A Primer On Connecticut Politics: Pesci On The Media, The State Of Connecticut, Notable Politicians Past And Present

Q: Before we get to the particulars, the details where the devil lives and breathes, let me ask you some general questions.

A: Sure.

Q: When did you first start writing for newspapers?

A: I remember my first or second column for the Journal Inquirer. I’m not sure of the date. It was a column on Thurman Milner, who was then running as mayor of Hartford. Mr. Milner won the contest and became the first black mayor of a major city in Connecticut.

Q: Do you remember what the column was about?

A: I do. It has long since been consigned to the newspaper morgue at the JI…

Q: Curious that you remember.

A: No one forgets the circumstances involving the birth of their first child. The mayoralty race was well underway when the JI stumbled upon some questionable credentials presented by Mr. Milner. He had flourished a certificate from “Roachdale College.” The paper discovered the certificate was produced as a result of a dormitory scheme. In due course, a story appeared, but no other newspapers were picking up on it. Journalism, as you know, is ten percent thought and ninety percent repetition. I wrote a letter to the JI and received back a note from Chris Powell, the paper’s Managing Editor – also, at the time, the JI’s Editorial Page Editor – asking if the paper could print it as a column. I assented. Mr. Powell requested other columns, and a career of sorts was launched.  Sometime later in 1992, Mr. Powell ran for the state senate on the Republican ticket against a strong incumbent Democrat from Glastonbury. He was disappointed, but not shocked, when he lost the race. Connecticut is as blue as Herman Melville’s inscrutable blue sky. I recall joking with Mr. Powell at the time that he was setting himself up for a painful defeat because he was a journalist, and many people in the state were just itching to hang all the state’s journalists on hooks in Hell. Anyway, not to stray too far from your question, Mr. Powell later left the editorial page because someone else had been hired to take his place on the page  while he was campaigning, and perhaps he was weary wearing too many hats. He had been writing columns in the JI under his own byline since 1969 and distributing to other papers commentaries that were appearing as unsigned editorials in the JI. The new Editorial Page Editor was, I had supposed, not too comfortable with an excess of conservative opinion on his pages, and I lapsed into a hiatus of a few months. Up to that point, I had been writing for the paper for about ten years.  My temporary absence from Op-Ed pages in Connecticut was cut short by Mr. Powell, who suggested that I send future columns to a series of Connecticut papers. He was sending his column to the same papers under his own byline.  And so, here we are.

Q: I notice you chuckled twice so far: first when you said that journalism was ten percent thought and ninety percent repetition, and again when you said editors supposed their papers were non-ideological and non-partisan. What’s so funny?

A: I see I’m not going to be allowed to get away with much here, but it would be pointless to insist on a less inquisitive interlocutor. Repetition of a story lies at the very heart of journalism. Stories unfold, and essentials are always repeated. A big story – Watergate during the Nixon administration may serve as an example – is picked up by a host of papers and the elements of the story are always repeated. I’m not convinced that the tern “non-partisan” is all that useful; a paper that is partisan would not consider itself so. We should recall the birth of modern American newspapers in the post-Civil War period. Many of the leading papers of that day were unabashedly partisan, and quite a few were little more than party organs. You may have noticed that there is a synergy, shall we call it, between newspapers and politicians. One of the reasons Connecticut is called “the land of steady habits” is because its newspapers have been habitually left of center.  As incumbent politicians drift to the left, they carry the media with them; and as the newspapers go, so go remaining politicians as yet untouched by ideological imperatives. I can think of only one newspaper editorial page in the state that might reasonably be styled conservative. That would be the Waterbury Republican American.  Most of the rest are left of center. The preferred term today is “progressive,” though there are some important differences between progressives and liberals. I am speaking here of editorial opinion and perhaps the editorial prerogatives of publishers and editors.

Q: Let me interrupt you. Wouldn’t the editors of most papers in Connecticut insist their papers are moderate?... Another smirk!

A: That defense might have been true in Connecticut a few decades ago. Times change. I would argue that the very standard by which one may calculate the ideological posture of the media in Connecticut has shifted to the left. But it is true: Most reporters, editors and commentators working today might consider themselves moderate. They have said that, and they are wrong. The claim to moderation is a conscience salve. You just rub a little “moderation” on your editorial page and you have proofed yourself against the charge that you are left of center. Most newspapers in Connecticut allow national conservative commentators to ventilate on their Op-Ed pages. This is a painless concession to moderation and “fair-play.” There may be a conservative Op-Ed writer or two ventilating about state politics in Connecticut newspapers; if so, they have not yet disturbed the political universe. Presently [This self-interview was conducted at the end of January, 2014], Connecticut’s gubernatorial office is held by a Democrat who appears often as possible marching energetically in union picket lines. Governor Dannel Malloy has gone to some trouble to identify himself publically as a progressive Democrat. Most of his PR initiatives are readily identifiable as progressive. He is comfortable with the progressive policy prescription of President Barack Obama. All the leadership positions in the General Assembly are held by progressives. The state’s entire U.S. Congressional delegation is Democratic, and Democratic voters in the state, many of whom are not progressive but who reflexively vote the party line, outnumber Republicans by a ratio of two to one. The old Democratic Party apparatus one associates with Tammany Hall is still very strong in Connecticut’s cities. The operative axioms that underlie Mr. Malloy’s first two budgets are progressive, and none more so than the tax increase in his first budget, the largest in Connecticut history, as well as his venture into crony capitalism. Moderate Democrats in the state have long since been consigned to the dustbin of political history. Moderate Republicanism -- as represented by the three “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” past members of the state’s U.S. Congressional delegation -- is a desiccated corpse. The same is true in the Democratic Party. All moderate Democrats have been put out to pasture. A Bill O’Neill or an Ella Grasso today would be moldering on the back benches of Connecticut’s progressive Democratic Party. This is the real universe of decisive political facts that shapes Connecticut politics. The liberal to progressive mass has a strong gravitational pull on the media. If we ask ourselves -- “How did things get this way? Why is Connecticut, for all practical purposes, broke?”  -- it seems to me proper to lay much of the responsibility on the shoulders of Connecticut’s left of center media. A stronger resistance to the progressive, leftward drift might have given us a more moderate configuration, but Connecticut’s media has for the past few decades simply succumbed to the gravitational pull of Democratic and progressive interests. I think it may have been Chesterton, himself a repentant journalist, who pointed out that no great struggle is needed to float downstream; even a dead body eventually reaches that point at which rivers dump effulgent into the ocean. The media in this state has too often cooperated with the ruling regime. The vigorous and healthful antibodies one expects from a media in opposition – the only kind of press that deserves respect -- simply are not in evidence.

