded time” -- any strategy to reduce spending.

A newly elected Governor Malloy departed sharply from ardent progressives in his party who insisted that the bulk of the tax increases should come mostly from the state’s millionaires; instead of acceding to what budget watchers in Connecticut might call the Donovan plan, Malloy increased tax revenue from enterprises that previously has escaped the tax man. The Malloy tax was broad based, not narrowly contrived.

Mr. Donovan, the Speaker of the House, later ran for the U.S. House of Representatives and was chosen by the Democratic Party as its nominee for the 5^th District. Mr. Donovan’s campaign was driven into the ground by an FBI investigation in the course of which his campaign finance manager and others were arrested. Had Mr. Donovan prevailed in a general election against Republican nominee Andrew Roraback, the Speaker would have entered the U.S. Congress just in time to vote affirmatively for national tax increases on millionaires. He missed the joyous moment by a hair.

We see here a notable difference between Mr. Obama, a perpetual campaigner, and Malloy, a perpetual campaigner. Obama’s tax on millionaires – actually, quarter-millionaires – is little more than a campaign device; the millionaire tax, which will become operative if previous across-the-board Bush tax cuts are adjusted to eliminate tax cuts on quarter-millionaires, will not generate enough revenue to pay for Obama’s new programs, unless it is broadened over time to include a revocation of middle class tax cuts.

But in other respects, Mr. Obama and Mr. Malloy have adopted similar political strategies in addressing deficits.

Mr. Malloy is now facing yet another deficit following his gargantuan tax increase, and the choices available to him to discharge the “shortfall” of his first budget and the coming deficit of his second budget – about $2 billion– are limited, because salary and benefit increases for unionized state workers in future years had been written into previous binding contracts he negotiated with state unions. Mr. Malloy then cannot expect savings from that quarter.

In addition, Mr. Malloy has vowed not to raise taxes to fill what he calls a “shortfall” of about $395 million in his last budget. And as soon as he turns the corner, following an upcoming special session on the“shortfall” in his current budget, Mr. Malloy will find himself face to face with a far larger deficit in the new budget season.

These deficits, the governor and other leading Democrats insist, have been caused by the national recession, the growth of Medicaid spending, the European double-dip recession – all of which, it should be noted, are beyond the reach of solutions that might be adopted by state government, which is a rather complex way of rhetorically disowning responsibility for the deficit. Mr. Obama is masterfully adept at escaping the predictable consequences of his policy victories.

There is no George Bush in Connecticut to serve as an convenient scapegoat but, in the absence of a Republican who may usefully be vilified, a host of sub-demons -- the national recession, the international double-dip recession, which has hit France in the breadbasket, and other convenient agents of Connecticut’s destruction -- will do just as well.

It falls to men and women of good intent to point out that because deficits are caused primarily by exuberant spending, the only curative solution to repetitive deficits is spending reform -- not just temporary cuts in spending, but rather a vigorous effort to identify and remove what one might justly call the many drivers of spending escalation in Connecticut.

Here we tread dangerously on the electrically infused third rail of Connecticut politics. A real constitutional cap on spending tied to increases in the state domestic product or an end to binding arbitration just might reduce the rate of spending increase in annual budgets, about 7 percent per year since the Weicker income tax was levied in 1991. Putting in mothballs chronically failing public schools and replacing entire administrations and teachers with more competent and energized staffs, would reduce labor expenses and provide an incalculable educational benefit. A recent 2011 proficiency study shows that magnet schools in Hartford vastly outperform Hartford public schools: “The gap in 2011 between magnet school performance and neighborhood school performance stands at 26.2 points at Proficient, having widened by just over 7 points in the past four years.”

Solutions that will reposition Connecticut as an economic and educational powerhouse relative to other states – including business tax reductions and regulatory reform – are at hand. It is the courage of useful convictions that is wanting.

Bearing All For Obama

It’s been one of those months.

Departing President Of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – unlike Supreme Leader for life Ali Khamenei, the presidency of Iran is term-limited –has paid the United Nations, Babel on the Hudson, his final visit.

His unvarying spiel was the same. Oil rich Iran is engaged in the peaceful production of nuclear facilities. No, Iran is not building nuclear weapons. Israel is a fake state that historically has no roots in the Middle East. Iran will obliterate the fake state if Israel should be presumptuous enough to attack Iran facilities that are producing nuclear weapons to obliterate Israel-- on and on.

Iran has a military presence in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. It has both in the past and present destabilized Iraq when the United States was in the process of bringing the fruits of liberty to Iraq following the untimely demise of Saddam Hussein. The U.S. military, under the leadership of President George Bush, term-limited Mr. Hussein. The cause of death listed on the coroner’s report for Osama bin Ladin – along with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed the architect of the destruction of the Twin Towers buildings in New York – was “death by Seals.”

For some reason, the patient people of New York City, attacked with an assist from mad Sheikh bin Ladin, since deceased, have not marched en mass on the United Nations the way earlier Frenchmen, invigorated by liberté, égalité, fraternité, marched on the Bastille.

Perhaps their tolerance of the rumbustious Mr. Ahmadinejad can be put down to good manners. Bill Buckley use to say that the trouble with bad manners, like those so often exhibited in militant theocracies, is that they sometimes lead to murder, as was the case when TERRORISTS sacked the American embassy in Libya and murdered American Ambassador Christopher Stevens. The TERRIORIST attack, first thought by the Obama administration to have been occasioned by a film that dishonored the Prophet Mohammed, apparently was planned by combustible TERRORISTS to celebrate the successful TERRORIST attack on the twin Towers in New York.

After much fidgeting, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was persuaded to admit that U.S. Ambassador Stevens was not assassinated by an unruly crown protesting a film denigrating the prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him. The consulate in Libya – recognized by most civilized nations under international law, as U.S. territory – was destroyed by TERRORISTS to coincide with September 11, the date of the destruction of New York’s twin towers.

It is to be supposed that President Barack Obama did not recognize the obvious connection because there was no calendar handy at the White House for the past week, in the course of which Mr. Obama persisted in calling the offensive film the flashpoint for the TERRORIST assault. After eight days of massaging the message, the White House finally fessed up and acknowledged the murder of Mr. Stevens was a TERRORIST act, information it was in possession of two days after the attack. Because the property was not immediately secured, the FBI, even today, has not had access to the site.

It may seem to the reader of these lines that the author has needlessly emphasized the word “TERRORIST” throughout. But there is a purpose to this method: Those who read these words aloud will soon get used to the “T”word. In time, it will become as familiar to them as other unmentionables, and with repetition, they will lose their logophobia and begin to call things by their right names.

On the Hollywood front, the singer, stripper Madonna has come out strongly in favor of Mr. Obama, according to the The Hill, a respected Washington publication read by most politicians on the Hill:

 

“Madonna offered a profanity-laced endorsement of President Obama at her concert Monday night, which involved the singer stripping down to her underwear to reveal the president's name written on her body.

“’You all better vote for f---ing Obama okay, she told the crowd at Washington's Verizon center.

“Later in the show, Madonna took off her shirt and pulled down her pants to show she had ‘OBAMA’ written in all capital letters across her lower back.

“’When Obama is in the White House for a second term I'll take it all off,’ she said to cheers and whistles from the audience.

Apparently this is not an idle threat. 
Madonna – no relation to THE Madonna – has been bearing parts of herself all over the world during her present tour. It’s still a matter of conjecture whether Ms. Madonna’s threat will intimidate people into voting for Mr. Obama. No polls have yet been taken.