The Trials Of John Rowland

Former Governor John Rowland, now a former radio talk show host, may have been “guilty,” in a metaphorical sense, of using his position to advance the political interest of one particular candidate over another. It has been said that Mr. Rowland had subjected poor Andrew Roraback, at the time a Republican Party candidate for the U.S. House in the 5th District, to a severe interrogation on his radio program, formerly called “Church And State.” Since being appointed to Connecticut’s Superior Court by Governor Dannel Malloy, Mr. Roraback has moved out of the political into the less contentious judicial arena. Apparently, Mr. Roraback had suffered no permanent harm, and losing a Hartford Courant endorsement to his Democratic opponent certainly cost the socially progressive Republican Party endorsed candidate more negative votes than Mr. Rowland’s barbed questions.

Mr. Rowland’s preferred candidate for the slot, it has been said, was Lisa Wilson Foley. At the time Mr. Rowland was hard grilling Mr. Roraback, the talk show host was employed as a consultant for Apple Rehab, a business owned by Mrs. Foley’s husband. Mr. Rowland implausibly claims he was assisting Mrs. Foley’s campaign on the side as an “unpaid consultant.”

Similar impostures – though news of them may shock the willfully ignorant – have been deployed in the news business from time immemorial. Abe Lincoln came very near to fighting a duel with one of his outraged political competitors when it was discovered that editorials in a Republican paper had been written on the sly by Mr. Lincoln; actually, one of the newspaper pieces had been written by his intended wife. Because it would have been ungentlemanly for Mr. Lincoln to involve his fiancée in the quarrel, he accepted responsibility for the satires but characteristically refused to issue an apology. Eventually, the matter was settled outside the law courts, without either of the antagonist having used against each other the large military broadswords Mr. Lincoln had selected as his choice of weapon. Mr. Lincoln, who towered over his opponent, hacked off a tree branch with his sword while the two stood facing each other on Blood Island, and the display of superior reach led to an amicable resolution.

In Lincoln’s day, newspapers were outrageously partisan, little more than party organs. In our day, newspapers are slyly partisan. If subtle partisanship were a crime, Connecticut prisons would be overflowing with journalists and editorial writers.

Charlie Morse, for many years the chief political writer for the Hartford Courant and an unabashed Weicker-liker, produced tons of columns favorable to then Senator Lowell Weicker, one of the papers most pampered political pets. The Courant, during Mr. Weicker’s push for an income tax, was solidly in Mr. Weicker’s gubernatorial corner. Before Mr. Weicker had been sworn in as governor, Mr. Morse accepted an offer from Mr. Weicker to work for him while continuing to write for the paper for a few weeks. After his inauguration, Mr. Morse left the Courant and began working for Mr. Weicker. There is no indication that Mr. Morse was being paid for his fawning columns. Some writers do it for love, others for money.

The Courant, a left of center publication, supported Mr. Weicker because its editors regarded the “Maverick” Republican as a sort of Jack the Giant Killer. “Maverick” was the title of Mr. Wicker’s “fact based” autobiography, most adequately reviewed by Journal Inquirer columnist Chris Powell under the title “Mr. Bluster Saves The World.” While Mr. Weicker and the editorial board of the Courant were synergistically attached at their navels, little did the Courant understand that Mr. Weicker was not killing the giant; there were NO conservative Republicans in office in Connecticut at the time. He was killing Jack -- his own Connecticut based Republican Party.  

There are no laws criminalizing journalistic bad habits.  The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects partisan and non-partisan journalists alike. Even if the accusation against Mr. Lincoln had been correct, he easily could have won his case in court by draping across his chest the breastplate of The First Amendment – or at least that portion of it that guarantees freedom of political speech. The freedom of religious expression clause in the very same amendment is not as hotly defended by the media because modern journalism tends to be instinctively anti-clerical. Some of us who understand why a watchful media should resist authoritarian displays of power cannot for the life of us understand why the same media should be so willing to bed down with grey headed incumbents whose first term in office coincided with the arrival of Noah’s Arc on Mount Ararat. Surely in our day, incumbent politicians are much more powerful than the ministers and priests who now preside over Gary Wills’ “Bare Ruined Choirs.”

Though Mr. Rowland’s defense attorneys have focused of the charges brought against him in a motion to dismiss, the First Amendment conceivably could be brought into play as a sleeper defense during the promised Rowland trial -- “promised” because it is always possible the trial may be ditched in favor of some plea agreement never made public between Mr. Rowland’s high priced Washington attorneys and prosecutors. Neither Mr. Rowland nor Mrs. Wilson-Foley were practicing politicians at the time Mr. Rowland, essentially a journalist, allegedly “favored” Mrs. Wilson-Foley, an aspiring politician, on his radio program. This means that no political favors either way could have been exchanged for allegedly “corrupt” money received by Mr. Rowland.

It is still very early in “the judicial process.” During Lincoln’s day, matters were adjudicated in courts of law, and instructive precedents were established. Nowadays, justice itself hangs from “process” nooses. Deals are made in private between Star Chamber prosecutors and defense lawyers, and precedence is a stranger at the hidden proceedings. Grand Juries, many political commentators understand, are Star Chamber proceedings, and Grand Jury findings released to the media are always highly prejudicial. They should be taken by a truly non-partisan critical media with tons of salt.

Parties, Nominating Conventions, And The Unitary State

"Patriotism if you must, but –please! – no parades” -- George Bernard Shaw

The Democratic nominating convention was merely a dot placed over a predestined “i”. Despite Jonathan Pelto’s occasional pokes at Governor Dannel Malloy, no one in the state seriously entertained the notion that Mr. Malloy would not emerge from the Democratic nominating convention as the party’s chosen gubernatorial candidate. Within the Democratic Party, there will be no room during the upcoming elections for liberty to stretch its legs. Opposition will be sternly repelled. The Republican Party convention, held this year in the sprawling Mohegan Sun Casino complex, was a different matter.