Q: That seems a little harsh. Let’s go back to some of the political characters in the state. Connecticut is full of them: former Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker; former U.S. Senator Chris Dodd, now a shill, as you think, for Hollywood; former suit-prone Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, now a U.S. Senator; former U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman; Governor Dannel Malloy, whom you’ve called the most progressive Connecticut governor since Wilber Cross -- a curiosity shop of characters, including Mr. Powell, whom you seems to respect.

A: Mr. Powell is among the best newsmen in Connecticut, and his impatience with nonsense is refreshing. It was Mr. Powell who styled Mr. Weicker a “gasbag” in his review of Mr. Weicker’s fact-based autobiography, “Maverick.” I reprinted the review, with Mr. Powell’s permission, on my blog site, “Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes From  A Blue State." I’ve also interview him several times on the blog.

Q: What makes a good newsman?

A: He must have an intuitive grasp of the nature of a good story and the will to pursue it to the gates of Hell. There’s a little bit of Alexander Pope in every good journalist:

“Am I proud?

Yes, why should I not be,

When even men who do not fear God

Fear me?”

To arrive at Pope’s rather generous estimate of himself should be the ambition of any reporter or journalist who relishes his own independence. And I’m using the word “independence” here to indicate a sharp separation between journalists and politicians. Mr. Powell is fond of quoting Joseph Pulitzer on the point:  A good reporter should have no friends.  And then too, anyone who appreciates Fredrick Bastiat has his foot firmly planted on the right path.

Q: In understanding the drift of Connecticut politics during the last few decades, how important is Mr. Weicker? He’s retired now, but still a bit of a live wire.

A: Yeah. He pops up from time to time, most recently in an Op-Ed piece in the Hartford Courant in which Mr. Weicker advises the Republican Party to become more like Mr. Weicker. The shape and destiny of the Republican Party – very much on the downslide these past few decades – cannot be understood without a careful consideration of Mr. Weicker, the last Jacob Javits Republican in the Northeast.

Q: Javits… there’s a name that is not likely to ring a bell in the memory of people younger than 30.

A: Mr. Weicker is not younger than 30. Mr. Javits, a Republican U.S. Senator from New York who professed a progressive brand of Republicanism, left politics in 1980. Mr. Weicker has identified himself on a few occasions as a “Jacob Javits Republican.” Mr. Powell, in his review of Mr. Weicker’s autobiography, identified Mr. Weicker as a gasbag who used his own party as a campaign foil to assure his re-election in a state dominated by Democrats.

Q: And you?

A: Mr. Powell has the better and more objective view. I think it was Bernard Shaw who pointed out that most autobiographies take liberties with the truth. Mr. Shaw said the most truthful biography of Napoleon would have been one written by his butler. In his own party, Mr. Weicker was the spreading oak in the shade of which nothing vital could grow. He also famously – and accurately -- called himself “the turd in the Republican Party punchbowl.” When he was chased out of the Senate in 1989 by then Connecticut Attorney General Joe Lieberman  -- a “Jacob Javits” Democrat, be it noted -- Mr. Weicker’s home party breathed a huge sigh of relief and began earnestly to attempt to dig itself out of the rubble. Mr. Weicker later ran as an independent for governor of his state and won. He imposed an income tax on Connecticut and then high-tailed it out of town, declining to run for a second term on a ticket of his own invention.  Democrats in Connecticut learned from the Weicker-Lieberman race that any Jacob Javits progressive Democrat could defeat any Jacob Javits progressive Republican, and they’ve been winning office ever since. In the past 16 years, beginning with U.S. Representative Nancy Johnson and ending with U.S. Representative Chris Shays, all the Republicans in Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional delegation have been replaced by progressive Democrats. And in 2004, Republicans surrendered the gubernatorial office to Danell Malloy, who is every bit as progressive as President Barack Obama. The ruination of the Republican Party is Mr. Weicker’s legacy to his state – that and the state income tax. When Mr. Malloy in his first budget imposed upon the people of Connecticut the largest tax increase in state history, Mr. Weicker commiserated. He had been there, done that.

Q: You believe Mr. Lieberman and Mr. Weicker were leading political parallel lives.

