Murphy sees Democrats’ problem but not that he’s part of it

By Chris Powell

Speaking the other day to a friendly liberal audience in Washington at the Center for American Progress, Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy put aside his usual bombast about President Trump and offered some candor.

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“When we talk about Trump’s corruption,” Murphy said of fellow Democrats, “we’re not terribly credible, because the public looks at Democrats and assumes that we’re just as corrupt. And we obviously have had some pretty high-profile problems in our party in the last decade. …

“I think young people believe that the Democratic Party is just as corrupt as the Republican Party is, and so while they’re noticing Trump’s corruption, they don’t see it as a reason to come out on the streets, because the alternative doesn’t look much better.”

Indeed. But Murphy himself is a reason Democrats don’t look much better. 

Last month the senator admitted to Politico that there is “no doubt” that President Biden’s mental faculties declined in office. Unfortunately Murphy, like most Democratic leaders, could not bring himself to acknowledge Biden’s mental decline before last November’s election or the Democratic National Convention last August. Nor could the senator and most other Democratic leaders acknowledge back then the corruption of the Biden family’s influence-peddling business.

Of course it would have been plausible to argue that Biden’s senility and his family’s influence peddling were preferable to Trump’s intemperance, character, and business practices. Elections for major offices usually require ascertaining the lesser of two evils. 

But Murphy did not acknowledge this when it counted. He could acknowledge his president’s flaws only once the public took them for granted. He didn’t dare to level with the public when it might have made a difference. 

Now, in the hope of becoming the leader of the party’s far left, the senator is touring the country trying to rile up Democrats who are already foaming at the mouth, precisely when, to increase its appeal, the party needs reflection, rationality, moderation, and civility, not leftist Trumpism.

From a Connecticut perspective, it’s hard to imagine moderation returning to the Democratic Party. Its majority in the General Assembly has just approved unemployment compensation for strikers. While he is a Democrat, Governor Lamont says he will veto the bill as he did once before. 

Connecticut’s other U.S. senator, Democrat Richard Blumenthal, is riding the same bandwagon to the far left. He has just proposed legislation to prohibit employers from suspending medical insurance for striking employees, as Pratt & Whitney did during the recent strike there by the machinists’ union. 

Blumenthal says it was “cruel and callous” for the company to stop compensating employees who had stopped working. If so, then the world is cruel and callous for not owing people a living. 

Among the state’s Democrats only the governor seems to have noticed that Pratt & Whitney, which was founded in Connecticut a century ago this July, has only half as many employees in the state as it once had, because the company long has been expanding elsewhere — in places where taxes and living costs are lower, government is smaller and less intrusive, and striking is not an entitlement to unemployment compensation and medical insurance financed by the employer being struck.  

But opposition to unemployment compensation for strikers is about the extent of Lamont’s moderation. 

While the illegal immigration controversy is raging in the state and around the country and the people rioting in California to obstruct immigration law enforcement are waving the flags of Mexico, other Latin American countries, and Palestine, not the flag of the country they are rioting in, Lamont still maintains that legal and illegal immigration are the same. 

The governor says he wants all immigrants, legal and illegal, well-intentioned and ill-intentioned, to be welcome in Connecticut — which is to say that the borders should be open again as they were under the Biden administration and that people living here don’t need any loyalty to the country.

Even coming from calm and cordial Ned Lamont, that is national suicide.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

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