By CHRIS POWELL
Connecticut’s Democratic state chairman, Danbury Mayor Roberto Alves, thinks he has discovered the decisive disqualification for the two declared candidates for next year’s Republican nomination for governor — Greenwich state Sen. Ryan Fazio and former New Britain Mayor Erin Stewart — and presumably for any Republican seeking elective office in Connecticut.
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It’s a slight variation of the Democratic election strategy that has been in use for the last nine years: Just keep chanting: “Trump! Trump! Trump!”
Alves’ variation on the theme is to ask Fazio and Stewart, as he did in a recent newspaper essay, whether they would still like President Trump’s endorsement, now that Trump and the Republican majority in Congress are reducing or threatening to reduce federal food and medical insurance subsidies.
Those subsidies raise an important question: Whether their excesses, which include a lot of fraud, some of which has been manifested in Connecticut, can ever be eliminated without harming the deserving poor. One incident of such fraud was publicized again last week when former Bristol Democratic state Rep. Christopher Ziogas pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges involving Medicare and Medicaid, fraud in which Governor Lamont’s former social services commissioner was implicated, soon after which she retired.
State authorities did not prosecute this fraud — federal authorities did. Indeed, it’s a fair question as to whether state government in Connecticut ever will get serious about eliminating excesses in social welfare programs without the pressure of sharply reduced appropriations.
Alves is pitching guilt by association: Trump is a cruel megalomaniac and a Republican, Fazio and Stewart are Republicans who voted for Trump, therefore Fazio and Stewart are cruel megalomaniacs, and so are all others who voted for Trump, even reluctantly, perceiving him as the lesser evil.
All’s fair in love, war, and politics, and of course in the presidential election last year Republicans campaigned against Democrats as Alves is campaigning against Republicans now. Democrats who were supporting their party’s presidential candidate, first President Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris, were accused of endorsing rampant inflation, illegal immigration, and transgenderism. Chanting “Trump! Trump! Trump!” as Democrats did last year failed to address these issues.
As Democratic state chairman, Alves could be especially attached to the Trump-chanting strategy because it might help avoid what should be the main issue in next year’s election in Connecticut — the record of the Lamont administration as the governor seeks a third term, as well as the longer record of the Democratic administration of the state since its last Republican governor, Jodi Rell, left office 14 years ago.
Connecticut has many problems: its long economic decline relative to the rest of the country; its high cost of living, especially with housing prices; its worsening poverty; and its many scandals of mismanagement in state agencies, scandals suggesting that the governor doesn’t pay enough attention. Awful as the president may be, Trump is not responsible for these problems.
It will be good if Fazio and Stewart can articulate these issues and it will be better still if they dare to specify alternative policies, especially toward the housing shortage. While the housing legislation just enacted by the General Assembly’s Democratic majority and the governor is mainly a sympathetic pose and is not likely to get much housing built, the Republican position on the housing shortage is mainly fear of the underclass.
But if Fazio and Stewart want to play Alves’ game about Trump’s endorsement, they could ask Alves whether the governor wants the endorsement of, say, Ziogas; his former deputy budget director, Konstantinos Diamantis, also just convicted on federal corruption charges; his disgraced former chairwoman of the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority, Marissa Gillett, who quit abruptly a few weeks ago when she was caught lying extravagantly; and former university Chancellor Terrence Cheng, who was removed for exploiting his expense account but still given severance pay of nearly $500,000.
Why can’t it just be taken for granted that both major political parties are terribly flawed? Maybe then there would be time to discuss issues.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 