By Chris Powell
As a stalwart of the Democratic left, where much politically correct demagoguery originates, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal may deserve the P.C. demagoguery hurled at him last week by Fox News and his Republican challenger, Leora Levy. But it was demagoguery all the same.
Levy touted a Fox News report asserting that as a leader of his high school class in 1963 Blumenthal organized a community fundraising event called “Slave Day” in which students donated their labor to charity, and that, three years later, when he wrote for the Harvard University student newspaper, Blumenthal used the word “negroes.”
This, Fox and Levy maintain, was racist — as if “slave” isn’t a perfectly good word, as if it signified something worse than the work of students for a good cause, as if some harm had been meant or done, and as if “negro” then wasn’t also a perfectly good word being used even by civil rights leaders — 15 times in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” address in 1963. Even now, while “negro” has lost favor to “Black,” it still means the same thing.
Whatever Blumenthal’s faults, racism is not among them. And even if anything racist could be found in his conduct as a student more than 50 years ago, it is already political precedent that possible misconduct as a juvenile is relevant only for Republican nominees to the Supreme Court.
The attack on Blumenthal by Fox News and Levy couldn’t have been dumber. But maybe that’s what happens when complaints of racism are made so recklessly and opportunistically by the political left and easily intimidate so many.
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Television commercials for Governor Lamont’s re-election campaign contend that Connecticut is thriving under his administration and even is gaining much middle-class housing.
But the official data shows that the state’s economy is weak relative to the rest of the country, and opinion polls show that people don’t feel so prosperous as they worry about inflation soaring and the prices of necessities rising or remaining much higher than they were a year ago.
As for housing, Connecticut’s shortage is widely conceded and is most complained about by the governor’s own supporters.
Indeed, if the economy is doing so well, why is government so busy creating more programs to subsidize people who are struggling? Those subsidies don’t suggest prosperity but impoverishment, with people less able to support themselves and more dependent on government.
Much more than the new and scattershot subsidy programs, the country needs to strengthen the program that provides the basic social safety net for everyone, and does so as a matter of right rather than political patronage: Social Security. U.S. Rep. John B. Larson, D-1st District, long has been pressing legislation to do just that, to increase benefits and finance them by making the Social Security tax more progressive with a 2% tax on incomes above $400,000.
Unfortunately, despite their majority in Congress and control of the White House, the Democrats have failed to enact Larson’s bill, and Republicans in Congress have shown no interest in strengthening Social Security.
The loss of Larson’s bill may be the worst consequence of the likely Republican majority in the next Congress.
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SO CUT YOUR OWN PAY: Projecting annual deficits of more than $100 million, the State Colleges and Universities system is raising tuition by 3% at the four regional universities, Central, Eastern, Southern, and Western.
The system’s president, Terrence Cheng, insists that there’s no other way. “Contractual obligations are real,” he says. “We’re not going to cut our way out of this.”
That is, no state agency dares to economize with payroll. No, payroll is inviolable, and presumably this principle starts with Cheng himself, whose annual salary is more than $350,000. The three other college system executives whose questionable conduct recently cost the system $750,000 in a lawsuit charging sex discrimination are paid between $228,000 and $256,000 annually.
So yes, let the students pay more, even as the college system’s enrollment keeps declining because higher education costs more than it’s worth.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.
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Chris Powell column 