Don Pesci: Night coming on in Connecticut after Democratic election flood

It’s a washout for Republicans, a signal victory for Democrats and, some disgruntled Republicans will say, their abettors in Connecticut’s left-leaning media. The Hartford Courant editorial board held their collective noses this year and gave their prized endorsement to Oz Griebel, the anti-party gubernatorial candidate of the moment. Griebel swept up a little less than 4 percent of the vote tally.

Once again, Democrat chestnuts were pulled from the fire by the larger Democrat controlled cities in the state and college students at Yale and UConn, many of whom are transients who will not be making their homes in the state after they receive their sheepskins. These voters will not befoul their own nests.

The Democratic ploy – make the campaign about President Trump’s delinquencies – worked remarkably well in a state in which Democrat voters have for years held a huge margin in party registration.

Here and there, grumblers in the media rained on the Democrat parade. Chris Powell, the former managing editor of the Journal Inquirer newspaper, now a free-lance Cassandra whose column continues to appear in the JI and other media venues, noted “Five days before the election Lamont, the Democratic nominee, told a rally of government employee union members in New Britain, 'We're going to be fighting for you for the next four years.'

Lamont's remark recalled Gov. Dannel Malloy's infamous if honest declaration to a rally of government employee union members at the state Capitol four years ago: ‘I am your servant.’” And Powell asked pointedly, “How will the new servant of the unions deliver to them after first pledging to raise taxes, then pledging not to, and then, hours before the election, dismissing a radio interviewer's question about taxes with a ‘no comment,’ as if that answer was not as arrogant as anything ever uttered by his ignorant Republican rival?”

The “ignorant Republican rival,” gubernatorial nominee Bob Stefanowski, was almost certainly right about Connecticut’s next governor when he said repeatedly during his campaign that a Governor Lamont will raise taxes and continue the warm relationship with Connecticut's employee unions that was such a prominent feature of the Malloy administration.

So then, where do we go from here? We go back to the future.

The Republican flank of the General Assembly has been effectively neutered by losses in a Senate that had been tied at 18 -18. Rep. Joe Aresimowicz eked out a narrow win to retain his post as speaker of the House. Aresimowicz is employed by a union and cannot be expected to befoul his own nest. Sen. Martin Looney, a leftist born and bred in New Haven, will continue to preside over the Senate as president pro tem. “I’m raring to go with the excitement of having a majority again,”Looney said in an interview with the New Haven Independent. As usual, these door keepers will keep the doors shut to Republican leaders in both chambers. They will not entertain Republican budgets or Republican ideas, an eerie repeat of the correlation of forces that followed Malloy’s first gubernatorial victory, in 2011.

Lamont, Looney and Aresimowicz may now proceed along their merry way as if the Malloy years, throbbing with union favorable contracts, business flight, the largest tax increase of any administration in state history, shouts from outside the state commentators that Connecticut -- whose cup runneth over with taxes, regulations and accelerated spending, along with repeated budget deficits – was simply a bad daydream. Night is coming on, with its soft murmurings of a future prosperity.

Yale and UConn graduates, who vote and run, will figure it all out soon enough. They will not have to live in the tax-prone, progressive nest they have helped to build here in the land of steady habits.

Don Pesci is an essayist based in Vernon, Conn.

Chris Powell: Malloy wins third term as Conn. governor!

State seal of Connecticut. Love the grapes! Nutmeg State residents are big wine drinkers.

Maybe it was his only way to win Connecticut's election for governor, but having assured voters during the final weeks of his campaign that no one would have to sacrifice during his administration, either through tax increases or cuts in services, Ned Lamont now can only disappoint people, even as the hungriest ones think that he owes them big-time.

Five days before the election Lamont, the Democratic nominee, told a rally of government employee union members in New Britain, "We're going to be fighting for you for the next four years." Lamont's remark recalled Gov. Dannel Malloy's infamous if honest declaration to a rally of government employee union members at the state Capitol four years ago: "I am your servant."

How will the new servant of the unions deliver to them after first pledging to raise taxes, then pledging not to, and then, hours before the election, dismissing a radio interviewer's question about taxes with a "no comment," as if that answer was not as arrogant as anything ever uttered by his ignorant Republican rival?