Prior to the opening of the convention, a Hartford newspaper had already agitated for the abolition of party conventions. The paper favored primaries as the most “democratic” method of selecting candidates for office; conventions were a little bit too bossy for the paper’s tastes. The same paper has advocated opening party primaries to all and sundry, regardless of political affiliation, possibly because the paper regards political parties as useless excrescences.

This is the Shavian view of patriotism applied to political parties. “Patriotism, if you must,” said George Bernard Shaw, “but – please! – no parades.” Party politics, if you must, but – please! – no party conventions. And no political parties either, if you please. Who needs parades when one has Shaw? Who needs political parties when one has the editorial board of (insert the name of your favorite paper here)?

This silly position is on a par with saying, “News if you must, but no news outlets, please!” He who wills the end wills the means. You cannot have patriotism without public expressions of patriotism – that is what a parade is.

The Hartford paper cited former Republican U.S. Senator Lowell Weicker, who once famously characterized himself as “the turd in the Republican Party punchbowl,” as supporting the paper’s views on party conventions and political parties.  Over the years, the editorial views of the paper and the eccentric political notions of Mr. Maverick have melded in such a manner that it is virtually impossible for a reader unused to the serpentine ways of Connecticut politics to disentangle the view of Mr. Weicker and those of the Hartford paper. They have become one and the same – which tells us all we need to know concerning the nature of politics and reporting in progressive Connecticut.

The real back story – even the real story about the Republican Party nominating convention 2014 – is much more interesting and entertaining than has been represented in Connecticut’s left of center media. It is true that the Democratic Party convention was a loud sleep-inducing snore, primarily because that nominating convention really was redundant. An edict from the Hartford paper successfully abolishing the 2014 Democratic Nominating Convention would have left Democratic politics precisely where it was before the Democratic delegates took their seats; and, of course, there will be no Democratic primary, and little on the Democratic side for media outlets to report. Sorry, no parade this time.

Here is the puritanical Shavian political universe, right before our eyes: no dispositive nomination convention, no primary, and no need for either. Indeed, in the unitary state, one party, like Aaron’s rod in scripture, swallows all the other parties. Now, that is a story worth covering. In the unitary state, there is no need for patriotism, or parades, or party conventions, or parties -- or news outlets, except as messaging relay centers.

Here is the Rubicon Connecticut is preparing to cross. Once we cross and burn our bridge, we will find ourselves, having arrived on the other side, in George Orwell’s Brave New World, where patriotism has been relegated to the dustbin of history and there are few manifestations of independence, liberty or creative thought. In a world in which everything has been decided by a unitary and permanent political oligarchy, there will be but one parade to march in. It should be noted that the word “patriotism” is here used to indicate a revolt against the established order. When Samuel Johnson said that “patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels,” he may have had in mind such “patriots” as Thomas Paine and American revolutionist Sam Adams.

In the unitary state, one need only obey to express one’s solidarity. Parties and political factions in which inconvenient ideas are manifested will have been abolished. And in a state in which there is only one subdued and co-opted media, there can only be one thought – shut up and march in the only remaining parade.

Weicker, The GOP’s Ahab

“Connecticut Commentary,” as usual, anticipated former U.S. Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker’s remarks on WNPR by nearly a week.

On May 9, Don Pesci addressed Republicans in Westbrook and mentioned Mr. Weicker at some length:

“Both Mr. Weicker and Mr. Malloy are progressives. At the root of progressivism lies the sundering notion that if government is good, more government must be better. From here it is but a baby step to the equally absurd notion that government is the state. In fact, the state is all of us, the government merely an administrative apparatus designed, if you credit the U.S. and State Constitutions, to accomplish our reason informed will. Mr. Weicker, whose ego as U.S. Senator and Governor was infinitely expansive, took this absurd logic a step further and regarded himself as the state. I should like to call your attention to the hopeful tense in that last sentence: Mr. Weicker was, he regarded– past tense: There is a God.


 “But it never hurts to remind ourselves that there is a Devil too. 

“From time to time, Mr. Weicker shows up, most often at WNPR or in the op-ed section of the Courant, to advise Republicans what they must do to become a majority party. You will never guess: They must field candidates like Mr. Weicker. But these days only progressives pay him much mind...”

Mr. Weicker ought to have retired from politics -- eighteen years of which he spent as a Republican U.S. Senator -- an honored elder statesman whose opinions on his party should have been taken with less than a ton of salt. That did not happen, largely because Mr. Weicker thought it politically useful to define himself as a maverick within his own party. In this he was extraordinarily successful, and when a parting of the ways became necessary, no tears were shed within Republican ranks when Mr. Weicker retired from politics for good, shortly after he, as governor, had imposed an income tax on his state.

Connecticut’s slow and painful decent into a reckless spending ditch began with the Weicker income tax. Connecticut is now the only state in the union that has experienced negative job growth. Maverickism does have a dark side. It also has a bright side, at least for Mr. Weicker. Connecticut’s state Republican Party is Mr. Weicker’s  President Richard “You won’t have me to kick around anymore” Nixon. Even though Mr. Weicker’s notions of what is best for his cast off party are irrelevant to most Republicans, the maverick who once fittingly described himself as “the turd in the Republican Party punchbowl” will always have his version of Republicanism to kick around.  In pronouncing his party irrelevant, Mr. Weicker hardly noticed that his state party’s irrelevance coincided rather neatly with Mr. Weicker’s nineteen year reign as the nominal head of Connecticut’s GOP.