A: Sort of. There are astonishing correspondences between the two. Through two bruising races – the Weicker-Lieberman race for the U.S. Senate and the Lieberman- Lamont race for the U.S. Senate – the two senators were pretty aggressive antagonists. It was Mr. Weicker who encouraged Mr. Lamont to challenge Mr. Lieberman. Of the two races, the Weicker-Lieberman contest was the more interesting to me.  Mr. Weicker, during his 18 years in the Senate, had staked out for himself large swaths of political territory that belonged to Democrats. He was friendly with Edward Kennedy and Chris Dodd, whose father, Tom Dodd, he had defeated in 1971 when Dodd the elder was reeling from scandals largely of his own making. David Koskoff wrote a fairly good book about Tom Dodd, “The Senator From Central Casting: The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of Thomas Dodd,” which I reviewed for one of the newspapers. Mr. Weicker’s campaign against Tom Dodd was, he later acknowledged, rougher than it should have been.  I made a record of Weicker’s comments on Tom Dodd when he was invited to appear on a radio show to say some soothing things about U.S. Senator Chris Dodd. He said, “In 1970, I made my first run for the U.S. Senate. It was a unique event in that I was pitted against a Democrat, Joe Duffy (sic), and an Independent, Tom Dodd — a beginning for me but an end to the distinguished career of Sen. Dodd. Though happy to win, I wasn't particularly proud of the tough verbiage I had landed on Dodd.” He also left some knuckle marks on Joe Duffey’s face.  Mr. Duffey was the anti-Vietnam political candidate of the moment. Mr. Weicker, who had called upon President Nixon to campaign in his corner, said Duffey and other protestors like him should be in jail. Later on, during the Watergate period, Mr. Weicker was to change his mind about the war. Mr. Lieberman was familiar with Mr. Weicker’s campaign methods. During the 1989 senatorial campaign, he attacked Mr. Weicker both from the left and the right. Much to Mr. Weicker’s dismay, Mr. Lieberman was indirectly assisted in his campaign by staunch conservatives such as Bill Buckley. The much abused Connecticut GOP, it seemed, was in full scale revolt against the “turd in the Republican Party punchbowl.” Mr. Weicker, at long last, was shown the door by his party. Today, Mr. Weicker says the Connecticut GOP booted him out, presumably for infidelity. But it was Mr. Weicker who had initiated divorce proceeding many years earlier; the final and fatal break was merely formalized with his loss to Mr. Lieberman. No one – not even he, it must be supposed – was surprised. During the Lieberman-Lamont race, Weicker and the Weicker-likers in the Democratic Party teamed up against Mr. Lieberman, but to no avail. Mr. Lieberman slipped the noose. Mr. Weicker and Mr. Lieberman were both liberals. A liberal group, the Americans for Democratic Action, rated Mr. Weicker in 1986 the most liberal Republican in the Senate. His rating was 20 points higher than that of Senator Chris Dodd. The bizarre notion of Mr. Weicker as a centrist was, even then at the apex of his senatorial career, preposterous. It was a fiction promoted by liberals who no doubt appreciated Mr. Weicker’s service in rendering harmless anyone in his party who displayed toxic conservative symptoms.

Q: Mr. Weicker declined to run again as governor. Had he done so, would he have won?

A: No.

Q: But he did say in an interview that ran in Connecticut magazine that he thought he could win.

A: Politicians are people whose whole lives are lived in the intersection of “yes” and “no.” The piece you’re referring to is called “Final Say: Lowell Weicker,” published in 2012. There is no final say with Mr. Weicker. There are no “last words,” and may never be as long as he has breath in him and there are Republican careers yet to destroy. The interviewer asked Mr. Weicker to justify his choice of Barack Obama over Mitt Romney in the presidential election, and Mr. Weicker doubted that a Republican moderate could survive a Republican primary, which is pure fantasy: Mr. Romney was hardly a fire breathing conservative, and he survived the Republican primary. The Republican Party in Mr. Weicker’s own state has never nominated a conservative for high office. Mr. Weicker’s nuisance value has ebbed since he left office. A re-election would have forced an awkward defense of the income tax in a general election. That tax was popular only among progressives in Mr. Weicker’s state. The tax changed the character of Connecticut and opened the flood gates to improvident spending. By the time Mr. Malloy was elected governor, spending in the state had tripled -- and the coffers were empty. Interestingly, the amount of the deficit faced by Mr. Malloy in the post-income tax period was, almost to the dollar, the same as it was when Mr. Weicker inaugurated his income tax. No one from O’Neill to Malloy had seriously addressed the spending side of the budget. A few months after Mr. Malloy was installed as the first Democratic governor since O’Neill had declined to run again as governor, Mr. Weicker lamented, “Where did it all go?” And I replied in a column, “Into the black hole, you ninny.”

Q: Mr. Weicker’s right hand man, Tom D’Amore, died recently and suddenly of a heart attack. His funeral drew quite a few people.

A: Yes, deservedly so. He was a nice man. During the height of the Cold War, a British agent was asked whether he could defend another agent who had gone over to the enemy. He said that if he were ever forced to choose between his country and his friend, he hoped to God he would have the good sense to betray his country, so imperious are the claims of friendship. The same might be said of Mr. D’Amore’s relationship between his friend, Lowell Weicker, and the Connecticut Republican Party. After he had been more or less appointed Republican Party Chairman by then Senator Weicker, Mr. D’Amore assured  the Republicans who had confirmed him as Chairman that he was not interested in presiding over the demise of the Republican Party. But he did -- he and Mr. Weicker. Rebuffed in his senatorial campaign with Mr. Lieberman by the very Republicans he had scorned over the years, Mr. Weicker had a second act as governor, in the course of which he imposed his income tax on the state that had rejected him. Some people at the time suspected that spite of some kind was roiling in Mr. Weicker’s veins. But it is equally likely that Mr. Weicker felt he was tying a knot in his loose legacy by imposing an income tax on the state. Within the space of two succeeding Republican governors, the state budget tripled. After Mr. Malloy had become governor, the first Democratic chief of state in Connecticut since the departure of Mr.O’Neilll, he imposed a massive tax increase to discharge a massive deficit, the result of profligate spending made possible by the Weicker’s income tax. Mr. Weicker was asked to comment on the new Democratic governor’s massive tax increase, the largest in Connecticut’s history, during a function attended by elder statesmen at the Hartford Club. Mr. Weicker heartily commended the governor for his steely courage and said he understood the necessity of tax increases. So, one imagines, did Mr. D’Amore.

Q: Senator Joe Lieberman ran aground on the same rocks, you believe.