But at least Lamont will enjoy a Democratic majority in the General Assembly, as the slowly rising Republican tide of recent years receded just as the party seemed about to seize legislative power. Dissatisfaction with President Trump probably hurt Republican legislative candidates.

The restored Democratic majority in the legislature probably won't object much to raising taxes again, as long as it is done quickly, leaving maximum time before the next election. New tax revenue will help protect the compensation of the Democrats' own campaign workers, like the members of government employee unions who performed sentry duty at polling places for Democratic candidates, doing political work on one their many discretionary paid holidays.

Connecticut's Republicans couldn't have suffered a bigger defeat than this election, since the state had been laid so low by eight years of Democratic administration under Governor Malloy that even Lamont ran against his own party's record. But circumstances turned out to be worse for the Republicans than Malloy's record was for the Democrats.

First was the failure of the Republicans to unite behind a gubernatorial candidate at their convention, resulting in a five-way primary whose winner was a political unknown with only 29 percent of the vote, Bob Stefanowski.

Second was the failure of the Republican bench, the party's leading legislators and mayors, to win nomination for higher office this year. Only one of those leaders did -- state Sen. Joe Markley, of Southington, who ran for lieutenant governor. With that exception everyone on the Republican ticket for statewide and congressional office had little to no name recognition when the campaign started and barely more when it ended.

That Stefanowski came fairly close despite his lack of involvement in the state's public life, his unfamiliarity with state government, and his refusal to articulate a platform beyond reducing taxes suggests that Connecticut was ready for a change of regime if it was offered a more plausible candidate.

But while enactment of the state income tax in 1991 was expected to prompt a political revolution in the legislative election the next year, the political composition of the new General Assembly was exactly the same as the old's. Malloy is leaving office detested but here comes his third term.


Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Chris Powell: Of American single parenthood and low test scores

How much money has Connecticut state government thrown lately at what is called the "achievement gap" in the public schools, the gross underperformance of minority and impoverished students? Probably hundreds of millions of dollars.

But the results of the most recent standardized test taken by students in Grades 3 through 8, announced last week, show no improvement over the last four years, the period during which the current test has been administered.

Two-thirds of black, Hispanic and impoverished students are below grade level in math or English or both, 40 percent of them far behind. While the "achievement gap" correlates largely with household poverty, other standardized tests long have shown that half to two-thirds of all Connecticut high school seniors never master high school English or math but are graduated anyway. (Results are similar in other states.)

The evidence in Connecticut is overwhelming that educational achievement has little connection with spending and everything to do with parenting. But the major-party candidates for governor, Democrat Ned Lamont and Republican Bob Stefanowski, pledged last week not to reduce state funding for municipal education. They pledged this not because it makes any sense as policy but because most of the money underwrites teacher compensation, there are more than 40,000 teachers in the state, they constitute its biggest special interest, and they want parents to think that money equals education.

Many parents want to think that as well. They don't want to be told that the failure of education is their failure to raise their kids properly. About 40 percent of Connecticut's children live in single-parent households and thus many get only half or less of the attention they should get. In the cities it's close to 90 percent.

In guaranteeing the status quo in state aid to municipal education, Stefanowski has made himself especially ridiculous, since, while pledging to repeal the state income tax over eight years -- or, as his latest remarks suggest, maybe 10 years -- he is locking a huge amount of spending into future state budgets before identifying even one substantial expense he would reduce.

But last week Lamont made himself ridiculous enough on education by proclaiming what he supposes to be the need for more "workforce training" even as the test scores show that primary education itself is failing amid the state's policy of social promotion. That is, all students know that they needn't learn anything to advance from grade to grade and graduate from high school.

So it's no wonder employers complain that while they have openings for good jobs they can't find skilled workers. It's hard enough to find high school graduates who have a high school education.

There can be no improvement while public education in Connecticut remains too politically influential to audit. It will keep consuming more and producing less.

Those Grade 3-8 test scores weren't the only hint last week that simple demographics are everything. A survey by the United Way concluded that 40 percent of the state's households don't have enough income to cover necessities.

A closer look indicates that most of those households are single-parent. It is as if people never heard that having children and raising them properly is expensive and not to be undertaken without a dependable spouse and income security. But then government long has been encouraging childbearing outside marriage.


Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Chris Powell: Will 'starve the beast' work in Conn.?

Original Godzilla film poster in 1954.

