Don Pesci: Do political endorsements matter?

VERNON, Conn.

First Lady Michelle Obama has endorsed Democrat Dannel Malloy for re-election as Connecticut's governor. In a picture worth a thousand words, Mrs. Obama was shown on “Capitol Report” being bussed robustly by U.S. Sen. Dick Blumenthal, who no doubt would endorse Mr. Malloy were Mr. Blumenthal a newspaper; some would argue that Mr. Blumenthal  is a newspaper. The winner of the Malloy contest with Republican Tom Foley will become governor of a state first in the nation in progressive governance and crony capitalism and last in almost every other important measurement of prosperity.

Will the first lady's endorsement matter to anyone but hardened Democrats, or to voting age high-schoolers who prefer healthy and pallid lunches to pizza and brownies? Probably not. For politicians, endorsements are little more than shows of party solidarity, and there are few political marriages in the nation more solid than that between Mr. Malloy and President Obama. Indeed, newspaper editorial endorsements in Connecticut’s left-of-center news media also have become highly predictable displays of ideological solidarity.

The lame-duck  president has had some difficulty getting himself invited to campaign soirees elsewhere in the Disunited States. Democrats vying for office in Red States  have tended to shun the president, if only to avoid the falling timbers of Mr. Obama’s foreign and domestic policies. Mr. Obama’s foreign policy is recklessly absurd because all foreign policy but his is constructed around a realpolitik understanding of friends and enemies. Mr. Obama is the first U.S. president who seems incapable of distinguishing between the two. In domestic policy, Mr. Obama should have devoted his energies during his first term to settling market uncertainties occasioned by a ruptured housing mortgage bubble partly caused by Beltway favoritism and the dismantling of the Glass Steagall Act, a Franklin Roosevelt measure that that prevented investment banks  from meddling in commercial- banking activities. Instead of attending to the crisis at hand, Mr. Obama created a crisis of his own making by instituting Obamacare, a progressive baby step on the way to universal health care.

Mr. Obama will be appearing in Bridgeport – if, indeed he does make an appearance, a previous campaign appearance on behalf of Mr. Malloy having been called off because of the Ebola crisis – only a few days after Anne Melissa Dowling, Connecticut’s deputy commissioner of the Department of Insurance, announced that  of course she was concerned about insurance-policy cancellations in Connecticut.

“Dowling, NBCConnecticut reported, “says some 55,000 people across the state will have their policies canceled either because it no longer meets the requirements of the Affordable Care Act or because grandfathered policies that didn’t need to meet requirements have simply been canceled by the insurer.”

Even here in true blue Connecticut, some members of the state’s all Democratic congressional delegation have proven resistant to Mr. Obama’s charming attempt to make the world over according to his eccentric predilections.  Congresswoman Elizabeth Esty, for instance, has announced she will not attend Mr. Obama’s prospective campaign appearance of behalf of Mr. Malloy unless the president somehow manages to cross her path in her own district. The lady is very busy attending to her re-election – partly by composing and endorsing killer ads against her opponent, Republican Mark Greenberg, that even The Hartford Courant considered “creatively misleading” and (gasp!) “false.” Mrs. Esty has announced she would not be calling on the president when he appears in Bridgeport, only a hop, skip and a jump from Mrs. Esty's 5^th District.  Connecticut is such a small state that anywhere in the state is but a hop, skip and a jump from anywhere else.

The Courant, the state’s largest  newspaper, endorsed Mrs. Esty, the second time it had done so. One of the indispensable determinants that garner Courant endorsements is experience in office, a requirement the paper waived during its first endorsement of Mrs. Esty, who at the time was running against a far more experienced candidate, Republican nominee for the U.S. House in the 5^th District Andrew Roraback. The notion that the more experienced candidate for a particular office ought to receive the approbation of voters is, in fact, an argument for the perpetual election of incumbents, except on those rare occasions when the retirement of an incumbent leaves an office vacant. It is a policy, highly suspect in a constitutional republic, that would have stopped the American Revolution in its tracts: King George III, who inherited the British throne at the age of  12, had a much longer and deeper experience running the American colonies than did any of the founding fathers of the country. Most Americans are uncomfortable with perpetual monarchies or unchanging legislatures.

But not The  Courant. The paper’s current endorsement of Governor Malloy is riddled with enough qualifiers to sink a battleship, and this year, as usual, Democrats in Connecticut’s congressional delegation have garnered the paper’s affections; this at a time when Republicans are expected to retain control of the House. Some bean counters expect Republicans to capture the Senate as well. As the whole of New England moves further left, the usual endorsements will increasingly be taken with a ton of salt by voters less progressive than the usual progressive representatives.

Don Pesci (donpesci@att.net)  is a Connecticut political writer.

Don Pesci: Abe Lincoln and the trials of John Rowland

  By DON PESCI

VERNON, Conn.

Former Connecticut Gov.  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 5^th District, to a severe interrogation on his radio program, formerly called “Church And State.”

Since being appointed to Connecticut’s Superior Court by Gov. 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 two 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 antagonists 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.

Charlie Morse, for many years the chief political writer  of  The Hartford Courant and an unabashed Lowell Weicker-liker, produced tons of columns favorable to then Sen. 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; and so was Mr. Morse, who left The Courant to work on Mr. Weicker’s campaign – even though he continued his column in the pro-Weicker Courant.

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 gray-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  the "Bare Ruined Choirs''.

Though Mr. Rowland’s defense attorneys have focused in a motion to dismiss on the charges brought against him, 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.

 Don Pesci is a writer who lives in Vernon, Conn. He may be e-mailed atdonpesci@att.net.