Democratic Demagoguery in Connecticut

The first shots of the 2014 gubernatorial campaign were fired by Malloyalist pit bull Roy Occhiogrosso and state Democratic Party Chairwoman Nancy DiNardo shortly after former Ambassador to Ireland Tom Foley announced at the end of November his availability for the Republican nomination for governor.

Asked by a reporter to comment on Mr. Foley’s early entrance into the gubernatorial arena, Mr. Occhiogrosso sniffed, “We don’t comment on Tom Foley’s political ambitions. He lost one race. He’s more than welcome to lose another.”

Ms. DiNardo, coloring within the lines of Mr. Occhiogrosso’s curt dismissal, said in a media release, “Tom Foley just doesn’t get it. Like Mitt Romney, he doesn’t understand the challenges that average hardworking people face. He is just another out-of-touch vulture capitalist who sees the average resident as something less. It’s a toxic world view that the voters of this country rejected just a few weeks ago. And if ambassador Foley runs again, he’ll find out exactly what the voters of Connecticut think of his economic philosophy.”

Mr. Foley lost the governor’s race to Mr. Malloy in 2010, owing to the additional votes Mr. Malloy was able to garner while appearing on the “Working Families Party” line. In a recent suit decided by Connecticut’s Supreme Court, the court awarded the Republican Party the top line on the ballot in the recently concluded elections because Mr. Foley had received more votes on the Republican Party line than did Mr. Malloy on the Democratic Party line. The race was exceedingly close. Charges during the race that Mr. Foley was a “vulture capitalist,” as Mrs. DiNardo toxically puts it, did not appear to do much damage to Mr. Foley’s prospects, who lost to Mr. Malloy by a slender 6,400 vote margin. Democrats in Connecticut outnumber Republicans roughly by a ratio of two to one.

Other Republicans who have shown interest in running against Democratic Governor Dannel Malloy are perhaps, to Mrs. DiNardo’s way of thinking, less “out of touch’ in the toxic world of Connecticut politicking.

Both the Republican House and Senate leaders in the General Assembly, Senator John McKinney and House leader Larry Cafero, as well as Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton, have signaled their interests in running for governor, and all have considerably more direct experience in issues affecting the state than Ms. DiNardo and Mr. Occhiogrosso might wish.

The knock on Linda McMahon, when she ran twice for the U.S. Senate, was that she had little direct experience in politics, was redundantly wealthy, and made her millions in a way that caused some in the media to wrinkle their noses with displeasure. True, soon to be Senior Senator from Connecticut Dick Blumenthal and U.S. House fixture Rosa DeLauro are also millionaires, Mr. Blumenthal having been fortunate enough to marry a woman whose father owns the Empire State Building in New York and some few other valuable properties, and Mrs. DeLauro having had the luck to marry pollster to the Democratic stars Stan Greenberg.

Of the six richest U.S. Senators, only one is a Republican. John Kerry of Massachusetts, reported to be under consideration for departing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s position, is number one, weighing in with a net worth of $238,812,296; Mr. Blumenthal is number six, with assets amounting to $94,870,116.

Great wealth is not necessarily a bar to politicians who, ideally, serve all the people all the time. Franklin Roosevelt, after all, did not sell apples for pennies on a street corner, and George Washington, father of the early Republic, a capitalist enterprise, is still the richest man to have held presidential office. But even Mrs. DiNardo, if one could catch her in an honest non-political mood, might be forced to admit that the life styles of both Mr. McKinney and Mr. Cafero are more representative of the middle class than that of Mr. Blumenthal, who lives in a million dollar estate in toney Greenwich, as does Mrs. McMahon.

We see the future through a glass darkly, but none of it looks promising. Like California, Connecticut is broke and teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Both Mr. Malloy and Mr. Obama continue in their crony capitalist ways – transferring huge gobs of tax money not to the poor but to bribable large corporations – and demagoguery will only get you so far.

Mr. Foley is supposed to be out of touch with the usual Democratic constituency because he used the expression “little people” to condemn the seeming indifference of the party of the little people to the common man.

In an attempt to balance a chronically unbalanced budget,Mr. Foley told a TV news reporter, the governor was pulling the plug on needed services: “Now they're hurting the little people in the state: Alzheimer’s funding, the children's fund, the disabled, vets. They're stepping on the brake and hitting the accelerator at the same time.”

Here is an Obama voter, a 57-year-old African-American salesman in Calera, Ala., formerly a Republican, accounting for his switch: “Democrats stand for little people, regular people, common people like myself. My daddy was a Republican because Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, but the Republican Party changed and started being for people who had money.” And here is Democratic Party hero Andrew Cuomo, mayor of the Big Apple, hoisting his flag for the little people: "We're going to do all the hard things. We're going to bite the bullet. And we're going to do the courageous thing without punishing little people or exploiting the rich people."