From his remarks to reporters last week at the Crocodile Club lunch at Lake Compounce in Bristol, the Republican candidate for Connecticut governor, Bob Stefanowski, seems to think it's not important to tell voters how he would cut the half of state government that is financed by the state income tax, which he wants to eliminate over eight years. 

“We're ready and happy to talk about it," Stefanowski said, but he still has not   done so specifically. "I don't think the argument is about what the details of people's plans are," Stefanowski added, because there is such a "stark contrast" between him and Ned Lamont, the Democratic candidate for governor. Lamont, Stefanowski said, "is going to raise taxes and I'm going to try like heck to get rid of the income tax.” 

Yes, telling voters the consequences of his platform before the election might spoil the lovely dream of escaping the income tax. Since he won the Republican primary with nothing but that lovely dream, maybe Stefanowski thinks he can keep avoiding specifics because a candidate's credibility doesn't matter. 

Stefanowski doesn't seem to have noticed that he got only 29 percent of the Republican primary vote and that only 20 percent of Connecticut's voters are Republicans. Or maybe he doesn't think that matters either. 

But maybe even if a governor had no budget priorities and just began to cut spending across the board -- pursuing the good, old conservative platform, "starve the beast" -- much help might be volunteered to him, if resentfully. 

Maybe just reversing the dynamics of budgeting would spark the necessary reforms. That's because all the spending-dependent groups in Connecticut long have been on the same side, clamoring together to increase taxes so they all could get more. 

This has always worked for them, since, despite the whining about spending cuts, total spending in state government always increases and the only "cut" is in its  rate of increase.  

If a governor was determined to reduce or even just freeze spending and had enough support in the General Assembly to sustain his veto, the spending-dependent groups might be forced to split up and scrutinize each other for inessentials and excesses. Knowing the tricks of budgeting, these groups might make excellent auditors. 

For example, advocates for the mentally handicapped, 2,000 of whom are always languishing on a waiting list for placement in group homes, might start caring about the expense of the paid day off enjoyed by state and municipal employees in the name of Columbus. They might even question collective bargaining and binding arbitration for government employees, policies that put the compensation of those employees ahead of all other purposes in government. 

Employees of nursing homes and nonprofit groups with whose salaries state government long has been stingy might protest the extravagant pay at the University of Connecticut. 

Passengers of the Metro-North commuter railroad, where maintenance is always neglected, might protest the bus highway to nowhere. 

Parents of special-education students for whom services are hard to obtain might denounce the huge but never tabulated cost of social promotion in the schools. 

They all could have fun picking through the bonding package. 

If Stefanowski really thinks that most voters care only about taxes, let him run on "starve the beast." 

The beast does need to go on a severe diet. But if voters are more sophisticated, Stefanowski better start explaining. 


Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Don Pesci: The role of humor and viciousness in politics

Anti-Jefferson cartoon in the 1800 election campaign depicts him burning the Constitution.

Republicans, we all know, do not know how to campaign -- which is why they lose elections. In the modern period, political jousting is either murderous or feckless. Twitterdom is full of deadly thrusts unleavened by humor, the opposite of wit.

Let’s suppose Connecticut Republican gubernatorial hopeful Bob “The ReBuilder” Stefanowski were Abe Lincoln, sans beard but with a similar sense of humor. Someone at a political rally once accused Lincoln of being two-faced – he was  being rather subtle on the issue of slavery– at which point Lincoln stopped his speech and shouted back, “If I had two faces, do you think I’d be wearing this one?”

The audience shivered with appreciative laughter, and laughter in politics is better than votes because it engages the stomach muscles and the thorax. Voting is a public duty most people choose to ignore, particularly in our day of snake oil salesmen. But laughter cleanses the soul and shocks the memory. Remembering a good joke is so much more pleasant that remembering a humorless politician.

So then, here is Lincoln Stefanowski ruminating – from the stump – on a recent Ned Lamont campaign rally in Hartford, Connecticut’s capital city and recently bailed out by the political money lenders under the gold-guilt dome in Hartford:

 “I see the Democrats had a rally in Minuteman Park in Hartford. All the usual celebs were there, minus Governor Dan Malloy, who’s in hiding. Democrats do not want the infectious Malloy touching their campaigns''. CTPost reported, “[Democrat candidate for State Treasurer Shawn] Wooden produced an awkward moment during the rally when he introduced Lamont as ‘Governor Malloy’ in an apparent slip of the tongue. Republicans continually paint Lamont as an extension of the unpopular Democratic governor, while Lamont emphasizes his differences from Malloy.” You see, at bottom – THEY KNOW – there are no policy differences between Malloy and Ned Lamont, who I hear is a wealthy businessman with only a smattering of political experience like… well, never mind.