A: Not quite, but the political Odysseys of both Mr. Weicker and Mr. Lieberman were eerily similar. Both were senators of long standing: one, Mr. Lieberman, a liberal Democrat whose foreign policy views were shaped by years of opposition to Soviet communism in its various shapes and permutations; and the other, Mr. Weicker, whose politics were shaped by a politically profitable resistance to what one might call Reagan Republicanism. Both took a bridge too far, Mr. Weicker far more often and more exuberantly than Mr. Lieberman.  Both were sensible that they were operating in New England, about which Barry Goldwater said: If you lop off California and New England, you’ve got a pretty good country. Mr. Lieberman endorsed John McCain for president over Democratic nominee Barack Obama, causing Democratic heads back home to explode. Mr. Weicker’s sleights to his party nominees are perhaps too many to mention.  One of U.S. Senator Chris Dodd’s Republican opponents, Republican Party nominee for the U.S. Senate Roger Eddy, popped down to Washington to secure Mr. Weicker’s support and was assured by Mr. Weicker that he could count on him 100 percent. Mr. Eddy returned home whistling “Happy Days Are Here Again,” only to hear, on the eve of the election, Mr. Weicker’s radio endorsements of Mr. Dodd – the revenge of “the turd in the Republican Party punchbowl.” Mr. Weicker was punished for his party lapses when liberal Democrats in his state and Republicans tuned towards Lieberman in his senatorial race. And progressive Democrats in Connecticut attempted similarly to punish Lieberman by flocking to Weicker preferred candidate Ned Lamont in a Democratic primary. Mr. Lamont won the primary but lost the general election to Mr. Lieberman, who by that time had discovered the benefits of party independence. Mr. Lieberman ran as an independent senator and won; Mr. Weicker ran as an independent governor and won.  But that history is not likely to repeat itself.

Q: Why not?

A: It takes a politician full of years in Congress to pull it off, and the present members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional delegation are – what shall we say? – light-weights. Both Connecticut U.S. Senators Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy are new arrivals. It takes a good long time for a U.S. Senator to grow a beard and, at least in Connecticut, all the long beards have drifted off to greener pastures elsewhere. Mr. Weicker hung himself with an income tax. Mr. Dodd is now lobbying in Hollywood. Mr. Lieberman has attached himself to a prominent law firm as a lobbyist. Before they had kicked the dust of the Senate from their feet, both Mr. Dodd and Mr. Lieberman had vowed, but not on a stack of Bibles, to eschew lobbying. It’s sure a strange world, isn’t it?

Q: But all that is in the past, so much water under the bridge. Can we talk a bit about the present and the future?

A: Yes. But remember, the past exercises a gravitational pull on the present.

Q: How would you describe the correlation of political forces in Connecticut today?

A: There is no enemy to the right in Connecticut, never has been. And in the absence of strenuous opposition, the state has moved very far to the left. Most Democratic politicians, who were alive and kicking in, say, 1990, the last year of the O’Neill administration, would be dismayed at the leftward drift. President Richard Nixon, shortly after he had taken the country entirely off the gold standard, used to say, much to the annoyance of the late Bill Buckley, “We are all Keynesians now.”  Similarly, it might be said by Mr. Malloy, “We are all progressives now.” Mr. O’Neill’s first term saw a rapid increase in spending, owing mostly to the boom period in the 1980s that had produced successive budget surpluses. The surpluses spurred spending, which resulted in a higher budget ceiling. When the boom ended, as all booms must, no serious attempt was made by O’Neill administration Democrats to lower the ceiling through spending cuts. Improvident spending had produced a deficit, which in turn led the way to so called “tax reform.”  The O’Neill deficit opened the door to an income tax. Mr. Weicker waltzed through the opening, and his “tax reform” relieved all state legislators at the time of a mounting pressure to reduce spending. Facing a similar set of circumstances in 2011, Mr. Malloy “pulled a Weicker.” The Malloy tax increase, the largest in Connecticut’s history, raised the spending ceiling. Connecticut is now the highest taxed state in the nation, and as such it is poorly positioned for a quick recovery if  the rising tide mentioned in a memorable speech by President John Kennedy ever does lifts all the boats.  I do say “if” because progressive proposals adopted both in Washington and at home in Connecticut have delayed a national and state-wide recovery. All this is background music, but the correlation of forces in the state, including a compliant, left of center media, is such that these harsh notes reach the ear as bewitching music, a song of sirens.

Q: But the Republican response to what you call the siren song has more or less fallen on deaf ears here in Connecticut. Are Republicans not shouting loudly enough?

A: I think the alternative message promulgated by Democrats, part of the siren song, is more alluring. Theirs is a bread and circus remedy. The Republican message is that wealth, real wealth, is created wholly in the private marketplace by entrepreneurs who are free to create products people want. The free flow of marketable intelligence is curtailed when the government aggressively, unnaturally and unnecessarily directs the flow. Democrats say: Not to worry, there’s nothing we can’t fix; and they proceed to offer a series of fixes, sometimes involving their political cohorts, that worsens matters. Long term solutions imposed from above on a quasi-free market rarely produce beneficial effects. The progressive is a Chanticleer convinced the sun cannot rise in the absence of his crowing.  

Q: These would be the crony capitalists.

A: Yes, progressive crony capitalists. Honore Balzac used to say that behind every great fortune lies a great crime. If he had lived in the 20^th and 21st centuries, he might have amended his apothegm. Nowadays, behind every great fortune lies a politician dispensing favors. And please don’t think that purist Democrats have no blood on their hands. It has been common among Democrats in Connecticut, champions of the proletariat, to launch rhetorical missiles at rich Republicans during campaigns. Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate Linda McMahon’s leaky boat was sunk by commentators who never failed to mention her self-financed $50 million dollar sputtering campaign. That’s fine: All’s fair in love and politics. The victor in the race was Dick Blumenthal, now the 6^th richest Senator in Congress. Mr. Blumenthal’s campaign suffered a bump in the road when he was shown several times in several different venues saying or strongly implying that he had served as a marine in Vietnam. These were bald-faced lies; Mr. Blumenthal said he had misspoken, and the bump was quickly surmounted. U.S. Representatives Rosa DeLauro and Jim Himes are millionaires, both Democrats. Mr. Dodd exchanged his Senate chair for a $2 million a year salary as a Tinsletown hawker, and if Mr. Lieberman has ever suffered proletarian want in the Senate, he is about to be richly rewarded for it. Mr. Weicker, whose grandfather was a successful business man, earned most of his money the easy way. Now that Mrs. McMahon – who ought not to have been elected to the Senate for a fistful of reasons – has been got out of the way, one expects to hear little in the future concerning the corrupting influence of personal wealth. How can you urge that point of view when three of the seven members of Connecticut’s all Democratic U.S. Congressional delegation are millionaires? The real corrupting influence in politics today lies in mutually beneficial  political exchanges between powerful politicians and crony capitalists on the right or left who prosper because of their efforts. These efforts always create disabling distortions in the market place and rarely help the majority of creative wealth producing entrepreneurs unattached to large corporations.