These bull bellowings are a little sad. Mr. Weicker is stuck in a time-warp groove: He repeats himself, and repeats himself, and repeats himself… No one, other than a few aged and crusty Jacob Javits Republicans or Democratic politicians eternally grateful for the Weicker income tax and the expansion of spending it occasioned pay him much heed these days.

Mr. Weicker’s views are set in mental concrete and do not change with the times.  As a U.S. Senator and the nominal head of his state party, Mr. Weicker favored opening his party’s nominating convention to non-Republicans, thus weakening the stranglehold on the state GOP of non-maverick, loyal Republicans. He now favors blowing up the nominating conventions altogether, because nominating conventions are, like all things Republican, irrelevant.  

When Teddy Roosevelt retired from politics, he shot a few water buffaloes in Africa. Mark Twain wrote up Roosevelt’s post presidential adventure as a mass slaughter of cows. Former President Jimmy Carter built housing for the poor and wrote books no one reads. Ronald Reagan, stricken with Alzheimer’s, retired to his ranch to await with his usual good humor the grim reaper. George Bush the younger took up painting and manfully restrained himself from commenting upon the idiocies of his successor.

There really is a life after politics. But not for Mr. Weicker. Like some raving Ahab, he has strapped himself to his own White Whale with his own harpoon lines, the victories and defeats of times past.  He and the whale, a metaphorical substitute for thwarted ambition, will go down together. Supported by the Republican Party in his state for nearly two decades in Congress, Mr. Weicker has no use for nominating conventions or political parties. The depth of his ingratitude is boundless, almost blasphemous.

When Starbuck in Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” accuses Ahab of blasphemy, the old puritan cries out, “Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.”

On the last day, when the angels finally call Mr. Weicker, he will go out with a snarl on his lips and a curse against the fictional devils in his past he has not been able to exorcise. The moment will not be recorded by WNPR.

The Connecticut GOP And The New Democratic Progressives

Below is an address given to the Westbrook Republican Town Committee on the occasion of the 15th annual John A. Holbrook Awards Dinner

It’s wonderful having the opportunity to speak with you. Lee wrote to me back in February inviting me here. I told him it would be a great honor for me and that the title of the talk would be something on the order of “Whither The Republican Party? And he wrote back a note: “Gee Don, I hope you don’t plan to whither us too much.” I knew then we could have a little fun tonight. However, I do want to advise everyone that to forestall confusion the title of this talk has been changed to “The Connecticut GOP And The New Democratic Progressives.”

I’ll post it on my blog site – Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes From A Blue State – for anyone here who nods off during the presentation. If you  Google “Don Pesci” in quotes, the site will come up. The quotes are important because, if you leave them off, you’re likely to get a bunch of stuff on Joe Pesci. He’s the guy with all the bodies in his trunk. For some reason, people sometimes confuse me with him.

One of the distinguishing marks of the Republican Party is that Republicans really do like to have fun. Democrats, as a rule, are too busy arranging the order of stars in the belt of Orion to pause to enjoy the good things of life. Has anyone in the past few years seen a more sober mug than that of Governor Dannel Malloy, Connecticut’s stand-in for that old progressive sourpuss Woodrow Wilson? I speak only of Mr. Malloy’s public persona. I’m sure he’s a barrel of laughs in private.

Tonight I hope to review the state Republican Party’s near past and then survey briefly some positive portents.

I’d like to begin with a little story about Bill Buckley and the media of his day. Things in the Northeast have not changed much. In Connecticut especially, beneficial change is agonizingly slow. Unlike Mr. Malloy, Bill was an Irishman who loved laughter, song, and ideas. Watching Bill playing with an idea was a little bit like watching Bach fingering a harpsichord keyboard. You just knew he was going to make celestial music out of his improvisations. Most of the music was wasted on the New York Times. The editors at the paper had little appreciation of stirring conservative political ideas, a failure of good taste that persists at the paper even today.

Someone persuaded Bill to run for mayor of New York against Abe Beame and John Lindsay, a left of center Republican who later drifted over to the Democratic Party. In due course, a reporter asked Bill what he would do if he actually won the contest. “I would demand a recount,” said Bill. Sure, sure. But if he were to be elected, what would he do? "Hang a net outside the window of the editor of the New York Times," to catch the falling bodies.

The French have a saying: “The more things change, the more they remain the same.”

The leeching of journalists into the Democratic Party continues apace. The percentage of full-time U.S. journalists who claim to be Republican dropped from 18 percent in 2002 to 7.1 percent in 2013, according to a recent study by Indiana University professors Lars Willnat and David Weaver. In 1971, when Bill released “Inveighing We Will Go,” a collection of his current columns, 25.7 percent of journalists polled had identified as Republican.

Some people in this room may think the seven percent figure a little high. In Connecticut, it feels like .007 percent.

Yesterday, the Big Apple had its Lindsays. Today, the state has its Cuomos – and, most recently, its Sandinista mayor of New York City, Bill De Blasio. And, of course, it retains its much less influential New York Times. And here in Connecticut we have our Weickers and our Malloys and, of course, our much diminished Hartford Courant. Taken all in all, this is why Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan’s red carpet, once said “If you lop off the Northeast and California, you’ve got a pretty good country.”

In Connecticut Commentary, I’ve gone to considerable trouble to point out the striking similarities between Mr. Malloy and former Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker – who once fittingly characterized himself as “the turd in the Republican Party punchbowl.” See: Republicans have punchbowls. They’re a happy group.