The paper tells us that “Lamont, in his speech, emphasized that the Democratic ticket represented ‘change.’” But Ned favors more taxes and tax hand-outs to corpulent big businesses fleeing the state. All this sounds wearily familiar: Lamont is the Malloy who wasn’t there. And the only real change that can be expected of the man I called “Ned Malloy” is a sweep of change from people’s pockets. My campaign offers real political change, and we won’t assault your wallets or put a regulator under your bed to adjust the pictures in your house.”

A close friend, Philip Clark, noted Lincoln’s 1846 campaign against Peter Cartwright. Lincoln “asked Cartwright if General [Andrew] Jackson did right in the removal – I believe it was – of the bank deposits. Cartwright evaded the question” – no big surprise there; it happens all the time among politicians on the stump – “and gave a very indefinite answer. Lincoln remarked that Cartwright reminded him of a hunter he once knew who recognized the fact that in summer the deer were red and in winter gray, and at one season therefore a deer might resemble a calf. The hunter had brought down one at long range when it was hard to see the difference, and boasting of his own marksmanship had said: ‘I shot at it so as to hit it if it was a deer and miss it if it was a calf.’ This convulsed the audience, and carried them with Lincoln.”

The pundits are telling us that the upcoming gubernatorial campaign will be vicious though, one hopes, not quite a vicious as the John Adams-Thomas Jefferson campaign of 1800. Students of history will recall that all the elements of a modern campaign sprouted from this nursery bed.

Jefferson, it will be recalled, was Adams's vice president. The principals, Jefferson and Adams, were, of course, above campaigning; the slugfest was run by associates. The Jefferson camp boldly asserted Adams was a "hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman." The Adams camp said Jefferson was “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father."

The two contestants viewed the battle from afar. Jefferson was not above hiring a hatchet man, James Callender, a political pamphleteer and newspaper editor, to spread campaign muck, while Adams considered himself above such low tactics. Callender proved effective in convincing dupable Americans – presidents at the time were elected through the Electoral College -- that Adams desperately wanted to attack France, and Jefferson prevailed in the election.

Eventually, the free-roving Callender turned against both Alexander Hamilton, whom he rightly accused of infidelity, and Jefferson, for having produced children by one of his slaves. Callender eventually was undone by his own bitterness and alcoholism. He was seen in drunken stupor in 1803, and later his body was recovered from the James River.

More Lincoln and less Callender would better suit the temperament of non-twittering voters in Connecticut.

Don Pesci is a Vernon. Conn.-based columnist.

Chris Powell: Conn. Democrats, Republicans vie to be nuttiest and most irresponsible

Which is Connecticut's nuttier political party? Most observers might say the Republicans because of their association with President Trump, the loose cannon-in-chief. Last week's primary results suggest otherwise. 

Yes, the Republican nomination for governor went to Bob Stefanowski, a former executive for a trifecta of disreputable corporations -- General Electric, which just moved its headquarters out of Connecticut; Union Bank of Switzerland, which helped the Nazis expropriate Europe, helped Long-Term Capital Management wreck the U.S. financial markets, and helped rich Americans evade taxes, for which the bank was fined $800 million; and DFC Global Corp., a payday lender in Britain. 

Stefanowski, who calls himself conservative, is so conservative that until last week he had declined to vote for 16 years, donated to Democratic candidates, and two years ago switched from Republican to Democratic as he contemplated running for governor in the other party. Stefanowski's insistence on repealing the state income tax without specifying where he would cut the equivalent half of state spending seems to have persuaded most of his supporters. 

But Stefanowski received only 29 percent of the Republican primary vote and won the nomination only because the remaining field was split four ways. 

Meanwhile in the Democratic primary  38 percent  of the vote for lieutenant governor went to Eva Bermudez Zimmerman, a government employee union organizer who misrepresented her mediocre qualifications to be first in line of succession to the state's highest office. Zimmerman was appointed to the Newtown Town Council, not elected as she claimed, was defeated for election in her own right, and ridiculously exaggerated her work as a congressional intern. 