Q: But you can’t fit all that on a bumper sticker.

A: Right. “Raise the minimum wage” fits. It’s a campaign battle flag rather than a useful proposal.  The flag indicates that those in favor of the proposal have chosen to place themselves in the trenches with the poor and dispossessed. How many heads of household in Connecticut make no more than minimum wage? Probably not many. You are not likely to come upon that statistic in your local paper, and why not? It is the very first question that should be put to any politician in the state who is advocating for a boost in the minimum wage. Most minimum wage earners are part time workers in households with an average annual income of $50,000, some of them kids socking away a few bucks to defray the cost of their increasingly expensive college loans. After Governor Malloy gave UConn millions of tax dollars, the university boosted its tuition fees. The minimum wage raises the cost of labor for employers who either will or will not be able to recover sometimes slight profits by increasing the cost of his product or service. That loss may be recovered by reducing the hours of full time employees, laying off workers or reducing the quality of the product or service rendered, unintended consequences none of which are likely to help aspiring college students or, say, a child in poor section of a city who would like to contribute his fair share to the upkeep of his household. The minimum wage in Connecticut is also connected to union salaries by means of contractual escalator clauses; so any increase in the minimum benefits a powerful special interest group in the state that, some say, provided the edge to Mr. Malloy during his second run as governor.

Q: Are people so easily fooled?

A: Some are, enough are. It was Lincoln who said “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time; but you can’t fool all the people all the time,” though that would seem to be the ambition of many politicians.

Q: Thanks. It’s been fun. Let’s do it again.

Murphy’s European Apology Tour

U.S. Senator Chis Murphy plans to travel to Europe on an apology tour, according to a brief notice in a Hartford paper.

“Over the last several months,” Mr. Murphy wrote in a media release, “our European allies have raised legitimate concerns about the nature and scope of U.S. intelligence programs, and I agree that at times, U.S. surveillance programs have not been conducted with the appropriate restraint and security, both in the United States and in Europe. While foreign citizens do not enjoy the same constitutional protections as American citizens, the United States should have processes in place that assure non-U.S. citizens that all possible steps are being taken to limit the scope of our surveillance programs so that we are targeting only the information absolutely necessary to find and catch individuals who pose a security threat to the United States and our allies. My goal for these meetings will be to help cement the overall relationship between the United States and Europe and discuss surveillance programs in our countries.”

The brief news account does not mention where Mr. Murphy plans to travel in Europe -- Germany, France, Spain, England or the Vatican.

Mrs. Pesci and I just returned from France, whose socialist president, more unpopular in his own county than president Barack Obama is at home, still feels the whip and lash of an out of control American spy agency.

Germany’s head of state, Chancellor Angela Merkel, heatedly objected when she discovered -- thanks to Edward Snowden and his patron, Russian President Vladimir Putin -- that the Americans had tapped her private cell phone.

That item made the news four days running before we boarded the plane for home.

Presidential flack catcher Jay Carney’s various attempts to explain away the obvious have made him a laughing stock throughout Europe.  In a first response to European unease, Mr. Carney assured Ms. Merkel on behalf of the president that the United States is not nor would in the future tap the cell phone line of Germany’s head of state. It took news broadcasters about one hour to note that Mr. Carney had agilely danced around the question: Has the Obama administration in the past tapped the private phone lines of Ms. Merkel? It has been reported that Ms. Merkle’s phone lines have been under siege for more than ten years.

   

European grown-ups understand that nations do spy on each other – but tapping the private line of a European head of state suggested to them that a time honored line had been crossed.

Just before boarding an airline for home, we found that the Obama administration had tapped the Pope’s phone lines. Someone in the airport joked that the Obama administration was perhaps seeking how best to obtain an indulgence for its many secular sins.

The second most prominent story during the weeks we were in Europe concerned the spectacular failure of the launch of Obamacare.

A stevedore who tied our boat to a pier in Arles joked, “Here come the Americans. They are all FBI agents.” He was joking of course, but clearly there was a scorpion’s sting in his remark.

If Mr. Murphy does alight in Germany during his apology tour, it is possible he may bump into Mr. Snowden who, according to a recent news report, has expressed interest in testifying in a German inquiry into U.S. spying.

The Washington Post has reported that Snowden’s appearance in Germany would be contingent upon a pledge that Germany would not shuttle the accused felon to the United States. The possible testimony of Mr. Snowden in Germany, the paper reported, “puts Merkel into a tight spot. German voters are furious with the U.S. government over the spying revelations, and allowing Snowden into Germany would be a popular move. But the Obama administration has made clear that it is willing to go to great lengths to retrieve Snowden — including, said Bolivian President Evo Morales this summer, forcing the leader of a sovereign country to make an emergency landing because of suspicions that Snowden was on his jet.”

“If there were the possibility to hear Snowden as a witness,” said Thomas Oppermann, a Social Democrat who heads Germany’s parliamentary intelligence oversight committee, “without bringing him into danger and completely ruining the German-USA relationship, we should use it.”

Unless Mr. Murphy is willing to travel through Europe on his knees, begging pardon of every European he meets, he will not be warmly received. It may be more useful for him to stay home, iron the wrinkles out of Obamacare, work to construct a passable budget – Mr. Obama’s first since achieving office -- and apologize to the Europeans from afar, where he will be safe from the taunts of stevedores and European schoolchildren.

An Interview With Don Pesci On Death Penalty Abolition

Q: The death penalty was abolished by the Senate on April 5. It’s a virtual certainty that the House also will approve the Democrat inspired bill. Do you feel safer?