Both Mr. Weicker and Mr. Malloy came into office when the state was laboring under a weight of massive debt caused by – no one in this room will be surprised – massive spending. Both Mr. Weicker and Mr. Malloy arrived at the same remedy -- massive taxation.  Mr. Weicker draped around all our necks a burdensome income tax yoke. Mr. Malloy was content to raise all those niggling little taxes that Mr. Weicker’s more comprehensive solution to debt was designed to exorcise. Mr. Malloy ended up authoring the largest tax increase in state history, leaving even Mr. Weicker in the progressive dust. Connecticut’s equivalent of the New York Times, the Hartford Courant, sent up a rousing cheer. No need for a net there – not yet. The Malloy long term spending cuts, in turned out, were made of fairy dust. During the next post-election year, Connecticut is looking forward to a debt of some $1.5 billion, according to the bean counters in the Office of Policy Management.

Welcome back to square one. 

Both Mr. Weicker and Mr. Malloy are progressives. At the root of progressivism lies the sundering notion that if government is good, more government must be better. From here it is but a baby step to the equally absurd notion that government is the state. In fact, the state is all of us, the government merely an administrative apparatus designed, if you credit the U.S. and State Constitutions, to accomplish our reason informed will. Mr. Weicker, whose ego as U.S. Senator and Governor was infinitely expansive, took this absurd logic a step further and regarded himself as the state. I should like to call your attention to the hopeful tense in that last sentence: Mr. Weicker was, he regarded– past tense: There is a God.

But it never hurts to remind ourselves that there is a Devil too.

From time to time, Mr. Weicker shows up, most often at WNPR or in the op-ed section of the Courant, to advise Republicans what they must do to become a majority party. You will never guess: They must field candidates like Mr. Weicker. But these days only progressives pay him much mind, because they alone are interested in tossing turds into punchbowls.

You’ve heard the expression: It’s always darkest before the dawn? Over the past few years, it has become possible to hope that a Republican dawn may yet arrive. To be sure, the same old evil spirits hang like a dark aureole around the rising sun. The Courant is still the Courant. Progressives occupy all the heights in Connecticut’s political arena – including the governor’s office, a majority position in both houses of the General Assembly, the entire U.S. Congressional delegation and all Connecticut’s constitutional offices. What we used to call in the old days “the climate of opinion” is still a silly mixture of utopian fantasy and political palliatives.  The old political heresies – including the anticipated arrival of a political superman, the god of the polis who will with a stroke of his pen banish all our fears and inaugurate a long hoped for Eden – still persist, like the ragged ends of a recurring nightmare. Connecticut’s left of center commentariet would like us to believe that conservatives are responsible for this sad state of affairs – even though, asked to name one conservative governor or two or three conservative members of the General Assembly, they would be tongue-tied --  for once.

But – be of good cheer. There are rays of light, tokens marking the end of a long twilight slumber.

Let me tell you what some of them are.

First of all, the pinch is on, and people – proletarians, not the One-Percenters – are feeling the pinch. Nothing is quite as effective as a pinch to wake you up.

The Malloyalists may have noted with some alarm the Hartford Courant’s post-budget editorial, “Gimmicks From The Anti-Gimmick Governor,” in which the editorial board, usually friendly to all tax increases and gubernatorial spendthrifts, chastised Mr. Malloy for using “gimmicks to paper over deficits.” In his first campaign for governor, Mr. Malloy flailed former Republican governors for having done the same thing.

All the polls have turned into gibbets for Malloyalists. The latest poll shows an alarming 49 percent of Connecticut’s overtaxed and overregulated citizens would bolt the state for greener pastures elsewhere if given their druthers. In one of his recent columns, ominously titled “Will Connecticut Ever Get An Opposition Party?" Chris Powell writes:

“… advocacy groups purporting to represent the neediest just observe silently as state government finds billions of dollars to spend on pork-barrel projects like the bus highway from Hartford to New Britain, corporate welfare, binding arbitration of public employee union contracts that puts government's biggest single cost outside democratic control, defined-benefit pensions for government employees, subsidies for childbearing outside marriage, drug criminalization, social promotion in schools, what is called farmland preservation, and such.” Kowtowing to such special interests rather than representing the general good insures, Mr. Powell writes, “that spending is never cut.”

The progressive palliatives – most especially the notion that a dollar removed from the private marketplace and re-allocated by politicians adds to the wealth of the state – have run aground on the rocks of reality. A close reading of Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” might have dispelled this destructive fallacy. But progressives are more inclined to read “Dreams From My Father,” President Barack Obama’s “fact based” autobiography, than they are likely to read Adam Smith or Ludwig von Mises, the author of “Human Action,” or Friedrich Hayek, the author of “The Constitution of Liberty” or, for that matter, anything written by Bill Buckley.

Here in Connecticut, Mr. Malloy has followed the same progressive campaign script as the one now being promoted by the Obama administration, a sort of updated version of Robinhoodism – with this important difference: Robin of Sherwood took from the idle rich – most of whom were made rich, it should be pointed out, by their close association with political power brokers – and gave to the poor. Mr. Malloy, masterful in fooling most of the people most of the time, has taken huge gobs of money from the working class and given millions of dollars to multi-million dollar companies that gratefully accept handouts from politicians hungry for campaign donations. Mr. Malloy was able to dispense these giveaways after having first broadening the tax base so that nail salon owners, who had previously escaped the taxman’s hang noose, would be able to participate in his “shared sacrifice.” I know of no Democratic politician who, following this imposition on the proletariat, has yet accused Democrats of conducting a war on women’s salons. A young man I know who left the state for greener pastures elsewhere told me that as soon as he heard the expression “shared sacrifice,” he knew he would be fleeced.   

In some columns, I’ve called Mr. Malloy “Connecticut’s crony capitalist in chief” and – I like this one -- “Governor Bling.” No Republican running for any office this year should fear that a charge of crony capitalism brought against Mr. Malloy or any of his Democratic associates in the Gener4al assembly, will boomerang and harm real capitalists. We arrest bank robbers because we are able to make the important distinction between bank robbers and bankers. It is because progressives cannot make reasonable distinctions that so many of our young people, the beneficiaries of very expensive tax supported colleges in Connecticut, are taking their diplomas to other states. Here in Connecticut, we appear for the moment to be satisfied with a progressive government; other less predatory governors and legislators are content with progress.