Zimmerman's main claim on the nomination was her Hispanic ethnicity as she exploited the retrograde movement among the Democrats toward the identity politics Connecticut might have thought it overcame 50 years ago. On taxes Zimmerman was just as bonkers as Stefanowski, advocating a vague tax on "big box" stores as the solution to state government's financial disaster. (Democrats always want more money for government but have to search for a new minority to extract it from, since they can't persuade a majority that the revenue will help anyone but government's own employees.) 

At least Zimmerman was an insurgent. She challenged a party old-timer, former Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz, for whom party leaders arranged the lieutenant governor nomination in exchange for her withdrawing for governor in favor of Ned Lamont. 

But to win as an insurgent in Connecticut's Democratic Party it's best just to pretend  to be one. That's the lesson of Jahana Hayes's victory in the primary for U.S. representative in the 5th Congressional District. 

Hayes, the former national teacher of the year from Waterbury, now living in Wolcott -- a detail carefully underplayed by her campaign -- is black and portrayed herself as the exemplar of the oppressed when in fact she is the exemplar of government's occasional success in advancing the disadvantaged. With no political experience, just platitudes, she got half the vote at the party's district convention and then the endorsement of its most influential interest groups. 

Because of the insurgency buzz contrived for her, she probably will be elected and in Congress will be another vote controlled by the National Education Association, just like the retiring congresswoman she succeeds. Comes the revolution! 


Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

 

Chris Powell: In Conn., Dems reject their record and Republicans won't learn

Hartford in 1877, as the nation came out of depression and the Industrial Revolution roared, especially in southern New England.

What does this week's primary election for governor say about Connecticut's Democratic Party? 

First, it says that at least the party cannot rationalize Joe Ganim's corruption in office. 

Second, it says that the party has come down with a bad case of schizophrenia, as Ned Lamont, having won about 80 percent of the vote, delivered an extemporaneous and overwrought if not hysterical acceptance speech admitting that the party's eight years in control of state government have laid Connecticut low and it desperately needs to change direction. 

How does a party seek to keep power on a platform of repudiating its own record? 

What does this week's primary election for governor say about Connecticut's Republican Party? 

The victory of business executive Bob Stefanowski says that the party has declined to draw any conclusions from its four recent disastrous experiments with nominating for high office self-funding but unknown dilettantes whose ideology, ability, and character have never been tested in public. Each of those experiments produced damaging discoveries about the candidates in the closing days of their campaigns. Now it easily could happen again. 

Behind every great fortune, the French novelist Balzac wrote, is a great crime. Of course that's not entirely true, but their recent record suggests that Connecticut's Republicans might do better to start believing it. 

The Republican results also should teach all of Connecticut something. Stefanowski won with only 30 percent of the vote and the winner of the party's primary for lieutenant governor, state Sen. Joe Markley, may have won with just less than half. To prevent such impairments of democracy, when the field of candidates is large and the leader has not won a majority, state law should provide for runoff primaries and elections or what is called "ranked-choice" voting. 

A second primary between the two top candidates for the Republican nomination for governor well might produce a different result. In any case a runoff system encourages consensus and discourages candidates who cannot win a majority and indeed may even be extreme. 

Extremism is already the Democratic charge about Stefanowski, though Lamont himself has embraced a far-left agenda and has pledged obedience to the government employee unions. 



PARTY ON, HARTFORD: The Democrats' subservience to the government class was exposed again the other day when the Hartford Courant reported that the Malloy administration's $500 million bailout for Hartford city government has squelched even the tiniest bit of pension reform there. 

Prior to the bailout, Mayor Luke Bronin and the City Council planned to save money by disqualifying new, nonunion city employees from the city's defined-benefit pension plan. The new hires were to be offered a defined-contribution pension, a 401(k) plan. 

Now that the bailout has been secured, city government is no longer inclined to economize with pensions. Council President Glendowlyn Thames says her colleagues are thinking: "These are city employees. We should be providing them with good pensions." 

But since state government is reimbursing half of Hartford city government's budget every year and assuming all the city's long-term debt, the city's employees have become more the burden of all state taxpayers than Hartford's own burden. So thanks to the governor, Hartford, where nearly everyone is a Democrat, can party on. 


Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn. 

Chris Powell: So in Conn., who is really conservative?

Most candidates in the primaries for the Republican nominations for governor and lieutenant governor advertise themselves as "conservative," since the party is generally conservative and its primary voters are heavily so. But the advertising leaves "conservative" undefined, and the candidates seem to think that conservative Republicans need only to hear the word before responding reflexively with approval. 

Conservatives may be more demanding than that. Are they really supposed to be persuaded by, for example, television commercials touting "conservative businessman Bob Stefanowski" for governor when the candidate has no record in public life and no one ever heard of him before he set out to buy the nomination? 

The Hartford Courant quotes Darien First Selectwoman Jayme Stevenson, a candidate for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor, as saying Connecticut needs consensus builders, "not people who stand on some kind of political ideology." Yet, though the Courant didn't report it, Stevenson's own advertising describes her as a "conservative Republican." 

Of course after the primary most of this "conservative" stuff will disappear from Republican advertising since Connecticut's electorate is liberal or libertarian on social issues. But given state government's financial collapse, the electorate is also growing more skeptical if not quite yet conservative on financial issues. At least there is a case to be made for something different from the uncritical liberalism whose political correctness correlates heavily with financial collapse. 

Will any candidates make that case well? If so, will they overcome the attacks of the state's politically correct news organizations? 

Such an attack was placed on the front page of The Hartford Courant this week as the newspaper maliciously described as an extremist the lieutenant governor candidate endorsed by the Republican state convention, Southington state Sen. Joe Markley. 

Unlike other candidates, Markley doesn't have to advertise himself as conservative, as he has a long record on issues that appalls the Courant. But it may not be as appalling as the Courant thinks. 

Markley, The Courant notes, would require parental notification of abortions for minors. But most people in Connecticut probably would support changing abortion law that way to prevent concealment of child rape, of which the state has had some horrible cases the Courant has declined to report plainly. 

Markley, The Courant continues, favors local option on fluoridation of public water supplies -- not because fluoridation is a communist plot but because it medicates people without their consent and because fluoride treatment is easily available otherwise. Preventing involuntary medication actually seems like a liberal position. 

Markley, The Courant notes, was the only legislator to vote against a bill purporting to require formal consent for college students having sex. The proposal was politically correct but will accomplish little amid the usual conflicting testimony. 

Markley, The Courant says, was a TEA Partier before the party started. TEA stands for "taxed enough already." Horrors! So which candidate for governor is airing commercials declaring that the middle class is overtaxed and "working families have paid enough"? That's no right-winger. It's liberal Democrat Ned Lamont. 

Right or wrong, Markley may be the only candidate in the primaries who has a record on state issues and can explain it thoughtfully and cordially. At least in that respect he is very much out of place. 


Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Chris Powell: The ambiguous charms of self-funding 'political outsiders'

Meriden, Conn., a heavily Democratic city that just rejected a property-tax increase.

Connecticut doesn't know the two rich and self-funding candidates for the Republican nomination for governor, Bob Stefanowski and David Stemerman, who are called "pop-up" candidates by the candidate endorsed by the Republican state convention, Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton. So Stefanowski and Stemerman are impolitely introducing each other to Republican primary voters. It's not pretty but it's useful. 

Last week Stemerman broadcast a television commercial noting that Stefanowski enrolled as a Republican only a few weeks before becoming a candidate, long had donated to Democratic candidates, and hasn't been voting Republican. (As it turned out, Stefanowski hasn't been voting Republican because he hasn't been voting at all for 16 years.) 

Indeed, while Stefanowski seems to have been a Republican for a long time, he left the party and enrolled as a Democrat for less than a year before re-enrolling as a Republican again a year ago, apparently because he first considered running for governor as a Democrat. 

So much for core beliefs. 

Stefanowski concedes most of this, explaining weakly that he was working abroad and should have sought absentee ballots. He counters that Stemerman was once a Democrat, too, and donated to Barack Obama in 2007. But Stemerman left the Democratic Party 15 years ago and says his contribution to Obama was just the price of admission to a fundraiser sponsored by a friend and there were no additional donations. 

Indeed, for corporate executives like Stefanowski and Stemerman, politics is often not a matter of core beliefs but just business that requires cozy relations with both sides of the street. 