Even within Democratic Party ranks, the expression “little people” is a synonym for “common people.” In rhetorical demonology, the expression’s antonym is – guess what? – “the rich.” One would think the head of the Democratic Party in Connecticut and Mr. Malloy’s chief flack catcher and demonologist-in chief would know all this; but then purposeful ignorance in pursuit of election victories is no vice for such as Ms. DiNardo and Mr. Occhiogrosso . 

The First Murphy-McMahon Debate

The following slug appeared on the front page of a Hartford paperthe day after a Face the State debate between Democratic U.S. Representative Chris Murphy and Republican Linda McMahon, both of whom are vying for U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman’s soon to be vacant seat:

“Another 90 seconds and no answers,'' he [Mr. Murphy] said, "not a single specific cut that Linda McMahon would support, and another example of fealty to a supply-side trickledown economics that just hasn't worked."

The statement bears close examination, but Mrs. McMahon did not during the debate force such an examination.

In an earlier debate with then Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, Mrs. McMahon caused some agita when she asked Mr. Blumenthal to explain how jobs are created. Clearly over his head in deep water, Mr. Blumenthal sputtered an answer that showed he did not at all understand how businesses produce jobs.

The embarrassing moment was not fatal to Mr. Blumenthal – he went on to win the race for departing U. S. Senator Chris Dodd’s seat – but it did rip a veil from his persona. Like most politicians who promote command economies, Mr. Blumenthal thought at the time – and still believes – that jobs are made by government intervention in the private market place.

Mrs. McMahon went on to answer her own question:

“Government does not create jobs. It’s very simple how your create jobs: An entrepreneur takes a risk. He or she believes that he creates a good or service that is sold for more than it costs to make it. If an entrepreneur thinks he can do that, he creates a job.”

In her debate with Mr. Murphy, Mrs. McMahon easily might have asked Mr. Murphy to tell the listening audience precisely what he meant by“supply side economics,” a term of reproach used by Democrats who have not read any of the essays or books written by George Gilder, the Saint Paul of supply-side theory. A much too brief discussion of Mr. Gilder’s “Wealth and Poverty” may be found on the Connecticut Commentary site here: “Of Capitalism I Sing.”

Mr. Murphy passionately supports Obamacare, passed by Democrats in Congress who did not read the bill, but it is plain from much of what he has said concerning health care that he would prefer a single payer system, which is to say a health care system run by Washington D.C. bureaucrats and politicians such as himself who prefer command economies. In such a system, health care would “trickle down” from national health care administrators and administrative technicians in the states to doctors and patients. In fact, the single payer insurance system preferred by Mr. Murphy is an extreme form of trickledown economics: Tax money is collected by bureaucrats in Washington and disbursed only to insurance companies that satisfy the rigorous demands of an authoritarian government. The ensuing regulations effectively prevent the economic creativity and vitality so apparent in free economies.

Mrs. McMahon might have asked Mr. Murphy during their debate why he preferred such an extreme form of trickledown economics. And in defending privately owned insurance companies from a government that seeks to control the means of production through excessive regulation, she easily might have cited the following passage from an essay recently written by Mr. Gilder:

“Capitalism is the supreme expression of human creativity and freedom, an economy of mind overcoming the constraints of material power. It is not simply a practical success, a ‘worst of all systems except for the rest of them,’ a faute de mieux compromise redeemed by charities and regulators and proverbially ‘saved by the New Deal.’ It is dynamic, a force that pushes human enterprise down spirals of declining costs and greater abundance. The cost of capturing technology is mastery of the underlying science. The means of production of entrepreneurs are not land, labor, or capital but minds and hearts. Enduring are only the contributions of mind and morality.

“All progress comes from the creative minority. Under capitalism, wealth is less a stock of goods than a flow of ideas, the defining characteristic of which is surprise. Creativity is the foundation of wealth.”

And that is why command economies frustrate the production of wealth – they force upon creative free markets a cookie cutter regulatory apparatus that benefits only the promoters of command economies. Mr. Murphy is one of them.

Mr. Murphy sustained his points in the debate through sheer bluster and chutzpah. He insisted, for instance, that some points in Mrs. McMahon’s economic program were lifted from Washington sources, a point hotly denied by Mrs. McMahon. She is, of course, a Republican, and many of her economic proposals certainly align with those of her party. The same is true of Mr. Murphy, who appears to have borrowed much of his rhetoric from his national party’s playbook, including the absurd claim that Mrs. McMahon is waging a "war on women” because she opposes the Democrat’s war on Christian doctrine.

Of course, in any debate with Mr. Murphy, Mrs. McMahon must be careful to give credit to the architects of a free economy, lest she be accused of lifting ideas from free market proponents much in the way Mr. Murphy has “lifted” a good deal of his command economy notions secondhand from President Barrack Obama’s all purpose made-in-Chicago campaign platform – including the absurd“war on women” meme, the national Democratic platform pro-abortion entente and even the “trickledown economics” rhetorical head fake deployed by Mr. Murphy in his first debate with Mrs. McMahon.