Here is another ray of sunshine.  More Republicans in Connecticut are identifying themselves publicaly as conservative – which means more Republicans have been moved by progressive whips and scorns toward a political position that might accurately be described by those who can tell their right from their left as “right of center.” And they are no longer persuaded by passé editors who think – absurdly – that Mr. Weicker was a “moderate Republican” or that Mr. Malloy can pull Connecticut out of its nosedive by taking taxes from nail salon owners and giving them to Aetna Insurance Company.  These are hopeful signs that the long Weickerian captivity of the Republican Party in Connecticut has come to an end.

Nationally -- and increasingly in Connecticut -- Democrats are attempting to refashion a new and winning coalition of voters. The political world is no longer divided only into the “haves and “have not’s.” Democrats have cut up the body politic into numerous pieces: women, against whom they suppose Republicans have made war; unionized teachers, traditional allies of the Democratic Party; minority groups; the permanent government, mostly unionized state and federal workers; malleable students caught in the briar patch of progressive academia; left of center media outlets; progressive billionaires who do not yet feel the ropes about their necks – remember Lenin’s promise that after the proletariat had seized the means of production, their victorious enemies would hang the bourgeois with the rope they had so obligingly given to them --  and other groups too numerous to mention.  The ambition of new progressives such as Mr. Obama and Mr. Malloy is to fashion a political credo that will capture the minds and hearts, not to mention the votes and political contributions, of all these disparate groups.

If you are able to meld these body parts into a political force, you needn’t worry too much about traditional political groupings such as churches, normative family configurations or political parties. Government, George Washington said, is force—which is why, he thought, it should be used sparingly. And force in a democratic republic involves the building of coalitions, temporary or not.  Think of the temporary coalition as a sort of Trojan Horse, an artful engine of destruction deployed to secure a desired political end. The end is the capture of the city or the state or the nation. And some who have been paying attention to the destructive progressive programs of Mr. Obama might well conclude that his end in view is the destruction of traditional and familiar coalitions of power. The Trojans were confident that the matchless walls and towers of Troy could withstand any assault. But wily Odysseus found a way.

There is one solid conclusion that may be drawn from a party of this kind that feeds on energy drawn from elliptical interests, and that is this: the Democratic Party – certainly nationally, and now within Connecticut as well – is no longer a centrist party. Still less is it a moderate party. It is, to use a word much in favor with demagogic progressives whenever they are inclined to hurl rhetorical thunderbolts at Republicans, an “extremist” party. And if the less than seven percent of journalists in Connecticut who are Republicans were, say, twice that figure, the obvious imposture would be twice as obvious.  

Twenty years ago, political commentators used to refer admiringly to the “vital center.” That center has all but disappeared within the new progressive Democratic Party – led down the road to perdition by utopian supermen such as Mr. Obama and, closer to home, Mr. Malloy.

Progressivism is a very old political creed; it sprang from the religion infused prairie populism of the post-Civil War period and found its earliest national expression within the Republican Party of Teddy Roosevelt, the Bull-Mooser. But the new progressivism of Mr. Obama, Nancy Pelosi, her Connecticut counterpart, U. S. Representative Rosa DeLauro and, so it would appear, U.S. Senators Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, really is a Trojan Horse of a different color. It is a movement pushed forward by hard leftists and some overly nostalgic Democrats who look back upon the depression and post-depression years of Franklin Roosevelt as the golden age of their party.

So then, once we have established, as I’ve briefly and inadequately tried to do here, a clear view of what used to be called the “correlation of forces,” the all-important question arises: What should Republicans do to right our state and country?

The short answer to that question is this: The party should become less like Mr. Weicker and more like Mr. Buckley; which is to say – the party should unapologetically and energetically embrace conservative ideas, the only effective antidote to a wayward and destructive progressivism.

The Republican Party in Connecticut has a rare opportunity to show others the way out of the progressive briar patch in which both the state and the GOP have lingered for nearly half a century.

We know where we are. In almost every important index measuring progress and prosperity, Connecticut lags far behind other states. We know how we got here. Democrats and moderate Republicans have led us into the Dark Forest of a Grimm fairy tale. We spend too much; we regulate creative capital too often, and destructively; we have become for all practical purposes a one-party state, and one-party states are notoriously corrupt enterprises; we have fallen into the crony capitalism trap; we have abandoned our cities to solicitous Democrats who have constructed gorgeous gilded cages for the poor; we have accepted uncritically such idiotic and false categories as “social conservatives” and “economic conservatives” – rather as if conservative economic prescriptions will never affect the nature of society; rather as if destructive progressive prescriptions will never effect our economic condition. If you surrender the social sphere to progressives, it will be only a matter of time before they claim ownership of the economic sphere, and that is exactly what happened during the last presidential contest.

In the thrice told fairy tale, it is most often the third son or daughter who leads the way out of the perilous forest – usually after marking the way into the forest by laying down a path of beans. The way out then becomes the way in – in reverse. It is the third son and the third daughter who is, of all the siblings, the most beautiful, the most courageous, the most resourceful, the most determined and the most intelligent.

You here in this room – every one of you – very likely have the courage, the fortitude and the intelligence to become that third son or daughter. The way we get out of a difficulty is to reverse the way we got into it, and let no wicked sorcerer on the way tell you that the way home is not forward progress.

