By Chris Powell
Whoever would have thought that after 22 years in the state Senate and another 22 in the U.S. House of Representatives from Connecticut’s 1st District, the most Democratic district in the state, John B. Larson, raised in an East Hartford housing project, devotee of President John F. Kennedy, and holder of a 90% rating from Americans for Democratic Action, might not be liberal enough?
Muad Hrezi, that’s who.
Hrezi, 27, son of Libyan refugees and a former substitute teacher and staffer for U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, is challenging Larson for renomination, suggesting that Larson is serving “greedy special interests” and has been “bought by corporations.”
Hrezi received few votes at the recent Democratic nominating convention in the 1st District but has been trying to petition his way into a primary against Larson in August. He seems to have fallen short of the 3,900 petition signatures he needed from 1st District Democrats, but he hopes to win a court order for a primary anyway. It would be the district’s first primary since the one won by Larson himself in 1998.
Surprisingly, Hrezi’s campaign is reported to have raised about a half-million dollars, and it has been a long time since Larson had competition serious enough to cause him to raise a lot of campaign money.
Could Hrezi duplicate the shocking upset achieved four years ago by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another young unknown with no record in public life, who ran a far-left campaign in a heavily Democratic New York City district and denied renomination to 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley, a member of the House Democratic leadership?
That’s Hrezi’s idea. His platform supports raising taxes on the rich, raising the minimum wage, canceling all student loan debt, making higher education free (to students anyway), the “Green New Deal,” government takeover of medical insurance, slashing military spending, and putting still more money into schools.
Hrezi’s ideological blinders are apparent insofar as his platform takes no notice of inflation, which is by far the greatest burden on the working class he aspires to help.
At least Hrezi condemns the federal government’s subservience to the investment banking industry. Like more serious liberals he proposes reinstating the restrictions on investment banking that disappeared when the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed in 1999.
But is Larson really a tool of greedy special interests and corporations when he is solicitous of the Hartford area’s insurance companies and military contractors and their thousands of employees? Or is he just serving his district?
And how eager should the district be to dispense with Larson’s great seniority in the House and the goodies it often brings home from Washington?
While Larson remains vigorous at 73, a recent opinion poll suggested that many in Connecticut — not quite a majority — are tiring of U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who also remains vigorous at 76 after 37 years in elective office, though Blumenthal’s tenure may seem longer because of his devotion to television news cameras. Could Hrezi make 1st District Democrats as tired of Larson as Ocasio-Cortez made Democrats in the Bronx and Queens tired of Crowley, or motivate the far left as much as AOC did?
Maybe. But Larson is gregarious and well liked, and even if he is losing touch with his district, he remains well known while hardly anyone has heard of Hrezi.
The big question in any challenge to Larson, now or in the future, may be whether Democrats in the 1st District have moved much farther left than Larson and most observers think. Hrezi stresses his endorsements from 18 far-left activists, none of whom commands a substantial constituency, even if the far left makes, if not the most sense, the most noise.
But Democrats in the 1st District are not accustomed to primaries and it has been two decades since Larson was hard-pressed to get people to the polls on his own behalf. The fewer the voters, the more likely that the most ideological among them will constitute a majority in a primary.
At least one trend may be working in Hrezi’s favor: the worsening proletarianizing of Connecticut and the country under regimes of both parties. With the real inflation rate above 20% and government still growing anyway, desperation is approaching fast.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.
-END-
Chris Powell column 