Stefanowski got his commercials on TV before the other Republican candidates and for a while was thought to have an advantage, but he may be badly damaged by exposure of his opportunism and dilettantism. Since Stemerman's connection with the other party is fairly remote, Republicans may take less offense from him. 

The exchange between the self-funders is a reminder that the mantle of "political outsider," seemingly much desired by some candidates for governor, can also mean unknown, untested, uninformed, and full of last-minute, unpleasant surprises, as state Republicans might have learned from their awful habit of nominating self-funding political neophytes for governor and U.S. senator in recent years. 

But there's nothing wrong with changing parties out of principle rather than opportunism, since people's views and parties evolve. Winston Churchill changed parties twice, from Conservative to Liberal and back again, because of policy differences before saving civilization from barbarism. Having gotten away with it all, he reflected: "Anyone can rat but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat." 

Stefanowski botched his "re-ratting," even as the next governor may need Churchillian ingenuity to save the state from parasitism. 

At least there was a hopeful sign last week from Meriden, a heavily Democratic city that held a referendum on its City Council's proposed budget, which carried a property tax increase of 5 percent. 

The budget was defeated by 5,999 to 260, a margin of 96 to 4 percent, and turnout was fairly representative — almost 6,300 voters. 

If even a Democratic city has had enough of raising taxes, how will ordinary Democrats view a candidate of their party for governor who plans to raise taxes again to appease the government and welfare classes? 


Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn. 
 

Chris Powell: Avoiding teaching at UConn; Kansas vs. Conn.; why the 'buffoon' won

Main quad of the flagship campus, in Storrs, of the University of Connecticut.

At least some Republicans are refraining from the gush that usually insulates the University of Connecticut from scrutiny of its budget and political correctness. UConn President Susan Herbst's plan to retire for a teaching position early next year has prompted not just reflexive praise for her administration but also criticism of the university's financial excesses, particularly at the ever-troubled UConn Health Center in Farmington.

State government long has been reducing its subsidy to the university, causing it to raise tuition, and while UConn's facilities have improved greatly, fair questions abound, starting with administrative staff and salaries. But similar questions should be asked about instructional staff.

UConn prides itself on being a "research" university, the euphemism for a school where professors don't have to get their hands dirty teaching mere undergraduates, work that can be delegated to less expert and untenured instructors.

How much teaching are professors at UConn really doing, and is the state better served by their doing "research" instead? UConn seems never to have answered the question, perhaps because governors and legislators have never asked it.

* * *

EVEN KANSAS MIGHT BE A STEP UP: "Conservative businessman" Bob Stefanowski, as he styles himself in his television commercials, implicitly recognizing that no one ever heard of him, hasn't even qualified for the primary for the Republican nomination for governor. But the other day the Democratic Governors Association criticized him exclusively among the many Republican candidates.

Stefanowski had boasted in a commercial that his state budget plan had been developed in part by the economist Arthur Laffer, who had advised President Reagan. The DGA scoffed: "Conveniently Stefanowski forgot to tell voters about another one of Laffer's more recent credentials: chief architect of the Kansas budget disaster."

Yes, Kansas isn't doing well under Gov. Sam Brownback, a Republican. But Connecticut seems to be doing even worse, especially since Kansas never had the advantages Connecticut had before its government employee unions took over.

If the budget plan of an obscure candidate is the worst thing the DGA can cite about Republicans here, maybe Connecticut really has a chance of political change.

* * *

ISN'T THERE SOMETHING IN BETWEEN?: Venal, crude and stupid as the Trump administration can be, it may be most damaging not for any particular policy but for giving the impression that what it offers are the only alternatives to the failures and corruption of the liberalism that has been the country's political ethos since the 1960s.

Many people sense those failures and that corruption at least vaguely. That's why Hillary Clinton could not carry three ordinarily Democratic states in the 2016 election, losing  many working-class voters and forfeiting the presidency to someone who strikes many people as a megalomanical buffoon. But so many liberals now are on the government payroll that liberals are incapable of considering whether anything that passes as liberal policy might be mistaken.

As the Democratic nominee for governor of California in 1934, the socialist Upton Sinclair titled his platform "End Poverty in California." Big money was against him and he was defeated, causing him to observe that it's hard to get someone to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. Though Sinclair's side is in charge of Connecticut now, it is even harder here.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.