It may be proper to end this retrospective and prospective view by quoting Bill Buckley crying out from the center of the Dark Forest, way back in 1955, immediately after he had launched National Review magazine:

“We have nothing to offer but the best that is in us. That, a thousand Liberals who read this sentiment will say with relief, is clearly not enough! It isn’t enough. But it is at this point that we steal the march. For we offer, besides ourselves, a position that has not grown old under the weight of a gigantic, parasitic bureaucracy, a position untempered by the doctoral dissertations of a generation of Ph.D’s in social architecture, unattenuated by a thousand vulgar promises to a thousand different pressure groups, uncorroded by a cynical contempt for human freedom. And that, ladies and gentlemen, leaves us just about the hottest thing in town.”

It’s always liberating, isn’t it, to hew fast to a view that places you on the cutting edge of real progress? 

Before I leave the rostrum, I’d like to fold in with your own my applause for Marilyn Giuliano, whom you are honoring here tonight. I don’t want to damn Mrs. Giuliano with extravagant praise – often the kiss of political commentators is the kiss of death – but I may say she is an extraordinarily bright and accomplished legislator who serves on very important committees: education, appropriations and program review. You already know that.  Westbrook, and the whole of the 23^rd House District, appears to be well represented. So too in the State Senate: Art Linares certainly has a promising career ahead of him. The rest of the state should be so fortunate.

I’d like to thank everyone for making it possible for me to speak to you tonight and, if you have not already had too much of me, I’ll take a few of your questions.

Taking the 5th

The FBI was a major player in the drama. And everything that has happened on the public stage should convince Connecticut’s General Assembly that the state needs an Inspector General to uproot corruption before the FBI enters the theater.  When federal prosecutors turn up on the scene, Grand Guigno unfolds.

John McKinney, a Republican running for governor this year who has not yet been drawn by federal prosecutors into the mire, has proposed just that. His proposal has been received in silence by Democratic leaders in the General Assembly who control political business in the chamber.

The FBI intervention began when the struggle for the 5^th District U.S. Congressional seat left vacant after Chris Murphy’s elevation to the U.S. Senate seemed to be a contest between then Speaker of the State House Chris Donovan and an assortment of Republican hopefuls that included longtime State Senate leader Andrew Roraback, a late entry into the Republican primary, and three Republicans who had not held office before: Justin Bernier, Lisa-Wilson Foley and Mark Greenberg. The Republican nominating convention settled upon Mr. Roraback, a senator for more than a dozen years in the redistricted Torrington, Litchfield County area, and for several years Deputy Minority Leader Pro Tempore and Minority Caucus Chairman of the State Senate. On the Democratic side, Mr. Donovan, an early favorite, ran into an FBI sting operation in the course of which he was forced to withdraw from the race after federal prosecutors had indicted several of his campaign staff.

The FBI stinger in the poorly concealed operation was former Corrections Department union steward Ray Soucy – quite a character. In the Tammany Hall of the early 1900’s, Mr. Soucy would have made a superb ward heeler. FBI agents recruited Mr. Soucy to help them infiltrate and incriminate those running the Donovan campaign operation. He was their wired canary. The apple in the Democratic Party Garden of Eden was the promise of bundled campaign contributions given mostly to Democrats and some Republicans on the understanding that they would do all in their power to snuff a bill that would have put out of business roll-your-own cigarette operations. Several of Mr. Donovan’s campaign operatives fell for Mr. Soucy’s pitch and eagerly grasped the tainted FBI supplied campaign contributions.

Caught with their hands in the cookie jar, some staff members working on Mr. Donovan’s U.S. House campaign rolled over and gave additional testimony to prosecutors inclined to reduce their charges in return for their co-operation.

At one point, Mr. Soucy stuffed an envelope full of cash into a refrigerator used by Republican House leader Larry Cafero. Mr. Cafaro rejected the cash, and his aide gave instruction to Mr. Soucy how he might legally contribute to Republican campaign coffers. Mr. Cafero was told by the FBI he was not a target of their sting operation. The big fish, Mr. Donovan, was not legally compromised. Perhaps the stench of political pollution had reached his nostrils, or perhaps he had been tipped off on the FBI sting before he could be legally implicated; in any case, his campaign had been doomed. Democrats then turned to Elizabeth Esty, who defeated the Republican Party nominee, Mr. Roraback, in the general election.

So then, let’s tote up the winners and losers.

Ms. Esty won the seat, clearly a win on the Democratic side. Mr. Roraback, a liberal on social issues and a fiscal conservative, lost the race. Oddly, his candidacy was not endorsed by the Hartford Courant, Connecticut’s only state-wide newspaper. Since former Governor Lowell Weicker had left Connecticut’s political stage, the Courant had been searching for just such a golden Republican candidate as Mr. Roraback to endorse. Mr. Roraback, helpful to Democrats in the General Assembly as a passionate opponent of the state’s death penalty, later was appointed a Justice to the State Superior Court by Governor Dannel Malloy, a win for Democrats. Mr. Donovan was not prosecuted, a win for him and Democrats.  And then there is the continuing collateral damage arising from the Donovan sting – all of it harmful to Republicans and beneficial to Democrats.

The collateral damage involves Former Republican Governor John Rowland and Lisa Wilson Foley, one of the Republican contenders for the 5^th District seat.

If we brush away most of the political froth, it is not at all certain that Mr. Rowland will be packed off to prison a second time. Grand juries produce tons of damning press, because they are, essentially, prosecutorial star chambers. What we have heard so far in the media is the voice of the prosecution. The charges against Mr. Rowland, some lawyers believe, are weak – if he did not falsify his tax records. The public case against Mr. Rowland – what for lack of a better word we should call the ethical case -- is damning, but judges, unlike political commentators, are not much interested in romping through the souls of politicians. Mr. Rowland, not an active politician, allegedly made a pitch to Ms. Foley to help her in her campaign on the sly; he entered into agreement with a second Republican contender for the 5^th District seat to do the same. That second agreement never bore fruit, because the second politician, Mr. Greenberg, presently an announced Republican candidate for the 5^th District, was more ethically fine-tuned than either Faust or Satan. As a grown-up, Ms. Foley was perfectly capable of resisting the tempter, as Mr. Greenberg had done.  The case against Mr. Rowland is far from a slam dunk. It is a difficult case to prosecute, and its outcome is by no means certain.

