By CHRIS POWELL
Campaigns for next year’s elections in Connecticut for governor and Congress have begun already, 16 months ahead of Election Day. That gives them plenty of time to be meaningful.
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Because four incumbents on the Democratic side may face primary challenges — Governor Lamont and U.S. Reps. John B. Larson, Joe Courtney, and Rosa DeLauro — those campaigns could have plenty of meaning, though the challengers to Larson, Courtney, and DeLauro are unknown.
Distressed that Governor Lamont doesn’t go along with the far-left elements of the Democratic Party enough — just most of the time — Hamden state Rep. Josh Elliott this week formally announced his candidacy to replace the governor as the party’s nominee. Unlike the other challengers who have recently declared, Elliott has plenty of issues and admits that he hopes mainly to push the Democrats even more to the left but not to do anything that would impair Lamont’s chances of re-election if the governor is renominated.
Indeed, Elliott’s challenge may help Lamont in the general election campaign by making the governor seem more moderate than he really is.
Elliott objects emphatically to the governor’s recent vetoes of a wide-ranging housing bill that would have restricted suburban zoning and extended rent control throughout the state, and a bill qualifying strikers for unemployment compensation.
Elliott wants state government to spend a lot more money on social programs and pay for it by raising taxes on the wealthy.
Lamont, Elliott complains, makes it “very difficult for the legislature to get big ideas through under the ruse of the necessity of austerity, when we have billions of dollars of additional revenue coming in every year that, ultimately, only bring down the date of payment on pensions by a couple of years.”
Of course it’s all how one looks at it. “Only a couple of years” of payments to the state employee pension funds mean billions of dollars, which even a few liberals still think is a lot of money. Elliott’s observation might prompt some people to wonder why defined-benefit state employee pensions continue to have such priority in public finance and why they shouldn’t be phased out.
But like all liberals, if Elliott is forced to choose between the genuinely needy and unionized government employees, his party’s political army, he will choose the unions every time.
Elliott sees Lamont standing in the way of a “fair” tax system. What is “fair”? Higher taxes, of course, preferably on a small minority, since social programs in Connecticut are not yet successful enough to convince most people that their own taxes should go up to pay for them.
Elliott says: “We’re cementing a class structure in Connecticut, as opposed to helping people get into the middle class.” Yes, poverty in Connecticut has been worsening, in large part because of the shortage of housing.
But Elliott has yet to explain how people are helped to reach the middle class by the state’s main policy of public education, social promotion, which is graduating illiterates and near-illiterates from high school, or by welfare policy, which subsidizes childbearing outside marriage, deprives many children of fathers, and pushes them toward generational poverty. Like other liberals, including the governor, Elliott doesn’t notice those problems.
Even so, many Democrats are now so outraged at the prospect of any financial restraint in government that Elliott just might reflect the views of a majority of active party members, the ones who will vote in primaries. Republicans may hope so.
On the Republican side for governor, New Britain Mayor Erin Stewart, Greenwich state Sen. Ryan Fazio, and Westport First Selectwoman Jen Tooker are the likely contenders so far.
Stewart offers remarkable political success in a Democratic city but has yet to say much about state issues and offers only a promise of civility, which is just an evasion of issues. Tooker is little known. Fazio has made a good impression in his short time in the legislature and seems to be the one most likely to say something that matters.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 