A: Can’t say. Part of the abolition bluster was that the death penalty did not prevent murders, always a questionable assumption.

Q: “Bluster?” What ever can you mean?

A: It was never a serious proposition, just a useful piece of propaganda.

Q: But the polls!

A: Think of what is meant when it is said that a punishment deters crime. How do you collect reliable data showing that the death penalty – or, indeed, any punishment –deters an action? Reliable data retrieval showing that the death penalty has deterred Mr. Smith from murdering Mrs. Smith cannot be collected from Mr. Smith. Mr. Smith is invisible. And if he’s smart, he will choose to remain invisible. The pollster can’t find him. Mr. Smith is not likely to step out of the shadows and volunteer that he was contemplating the murder of his wife. The police still toss you into jail for attempted murder. Polls showing that murder is deterred OR NOT DETERRED by capital punishment are so highly attenuated as to border on surmise, mere guesswork. We assume that punishment deters because when we were little boys and girls punished by our parents for some innocent crime, we chose to refrain from recidivism. Dostoyevsky wrote a whole novel about crime and punishment, concluding at the end of it that a sense of honor, religious prescriptions and the tug of conscience very well might lead to confession and redemption. But crime prevention? In the absence of the virtues that may quicken the conscience and lead to genuine redemption, a policeman under every bed in the United States could not deter crime. Like the poor, crime will always be with us. The only question open for discussion is: What do you do with the criminal?

Q: You are not saying, are you, that punishment CANNOT deter crime?

A: That’s right. I am merely saying that deterrence cannot be accurately measured.

Q: The Democrats who approved abolition placed in their bill a provision that would retain Death Row for inmates who had been found guilty of heinous crimes; the death penalty was eliminated, but not Death Row. Why?

A: That is a good question. There are a number of possibilities. Politically, it was a shrewd thing to do. We do not know whether Mr. Williams’intention was punitive, but it seems so.In a post-repeal interview, Mr. Williams confessed that his ploy was primarily political. Following a visit to Death Row, Mr. Williams returned to meet with abolition legislators at the capitol. On April 9, a couple of days after the vote, CTMirror reporter Mark Pazniokas wrote“ Williams and Looney concluded that repeal was possible only if those sentenced to the new crime of murder with special circumstances faced conditions closer to death row than MacDougall.”
The Democrats could hardly argue that the new punishment tier they had established, “crime with special circumstances,” would deter murder, having argued that the death penalty itself was not a deterrent. Probably it was offered as political bait to draw in legislators fearful that a vote for abolition might be interpreted by voters in the upcoming election as indicating they were “soft on crime.” And, of course, the measure retains the union infused punishment apparatus. Democrats are big on unionization. One has the impression that any proposal made by any Democrat to save money through de-unionization might earn them a ticket to Death Row. Chris Powell, the managing Editor of the Journal Inquirer and its primary columnist, raised some questions about the new punishment tier, but he was the only one.       

Q: One of the other points raised against the death penalty by Senate President Don Williams prior to the vote to abolish was that it had been randomly applied: Not everyone who committed murder in Connecticut has been sentenced to death.

A: And a good thing too. In practice, Connecticut’s death penalty punishment was applied ONLY if certain circumstances had been met. Not every murderer qualified. You had to work really hard to merit the death penalty. It is no argument in favor of the abolition of a punishment – say, ticketing for speeding – to say that not everyone who commits the offense is punished. This is an infantile objection: “Mommy, he did it too. How come only I got sent to bed?” Should we abolish ticketing for excessive speed on the highways because – just to fetch for a figure – 98 percent of speeders are not ticketed and of those ticketed 99 percent are not brought to trial? Grow up!

Q: Personally, I would be in favor of abolishing the practice of ticketing for any reason, however specious.

A: Of course you would. I’ve driven with you.

Q: Another argument was that the penalty once applied was irreversible.

A: People who said that the death penalty could be applied in error had to travel outside the confines of Connecticut to find such instances. Or they presented their objection as a theoretical proposition. No one awaiting death on Connecticut’s death row has been mistakenly led there by judicial error.

Q: But the appeals!

A: A means of postponing punishment, a judicial means of jury nullification.

Q: And the money spent!

A: Legal assistance is expensive, most especially when it is supplied “for free” by the state. The economic argument for abolition is possibly the least convincing. If you want a Cadillac justice system, you have to pay Cadillac prices. Towards the end of the debate in the Senate, a provision was introduced in the bill designed expressly to turn some “moderate”legislators towards abolition. The state would create a special process for convicted murderers it no longer could execute. They would be treated in the same manner as death row inmates. The death penalty would be abolished, but death row – very expensive – would remain for murderers who, under the abolished law, were separated and treated differently than, say, prisoners who were jailed because they had too often been randomly arrested for speeding. Given an opportunity to abolish a dollar swallowing death row along with the death penalty, precisely those senators who had argued that the death penalty process was too expensive to maintain chose to retain death row. No one laughed. How expensive might it be to retain Joshua Komisarjevsky in prison for life in a death row like environment? He is a very young man and, of course, all the arguments utilized to abolish the death penalty minus one (irreversibility in case of error) may also be used to argue for the abolition of life in prison. No doubt, tax supported defense attorneys will be permitted to make just such very expensive arguments through the state’s sometimes redundant appeal system. The abolition bill does not and cannot prevent pointless appeals. These are measurable costs. Why have they not been measured? Why has no conscience stricken, economic minded opponent of the death penalty turned his rhetorical fire on a life in prison sentence that will be prohibitively expensive?

Q: Why?

A: Because dollars spent on the judicial system – the bulk of which find their way into the salaries of judges, lawyers, some of them legislators, and prison officials -- is a straw man issue, wholly irrelevant. If legislators were concerned about expense, they would have abolished death row.

Q: Well, you don’t have to get so huffy.

Chris Powell is the managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester and writes a regular column for the paper. In the course of our conversation on poverty and social disintegration, Powell made reference to a column by Mona Charen that fairly summed up his general feelings.