A “but" follows.

It’s difficult for Democrats to exploit this one politically. The two principal actors involved are a candidate for office who has never held a political position and a political commentator. The very possibility of political corruption among Republicans is slight because they are not in a power broker’s position. The political heights are commanded by Democrats. They own the political trading floor – all of it: the governor’s office, all the constitutional offices and both houses of the General Assembly. If Republicans wanted to trade political favors for money or power, it’s difficult to see how the matter could be arranged. It is possible that the FBI has not yet given serious attention to the real distribution of political power in Connecticut. The political game, all of it, has been moved into the Democrat’s court. You cannot rob a bank in which there is no money. Republicans in Connecticut are power-broke, and it is only a matter of time before federal prosecutors and political commentators in Connecticut embrace the shattering revelation – at which point all the big guns may pivot towards Democrats, proprietors of Connecticut’s one party state.

Connecticut’s Media-Progressive Complex: Or -- It’s The Spending, Not The Taxes, Stupid

CTMirror asks in a recent story “Is it time to overhaul Connecticut’s tax system?”

The progressive wing of the Democratic Party, now in the ascendency in Connecticut, has been trying to “reform” the tax system ever since it was last reformed in 1991 by then Governor Lowell Weicker, the father of Connecticut’s income tax.

In the course of its story, CTMirror quotes William Cibes, identified as “state budget director under Weicker and also co-chairman of the finance committee in 1989-90,” on property taxes. Mr. Cibes recently testified before the General Assembly’s Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee, which in the next few weeks will endorse a measure “that could launch a top-to-bottom analysis of how Connecticut taps taxpayers’ wallets.” Mr. Cibes testified that “high property taxes are a major reason why Connecticut’s tax system is broken. So property tax relief would lessen the economic burden on businesses, municipalities and individuals… Property taxes are relatively stable. But when a state relies excessively on property taxes to fund important services like education, infrastructure and public safety, businesses and individuals are punished.

Mr. Cibes’ statement was remarkably similar to an earlier Op-Ed piece printed in CTMirror written by John A. Elsesser, the town manager of Coventry: “The good thing about property taxes is that they are relatively stable. As part of an overall revenue structure, which is relatively balanced among taxes on property, sales and income, they make sense. But when a state relies excessively on local property taxes to fund governmental services, as does Connecticut, it’s reasonable to begin working to fix what House Speaker Brendan Sharkey has termed a ‘broken’ tax system.”

Mr. Cibes and Mr. Weicker were both prime movers in the effort to adopt an income tax. While campaigning for governor, former Republican U.S. Senator Weicker, running within a party of his own making, had eschewed an income tax as a means of liquidating a Democratic generated billion dollar deficit. Adopting an income tax, gubernatorial campaigner Weicker said, would be “like pouring gasoline on a fire.” Mr. Cibes had run for governor on an income tax platform, but he and his platform were decisively rejected at the time by 65% of Democrats.

While Connecticut’s income tax was muscled through the General Assembly by Governor Weicker, the income tax idea and its implementation originated with Mr. Cibes, whom Mr. Weicker tapped to head the state’s Office of Policy Management. Declining to run for a second term as governor, a grateful Weicker, before leaving office, created a plush featherbed for Mr. Cibes, appointing him the first Chancellor of Connecticut’s new Connecticut State University System. Like old soldiers, old political operatives never die, but neither do they fade away. They become associated with lobbying firms or pad their retirements with pensions drawn from tax dollars.

It should surprise no one, least of all the editors of CTMirror, that Mr. Cibes continues to insist that Connecticut is undertaxed. Mr. Cibes certainly is within easy reach of the reporters and editors of CTMirror. Mr. Weicker’s former OPM chief was one of the co-founders of CTMirror and serves on its board of directors, as does Stanley Twardy, former Chief of Staff for Mr. Weicker. According to a report in Raising Hale, CTMirror is published by Connecticut News Project. A review of political contributions by board members of CTMirror shows that eight of the ten board members have made donations to political candidates totaling more than $125,000, seventy five percent of which enriched Democrats.

The Weicker-Cibes income tax of 1991 dropped the sales tax rate from 8% to 6% and the corporate tax rate from 13.8% to 11.5%. A Rainy Day tax fund, since depleted by spendthrifts in the General Assembly, was also introduced, along with a largely irrelevant constitutional expenditure cap. Through inadvertence or design, the Democrat dominated General Assembly never quite got around to implementing the constitutional cap and, following the passage of the Weicker-Cibes income tax, spending in the state tripled within the space of three governors, two of whom were Republicans.

Mr. Cibes’ pitch on the necessity of tax increases sounds wearily familiar, especially coming on the heels of Governor Dannel Malloy’s massive tax increase, the largest in state history, which out-revenued even the Weicker-Cibes income tax.

Commending a plan put forward by “Better Choices For Connecticut”, progressive tax grabbers, Mr. Cibes argued a few years ago in his pitch for higher taxes that Connecticut could not possibly offset its deficit through spending reductions alone, and he called for a “fair share’ sacrifice on the part of taxpayers and tax gobblers, a motif candidate for governor Dannel Malloy deployed effectively in his campaign.

