By Chris Powell
With a television commercial for his re-election campaign Governor Lamont has evoked the sardonic old principle of advertising: Take your weakest aspect and promote it until the cows come home, pre-empting the competition’s criticism on the point.
The commercial is about the Lamont administration’s response to the two-year virus epidemic, a response that, as indicated by the performance of governors like New York’s Andrew Cuomo, could have been worse. But it could have been better too. A recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research ranked Connecticut among the 10 states with the [ITALICS] worst [END ITALICS] responses to the epidemic, as determined by deaths, unemployment, and school time lost. (New York joined Connecticut in the bottom 10.)
Lamont’s commercial tells a story that is not quite the one most Connecticut residents may remember.
A doctor speaking of the Lamont administration’s work says: “There wasn’t a moment to lose. They got us what we needed.”
Yet Connecticut nursing home workers complained frantically and long about their lack of masks and gowns, with some even dressing themselves in plastic trash bags for a while. Last December the governor touted the imminent arrival of a half million virus test kits that never showed up.
In his commercial the governor says: “We developed the most effective vaccination rollout in the country — got our schools open and kept them open.”
While Connecticut’s vaccination program did go well, schooling during the epidemic was as much a disaster here as it was anywhere else as government kept schools closed for long periods, capitulating to teacher union demands for perfect safety even as few schoolchildren ever suffered from or transmitted the virus.
The “remote learning” offered as a substitute for in-person schooling was an empty pretense, especially for neglected children in poor households. School closings and “remote learning” have cost tens of thousands of Connecticut children a year or more of their education — education that, amid social promotion, they will never recover.
The governor continues: “When other places remained closed, we made sure our small businesses could safely reopen.”
But while state government itself remained open only technically, its employees nominally working at home at full pay even as services to the public were sharply curtailed or suspended, many businesses, especially retailers and restaurants, failed or suffered devastating losses amid government closing orders. When they were told they could “safely reopen,” the damage had been done.
The governor adds: “Here in Connecticut we brought all parties together. That’s how we turned a massive budget deficit into three years of surpluses.”
But the main causes of those surpluses are the billions of dollars in emergency federal aid and the tax revenue from the capital gains that have been bestowed on the rich by the inflation generated by the federal government, inflation that crushes working people.
The governor concludes: “Our state stayed strong, and it’s getting stronger.”
But Connecticut still ranks near the bottom in most national measures of economic growth and may be suffering the worst housing shortage and income inequality in the country, even if most state residents don’t mind as long as their own real estate values keep rising.
Of course no official seeking re-election is likely to broadcast a commercial admitting mistakes in office. The last one to do so may have been New York Mayor John V. Lindsay in 1969. While the commercial in which Lindsay admitted two big mistakes was said to have turned the election in his favor, he was also greatly helped by the buffoonery of his leading opponent.
Even so, since the epidemic was a new phenomenon for nearly everyone in the country, anyone in authority might be forgiven if he could acknowledge making mistakes and learning from them. The epidemic’s big lesson is that lockdowns don’t work — that, confining people, they help spread sickness even as they devastate the economy and education and cause mental illness and crime, making the supposed cure worse than the disease.
Unlike Lindsay, Lamont isn’t running against a buffoon this year. Admitting a mistake or two instead of concocting a video fairy tale might have been more help.
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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.
Chris Powell column 