Charen's column details some complacency-shattering statistics: “The illegitimacy rate among all Americans has been rising for decades. In 2012, we reached a grim milestone: The majority of births to women under the age of 30 are now outside of marriage. Among blacks, 72 percent of births are to unmarried women. And while some unmarried mothers go on to marry the fathers of their babies, it's rare in the African-American community, where only 31 percent of couples are married. (In 1960, it was 61 percent).”

Pesci: What you call “social disintegration” and others on the left call “poverty” is particularly insidious in cities. My own feeling, though you may disagree, is that even liberals tend to shy away from such terms as “social disintegration,” perhaps because preferred terms such as “poverty” suggest easier solutions to painful problems. And, of course, Republican politicians, especially here in Connecticut, have been frightened away from even casual references to social disintegration. One rarely hears it mentioned. The poverty problem is solved when money retrieved from socially unconscious malefactors of great wealth is transferred by means of a political distribution system to the poor. Social disintegration is a harder nut to crack. Here is Powell writing on a proposal to cap Connecticut’s gross receipts tax:

“Just two days before it complained about cheap gas and sprawl, the Courant reported the arrest of three Hartford Public High School students for raping a 15-year-old girl at the school during school hours. The much-lamented ‘achievement gap’ between city and suburban schools has nothing to do with schools and everything to do with such social disintegration.

“If Connecticut's cities were ever habitable for those aspiring to the middle class and seeking safe and sound upbringings for their children, people would jump at the chance to live there and to save on gas. But as long as the cities are the centers of social disintegration, people will pay almost any gas price to live somewhere else.”

For you, social disintegration is a bridge issue that touches most if not all urban pathologies AND most if not all legislative proposals. Tell us what you mean by social disintegration.

Powell: I mean breakdown in the basic social norms of decent behavior --boys and young men behaving like predators and girls and young women behaving like prey because of lack of parenting; adults unable to support themselves because they have not obtained any education and not learned any marketable skills; a lack of participation in community life so whole jurisdictions become unmanageable except by police, who immediately come to be considered outsiders, or by gangsters. I think most of this comes about because government coddles and subsidizes childbearing outside marriage, in the mistaken belief that doing so is less expensive than taking custody of the neglected children. The mistake is a matter of faulty accounting. Insofar as fewer government employees have to be involved in direct, face-to- face care, it may seem cheaper to leave a newborn in the care of an unmarried, unemployed, unskilled woman who already has three children by three different fathers and who is getting no substantial support from any of them. But it's not cheaper if you count the broad social costs imposed by those neglected kids as they grow up, fatherlessness correlating overwhelming with every anti-social behavior. Demographics in Connecticut are almost entirely a matter of middle-class people and people aspiring to the middle class trying to get away from the slob culture of fatherlessness.

Q: This downward death spiral apparent in the cities, but also seen more frequently in suburbs as the victims of criminality move away from anarchic environments, has been analyzed to death. Your analysis is probably sharper than most. Let’s assume it’s right: Urban pathologies are related to fatherlessness and the breakdown of core cultural values. I think the values have broken down everywhere, but the consequences are more severe in cities – and more pathetic because the pathologies are passed along from children to children uncorrected by the wider society. Studies show that the presence of a father in the home, for instance, is directly related to intelligence in male children. We cannot say that people have been indifferent to the normal yearnings of young people for peace, security, good schools and mediating institutions that are the hallmarks of a sound and nurturing culture. The war on poverty has been fought for a long while, and nothing is more obvious than that the enemy has won. Healthy societies produce cultural antibodies to ward off social pathologies. Where are they? How does it happen that when we act to make things right, everything becomes worse? After years of fatherlessness in cities – many potential fathers are in prison or dead or ought never to have been fathers in the first place – how do we restore the missing cultural antibodies and change this path of generational destruction? What is right and what is wrong about the usual state agency response to cultural genocide?

A: I blame public policy for what is happening. People are usually dumb but they are seldom so stupid that they can't figure out their immediate financial position. Brandeis said government teaches the whole people by its example. Jack Kemp and others said that you get more of whatever you subsidize. Government today doesn't tell people that having children outside marriage is the most anti-social thing imaginable short of murder; government says it's OK and provides a host of subsidies for it -- a basic welfare stipend, housing vouchers, food stamps and WIC support, better medical insurance than most working married couples can get, day care, and such. It's not a luxurious life but in the chain of child neglect and abuse --fatherless, uneducated, unskilled, unemployable children having children -- it can look pretty good. The War on Poverty ended up destroying the family, not poverty -- which doesn't discredit the objective of alleviating poverty. It just discredits the means chosen. (Unlike most supposed conservatives, I support what is derided as "Obamacare," insofar as it is the conservative national medical insurance system proposed by the Heritage Foundation as an alternative to "Hillarycare" back in 1993. Medical insurance for all -- and there are perfectly market-based mechanisms for achieving it -- will alleviate a lot of poverty.) But I think the biggest part of an anti-poverty program is simple: Grandfather everybody who was made stupid by government welfare policy and tell everyone else that, starting nine months hence, everything changes -- no more subsidies for people who, outside marriage, have children they can't support. The orphanages and group homes would have to be ready but I suspect that the word would get around quickly and behavior would change. I think that for the most part parents and strong families are the missing antibodies you're looking for.

Q: Poverty may contribute to social disintegration. The old bromides are true here. The best welfare program is a job; to which one might add, the best social service department is a family, and the best police department is a father. Over time, as fathers, families, and jobs have disappeared, state proxies – police now posted in schools, social service workers, and welfare bureaucracies -- have replaced these civilizing and mediating institutions. As a result, we now find ourselves bumping up against a political problem. The social configuration has changed for the worst, yet everyone is invested in the new culture, however deficient. Another way of saying this is that politicians, always a timid bunch, dare not follow your prescriptions – cap subsidies and welfare payments and prepare nurturing safe havens for children exposed to violence – because it would not be politically expedient to do so. We are witnessing the opposite of a Babylonian captivity, people rushing from normative institutions into the jaws of artificial and insufficient replacement proxies, running from freedom into a new slavery, all with the blessing of those who should be leading the captives out of Babylon to a land flowing with milk and honey. My question now is: What is the instrument of change to be? How do we get to the Promised Land?

