By CHRIS POWELL
In theory Erin Stewart was a great idea for the Republican nomination for governor: not just a woman but a Republican who was elected six times consecutively as mayor of a heavily Democratic city, New Britain. She must have had something going for her.
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But in practice as a candidate for governor Stewart has been giddy, superficial, reckless, vulgar, and astonishingly inept politically even as challenging a Democratic incumbent and Connecticut’s entrenched Democratic machine requires great political skill just to have a chance.
In recent weeks Stewart has been a disaster.
First she gave an interview in which she claimed to have been offered bribes by many New Britain residents seeking favors from her office, bribes that she didn’t accept but never reported. Stewart seems to have thought she was touting her integrity but she actually impugned herself.
Then there were allegations that the Stewart administration’s tax collector had mishandled funds and backdated taxpayer checks to let delinquents escape late fees.
Then the Connecticut Mirror disclosed that as Stewart was preparing to leave office she applied to city government for a form of annual pension that didn’t exist, a pension she imagined to be worth nearly $40,000 a year. Challenged about this, her explanation was simply: “Why wouldn’t I?”
And a few days ago the Hartford Courant and WTHN-TV8 in New Haven disclosed that Stewart had used her city government credit card for thousands of dollars of purchases for personal items delivered to her home but misclassified as office expenses, as well as for an expensive membership at the Hartford Club and a $500 birthday dinner. She denied nothing, instead claiming that the purchases were in the city’s interest and people were just out to get her.
Even Governor Lamont couldn’t resist noting the irony that, after Republicans highlighted the expense account abuse for which the chancellor of the Connecticut State Colleges and University system, Terrence Cheng, was removed and given a year of paid leave, Republicans seemed about to nominate their own expense account cheater for governor.
While the governor himself has not been implicated, corruption, malfeasance, and indifference to failure have been frequent in his administration. Mastery of the many specific examples of this might be the strongest attribute for a challenger to the governor’s re-election. Can Connecticut’s Republicans really think that Stewart could exploit such examples now without being made ridiculous by her own self-dealing and unaccountability?
Indeed, Stewart’s exploitation of her expense account probably would resonate more with the public than state government’s longstanding failures with education, child protection, housing, and urban living standards. Those failures are simply taken for granted, the natural order of things. But people do understand when elected officials abuse their office to enrich themselves.
At their state nominating convention this weekend maybe some Republican delegates will figure that the party’s chances in the state election in November are so poor, with the Democrats so entrenched in the state and President Trump’s national Republican administration so capricious and corrupt, it won’t matter if, in nominating Stewart, Connecticut Republicans are seen to condone capriciousness and corruption at the top of their state ticket as well.
Republicans who think that way will be wrong. Win or lose, every election is an opportunity to restore faith in democracy, or diminish it.
ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION’S COST: Enrollment in Bridgeport’s schools has fallen by 700 students over the last year, from 20,000 to 19,300, and much of the decline is attributed to illegal immigrants leaving the city or at least removing their children from school in fear of the Trump administration’s enforcement of immigration law.
Whether this is good or bad, Bridgeport spends an average of more than $18,000 per student per year, so the decline in its student population could save nearly $13 million per year, if the money wasn’t used just to increase spending elsewhere.
In any case this development invites review of how much the illegal immigration facilitated by state government is costing Connecticut, and how it is never directly appropriated for.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 