By Chris Powell
Especially for politics, “never let them see you sweat” is usually a good rule, but last week Governor Lamont’s campaign for re-election broke it spectacularly.
The Lamont campaign responded hysterically to the most pointed video commercial yet broadcast by the Republican nominee for governor, Bob Stefanowski. The commercial noted the irony of the governor’s appeal to businesses in abortion-banning states to relocate to Connecticut, an appeal made even though the governor’s wife, an investment banker, lately has been developing businesses in Tennessee, a state that had a “trigger law” ready to outlaw abortion upon the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.
The governor’s touting abortion rights as economic development wasn’t serious. It was aimed less at out-of-state businesses than at Connecticut’s own voters in the belief that most of them support all abortion all the time as the governor and all other leading Democrats in the state do. The Stefanowski commercial was so effective not because it took any position on abortion — the Republican candidate supports Connecticut’s longstanding liberal law, allowing abortion before fetal viability and limiting it afterward — but because it exposed the governor’s insincerity. Doing business in anti-abortion states turns out not to be so bad when the governor’s wife does it.
Stefanowski’s rebuke of the governor was fair enough and the Lamont campaign should have just let it pass. Instead the campaign issued a statement calling the commercial “false” without explaining how. Instead the statement quickly tried to change the subject, accusing the Republican of being “extremist,” “anti-choice,” and a “failed businessman” who “bragged about firing people.” This hysteria called more attention to Stefanowski’s commercial without rebutting it and showed just how stung the governor was.
The Lamont campaign may respond with commercials attacking Stefanowski’s background, but they may seem a bit dated, as Connecticut heard it all four years ago during the first contest of the two candidates.
Maybe the governor’s hysteria will inspire Stefanowski to attempt fewer commercials depicting himself as a nice guy (the governor is one too) and more addressing issues about the conduct of the Lamont administration — like the grotesque cost overruns and corruption in the New London State Pier project, the contract-steering scandal in the state budget office, the never-ending financial bungling and exploitation at the University of Connecticut, and the governor’s recent insistence on raising diesel fuel taxes by 23%.
If he wanted to be really daring, Stefanowski might advertise the governor’s support of post-viability abortion and opposition to parental notification of abortions for minors. The Democratic positions are extremist, strongly contrary to the public’s views, and something Democrats may not want to have to explain any more than Mrs. Lamont’s doing economic development in supposedly benighted Tennessee.
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ANOTHER UCONN MESS: Two weeks ago a Superior Court judge confirmed another scandal at UConn, awarding a former professor more than $700,000 from the university and restoring him to his job upon concluding that he was fired as retaliation for questioning mismanagement and nepotism in the university’s business school.
Additionally the court will award fees to the plaintiff’s lawyer, and since the case has been going through state and federal courts for 11 years, these fees could exceed the actual damages.
In January UConn was ordered to pay $11 million for another improper firing, that of basketball coach Kevin Ollie, to whom the university stupidly had awarded union contract protections on top of his own contract.
Almost as notoriously, UConn’s Board of Trustees hired Thomas C. Katsouleas as president in 2019 only to discover that it couldn’t stand him, causing him to resign two years later and parachute into a tenured professorship at the university with a guaranteed salary of $330,000, an expensive perk of his presidential contract.
In 2019 Katsouleas’ predecessor as president, Susan Herbst, moved into the same professorial sinecure at UConn with an exceedingly light course load and similarly stratospheric salary, starting with a paid year off at her old presidential salary of more than $700,000.
These details might make a pretty good campaign commercial calling for the replacement of all UConn’s trustees.
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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.
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Chris Powell column 