The revenue proposals promoted by “Better Choices For Connecticut” and embraced by Mr. Cibes included an increase in the income tax for “those who can best afford it,” likely anyone making more than $250,000 per year, an increase in corporate taxes and an increase in the sales tax. The corrective measures promoted by Mr. Cibes insert progressive features into the Weicker-Cibes income tax, considered by some when it was passed as insufficiently progressive. At the time of passage, Mr. Cibes had told the New York Times that the architecture of the tax made it more progressive than it seemed. But progressives believe you can never have enough of a good thing.

Once the new revenue proposals are imposed on the Weicker-Cibes income tax, Connecticut will have adopted the same tax scheme Mr. Cibes promoted when he ran for governor way back in 1991. Property tax relief is little more than a convenient cover that will allow progressive Democrats to boost taxes when, after the upcoming elections, the state once again finds itself confronting a $2 billion deficit brought on by exorbitant spending. And the reporters and editors at CTMirror are too bright not to have noticed the obvious sham. One can only conclude that in failing to report sufficiently on one of its board of directors, CTMirror did not wish to place before its readers such inconvenient truths as might disturb Mr. Cibes and others who financially support the Connecticut News Project.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Women

Someone – Regina Roundtree, a Woman On Fire -- has conceived the idea of honoring Pat Longo, long one of the principal worker bees in Connecticut’s Republican Party. Of course, she’s much more than that.

Mrs. Longo immediately comes to mind whenever I recall William Faulkner’s tribute to women: “If you have something very important to do, give it to a busy woman.”

On March 1, Mrs. Longo will be honored at a special dinner arranged by Ms. Roundtree at Anthony's Ocean View in New Haven. All the particulars may be found at The Connecticut Black Republicans & Conservative site (CTbrac) here.

Mrs. Longo, who is to receive the 2014 “Lillian Ford Feickert Award,” will find herself in good company.

The keynote speaker of the evening will be Dr. Alveda King, the niece of Martin Luther King Jr.

A former college professor who served in the Georgia State House of Representatives, Dr. Alveda King is a recipient of the Life Prize Award (2011), the Cardinal John O’Connor Pro-Life Hall of Fame Award (2011) from the Legatus organization and the Civil Rights Award from Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) (2011). Dr. King regards the pro-life movement as a continuation of the civil rights struggle. A brave survivor of the Civil Rights Movement -- Her family home in Birmingham Alabama, was bombed, as was her father’s church office in Louisville, Kentucky, and she was jailed during the open housing movement – Mrs. King is singularly unafraid of the usual rhetorical bricks thrown at women presumptuous enough to rise to the defense of unborn children.

Crystal Wight, editor andpublisher of the blog Conservative Black Chick, will receive the “Woman on Fire” award at the event, though she will not be able to attend.

Attendance is mandatory for those in Connecticut who, over the course of the last couple of decades, have “seen the future” as devised by the usual culprits and know instinctively that “it will not work.” Names will be taken of slackers not in attendance. And after the state we all love has slipped into the abyss, nudged over the edge by the reigning power brokers, the list of sunshine patriots will be produced and published in what remains of the state’s free press.

If Connecticut is to be saved, salvation will come from busy women on fire, like Ms. Roundtree, who has given me the opportunity of praising Pat Longo.

Mrs. Longo, as all the right people attending CTBrac’s “Women on Fire” event will know, was elected Connecticut National Committeeman to the Republican National Committee in January of 2007. Prior to that, she had served as Vice Chairwoman of the Connecticut Republican Party for fourteen years. A very busy woman, she has been a fundraiser, grassroots organizer and a delegate coordinator to the Republican National Convention for Connecticut. She has for much of her political career been building up the Connecticut Republican Party, while others in the party, thumb-twittlers, have been watching her from the sidelines building up the Republican Party.

Twenty plus years is a long time to be tending vines in the Republican Party vineyard, and Republicans may be somewhat tardy in doing themselves the honor of honoring Mrs. Longo at the “Woman on Fire” event.

Like many active Republicans in the state, Mrs. Longo is a survivor with just enough conservative cordite in her veins to make her both dangerous and interesting. At the same time, Mrs. Longo is a bridge builder, and an extraordinarily wise woman.

Unless one is Caesar – or Lowell Weicker – one does not want to blow up the bridges that connect the various territories Republicans in the past have staked out for themselves. To have survived Mr. Weicker is no mean accomplishment for the Republican Party.

There is now a great quarrel – which rages mostly in Connecticut’s left of center media, and in the fevered brain of left of center commentators who have taken it upon themselves to advise Republicans how best to become more like them – concerning conservatism in Connecticut verses what one must call, for lack of a better word, “moderatism.” Under the general scheme being pressed upon Republicans by the state’s new progressive left, moderate Republicans are to be tolerated, while conservative Republicans are to be put to the torch. This arrangement, people attending the “Women of Fire” event will notice, has advantaged progressive Democrats, who are – dare I say it? – extremists.

The best answer Republicans can offer to this “trap-door” option – promote “moderate” Republicans who thereafter lose elections to progressive Democrats – is Pat Longo herself, the Pontus Maximus of Women on Fire.

When Mrs. Longo receives the award named after Lillian Ford Feickert -- Vice Chair of the New Jersey Republican Party, president of the New Jersey Woman's Suffrage Association, U.S. Senate candidate, and fearless, tireless, Republican Party organizer – it will be an award well given and appropriately received.

By the way, Republican men who do not fear strong women – nearly all conservatives and not a few non-extremist moderate Republicans – are cordially invited to the event. They will not be burned; the evening will be set alight with good conversation, great food, enlightening speakers; and in the Winter of Republican Party discontent, the illuminating blaze from “Women on Fire” will warm the cockles of their hearts. And should any Democrats who feel alienated by the progressive turn  their party has taken feel inclined to attend, let your heart be your guide -- bring along your fiery wives. 

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.