By Chris Powell
Reading the campaign flyers, postcards, and handbills that have been flooding Connecticut’s mailboxes on the eve of a state election, people might think that personalities are the only reasons for voting.
Almost all candidates for the General Assembly profess to care, to support good schools, to want to reduce crime and restrain taxes, and so forth down the list of trivial generalities. Indeed, most of the text in any candidate’s flyer could be exchanged with the text in his rival’s flyer without misleading anyone.
It’s as if there are no policy issues to consider, except, with certain Democrats, abortion, though few if any candidates propose to change the state’s liberal abortion law, which follows the policy articulated by the U.S. Supreme Court’s recently reversed decision in Roe v. Wade. In Connecticut abortion is just a much-needed distraction from inflation, open borders, corruption, failing schools, and transgenderism.
Even the legislative candidates of the minority party, the Republicans, seem unable to find anything meaningful to say and fail to specify any faults of the Democratic state administration. Apart from generating hysteria about abortion, mere name recognition seems to be the only objective of the campaign publicity of the legislative candidates. Issues of policy are left to the candidates for governor, an omission that might seem moronic.
Maybe policy issues are omitted because many candidates, particularly but not exclusively the newcomers, know little about issues. But issues also may be omitted because even the newcomers may know that to discuss issues risks alienating voters as much as it may gain their favor.
Connecticut is full of special interests, and a candidate’s taking a position on a serious issue may evoke indignation from one interest group or another and prompt it to run its own campaign against the candidate.
So in this respect even the newcomers with nothing to say and the candidates who talk only about abortion may be politically savvy after all, figuring that what you don’t say won’t hurt you, though saying nothing leaves voters no wiser about the challenges facing the state.
Even so, practically every day generates what [ITALICS] should [END ITALICS] be an issue for state legislative candidates.
For example, no governor in modern times has bestowed more financial patronage on interest groups and individual voters during a re-election campaign than Governor Lamont has done.
Last week the governor announced $47 million in state grants ranging from $2.2 million to $9.8 million to 10 groups that are supposed to assist small businesses. Some of these groups have little record of performance, and what they achieve with the money other than employ Democrats almost surely will never be audited.
Even most of what state government does directly at greater expense is never audited for results. Two weeks ago it was reported that the state Public Health Department had failed to determine whether COVID-19 test providers that were paid millions of dollars by state government also collected insurance payments for the same tests, payments that should have been refunded to the state. Nothing is likely to come of this either.
Also two weeks ago state government mailed 248,000 checks totaling $42 million and averaging $170 as a bonus in the state’s earned income tax credit for low-income households. When a Republican governor, John G. Rowland, mailed special tax rebate checks to voters as he sought re-election in 1998, Democrats denounced the gimmick as bribery. Today the bribes are a Democratic idea.
And the state Public Utilities Regulatory Authority has just ordered Connecticut’s two largest electric companies to give low-income households discounts ranging from 10 to 50% on their electric bills. State government won’t be reimbursing the utilities for the money. No, the discounts will be financed by higher rates for everyone else. Everyone else will blame the utilities, not state government, but the utilities won’t complain, lest the regulators hit them again in revenge.
This discount scheme is essentially a sneaky state tax increase to pay for welfare benefits, a tax increase on which state legislators did not have to vote. This too might be a good campaign issue for any legislative candidates who aspire to relevance.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.
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Chris Powell column 