A: Yes, exactly -- the government is now about half the economy, and given the lack of public-interest participation in civic life, the lack of participation by people employed in the private sector, even a government that constitutes a quarter of the economy is probably beyond control. In a column last year I asked and pretty much answered the question: “Is Connecticut past the tipping point?”:

What can turn it around? Probably only self-denial by the government class, which will never happen, or, over the very, very long term, the economic collapse that will result from more growth in government and the resulting departure of what's left of the private sector. As many political columnists on the right have noted, the government class is now a publicly financed, self-sustaining political machine beyond competition. Under the Democratic Party the government overcompensates the public employees and they kick back part of their overcompensation to the party and provide the campaign soldiers to keep the racket going. When half the population is either on the government payroll or has a close family member on the payroll or is getting substantial transfer payments, it's mathematically impossible for an independent public interest to assert itself politically. I keep at it only because my ability to make a living is not transferable, entirely a matter of my 50 or so years in journalism and public life in Connecticut, and, of course, for spite. I would hate for certain people to think that nobody was on to them. But it's not much consolation.

Garber’s Swift Boat Ads And Dean’s Challenge

Ross Garber waited quite a while before expressing his interest in running for attorney general as a Republican. This sort of thing may be inconvenient to party nominated candidates, but so long as it’s still a free country, Mr. Garber is free to be his potty old self, and everyone else in the party should be prepared to humor him.

But Mr. Garber now has chosen to wrest votes from attorney general party nominee Martha Dean through a series of “swift-boating” ads. “Swift-boating” is a term that came into currency during the presidential run of Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts when it was felt that Kerry’s supporters that his opponents were pumping false and toxic ads into the political bloodstream.

Garber so far has released, a little more than a week before the primary, two swift-boat ads, either one of which is worthy of the most shameless of ex-President Richard Nixon’s worst subalterns.

The Garber-garbage ads tear out of context a Dean quote suggesting an honest discussion concerning the decriminalization of some drugs, plops butchered quotes into the more lurid of the brochures and surrounds it with pictures of crack dealers and discarded drug paraphernalia. Rick Green, a columnist and blogger for the Hartford Courant ran without comment pictures of the ad on his blog site.

This is the first of Mr. Garber’s ads posted on Mr. Green’s blog site:

The back of the brochure shows a placid and smiling Mr. Garber and a drug user bending listlessly over a bottle of liquor. Perhaps the despondent drug user has just read Mr. Garber’s political ad.

Even political writers who have placed themselves sympathetically and politically in Mr. Garber’s corner and have occasionally indulged in slipshod mud-slinging – Mr. Green, for instance, thinks “Mad Martha,” as he calls Mrs. Dean, has “cyborg blue eyes” – must have been a bit unsettled by such scurrilous brochures.

So, the question arises: What to do about last minute Tricky Dickey ads sent out so near a primary that they cannot be effectively challenged?

The intent of such ads is to capture the campaign narrative through a series of red herrings that, issued close to primary D-Day, cannot be effectively answered. Dean’s response to a charge that she would facilitate drug dealing would not fit on the bumper sticker of a car, still less in a campaign brochure. And relying on John Henry Newman’s remark that “if you fling mud, some will stick; stick but not stain” seems hardly appropriate, because that kind of a permissive, turn-the-other-cheek posture is not a sufficient discouragement to those proficient in the fine art of mud-slinging.

One could reply in kind with a brochure, for instance, showing Ross -- a lawyer who has chosen to build up his new law practice by defending political crooks -- surrounded by notorious mobsters such as Al Capone, with lurid shots of the bloody bodies left behind after the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. But if one’s objection to mud slinging is that it falls beyond the bounds of civil discourse, one can hardly engage in compensating scurrilities one abhors.

One real reporter at the Courant noted in one of his dispatches that Mrs. Dean said only that she would welcome an intelligent discussion, presumably among knowledgeable people interested in the decriminalization of drug use, with a view to settling the problem by means more effective than those currently in use.

Both Mr. Garber and Mr. Green seem to be unaware that the decriminalization discussion has been floating around for decades. Indeed, some ideological barriers that have long separated conservatives and liberals on the question of decriminalization were dismantled years ago by two of the most prominent conservatives of our time, William Buckley and noble prize winning economist Milton Friedman.

“Liberals at the Courant took issue with Dean’s remark that the legislature should consider drug legalization, a political position long embraced by some liberals and others who even now wince when they consider that prisons are bursting at the seams with people arrested for relatively minor drug offenses. It has been years since conservative economist Milton Friedman plausibly argued that the legalization of some drugs would relieve social problems. More than seven years ago, Bill Buckley shocked his brethren by agitating for the legalization of marijuana as a test to probe the question: Would legalization be more harmful than a present policy that packs jails mostly with young black men drawn into gangs by the lure of lawless money making.”

The passage quoted above is taken from an earlier blog and column -- which included embedded links that carry the reader to a column by Mr. Buckley and a video interview with Mr. Friedman. It answers a challenge presented by Green on his blog:

“Don,

“You sound like a true RINO. Decriminalize drugs? I don't recall many conservatives advancing this cause.

“Mad Martha deserves everything she gets. She ought to have the backbone to defend her own viewpoints.

“Rick”

In the meantime, Dean’s suggestion really should bear fruit. There should be a discussion in the state on the benefits of continuing a costly drug criminalization program that, some conservatives and enlightened liberals would be willing to argue, has turned the distribution of drugs in the poorer parts of cities over to criminals who are not likely to be thwarted by Mr. Garber’s and Mr. Green’s opposition to alternative strategies proposed by Buckley, Friedman and these guys:



See Chris Powell's column here.