Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

His handling of the virus epidemic has doubled Governor Lamont’s public approval rating, giving him more fans than detractors. But judging from recent developments that are being overshadowed by the epidemic, the governor could be forgiven if he hopes the epidemic continues through the 2022 election and beyond.

For last week it was reported that Connecticut ranks last in the country for personal income growth this year, ranked last in the country in employment growth last year, and has the country’s second worst ratio of state government debt to personal income.

Those reports essentially signify economic depression and insolvency, and eventually no amount of face-masking and personal protective equipment will be able to keep concealing it. Indeed, the growing evidence that the state and the country will just have to tough it out with the epidemic — evidence that lockdowns can’t beat it but medicine increasingly can — may cause people to lose faith in current epidemic policy as it keeps destroying education, businesses, other aspects of health, and the very joy of life.

If, as seems likely, Democrat Joe Biden is inaugurated as president in January, the governor may reasonably hope for some sort of financial rescue from the federal government. But if, as also seems likely, the narrow Republican majority in the Senate holds, any rescue may be limited.

Regardless, no federal bailout will change Connecticut’s prevailing economic conditions — the failure of the most expensive state government policies, particularly education and welfare, to achieve their nominal objectives and state government’s general failure to nurture the private sector, which pays for government.

Indeed, as CTNewsJunkie noted last week, in January all wage earners in the state will suffer a half-percent income tax withholding increase to finance a new state fund meant to cover paid leave for medical and family purposes.

Politically correct as this sounds, it is crazy policy. Many people will pay a tax for a benefit they will not use, and everyone will pay a tax for a benefit people easily could arrange for themselves simply by saving the money they will pay in the new tax. State government will give people nothing here. It will only be taking again.

---

THE JUNETEENTH MISTAKE: Last week’s best example of the posturing cynicism of government came from Manchester, whose Board of Directors voted to create another paid holiday for municipal employees — June 19th, or Juneteenth, which marks that day in 1865, which is widely misconstrued as the day slavery ended in the United States after the Civil War.

Actually Juneteenth marks only the end of slavery in Texas upon the arrival of Union forces there and their enforcement of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, whose effective date was Jan. 1, 1863. Since slaves were property being used to support rebellion, Union forces would seize and free them as military necessity.

But the proclamation applied only to states in rebellion. Slavery remained legal after Juneteenth in Delaware and Kentucky, slave states that had stayed in the Union and so were not subject to the proclamation. Slavery in the United States did not really end until six months after Juneteenth, on Dec. 18, 1865, when ratification of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution was proclaimed. Indeed, if slavery had ended on Juneteenth, the 13th Amendment would not have been necessary.

Manchester’s gesture will not just teach people wrong about history but also cost the town’s taxpayers about $175,000 each year as it gives town employees another paid holiday on top of the 13 they already have, quite apart from generous vacation and sick time. If, despite its mistaken premise, Juneteenth still had to be formally celebrated in Manchester, the Board of Directors could have substituted it for another holiday without incurring any cost. That the board did not do this reveals the new holiday’s true purpose.

The board got to strike another empty pose to satisfy the interest group clamoring for the holiday and to give town employees a raise, and townspeople got to pay more for less service.

Apparently the only other municipality in Connecticut that has made Juneteeth a paid holiday is New Haven, the chronically insolvent, chaotic, and dysfunctional capital of political correctness. That’s some company for Manchester to aspire to.

---

Chris Powell written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

Many teachers around the country are cheering the forthcoming change in national administration  because Betsy DeVos will be replaced as secretary of the U.S. Education Department. DeVos, an heiress and philanthropist, has been a fan of charter schools and a foe of political correctness. While not really expert in pedagogy, at least she has not been the usual tool of teacher unions.

But President-elect Joe Biden is encouraging teachers to expect Nirvana. Addressing them the other day, Biden noted that his wife, Jill, is a community college teacher, and so “you’re going to have one of your own in the White House.” Presumably that means teachers will have “one of their own” at the Education Department as well.

Among those mentioned is U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes, the former Waterbury teacher and 2016 national teacher of the year, a Democrat who was just elected to her second term from Connecticut’s 5th Congressional District.

Apart from her classroom work Hayes has no managerial experience and her first term in Congress was unremarkable. Her recent campaign’s television commercials celebrated her merely for listening to her constituents. While she won comfortably enough in a competitive district in a Democratic year, her departure for the Cabinet would prompt a special election that the Democrats might lose even as they already are distressed by the unexpected shrinkage of their majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.

But then the U.S. Education Department does little to improve education. Mainly it distributes federal money to state and municipal governments, which do the actual educating. No matter who becomes education secretary, money will still get distributed and education won’t improve much if at all.

Quite apart from the personalities, the big issue about the appointment of an education secretary is the big issue with other federal department heads. Why should the public cheer the appointment of an education secretary who is part of the interest group he would be regulating, any more than the public should cheer another treasury secretary coming from a Wall Street investment bank, another labor secretary coming from a labor union, another defense secretary coming from the military or a military contractor, another agriculture secretary coming from agribusiness, and so forth?

This kind of thing is called “regulatory capture” and it operates under both parties, though some special interests do better under one party than the other, as the cheering from the teacher unions indicates.

* * *

INCOHERENT SCHOOLING: The virus epidemic has invited a comprehensive reconsideration of education but no one in authority has noticed.

Every day brings a change of plan and schedule in Connecticut schools. One day they’re open and the next day they are abruptly converted to “remote learning” for a few days, a week or two, or a whole semester because somebody came down with the flu.

Amid all this many students have simply disappeared. Additionally, since education includes not just book learning but the socialization of children, their learning how to behave with others, the education of all children is being badly compromised.

Governor Lamont wants to leave school scheduling to schools themselves. This lets him avoid responsibility for any school’s policy. But local option isn’t producing much education.

The hard choice everyone is trying to avoid is between keeping schools open as normal, taking the risk of more virus infections because children are less susceptible to serious cases, or converting entirely to internet schooling and thereby forfeiting education for the missing students and socialization for everyone else.

If social contact can be forfeited, the expense of education can be drastically reduced. The curriculum for each grade can be standardized, recorded, and placed on the internet, with students connecting from home at any time, not just during regular school hours. Tests to evaluate their learning can be standardized too and administered and graded by computer. A corps of teachers can operate a help desk via internet, telephone, or email.

Much would be lost but then much already had been lost even before the epidemic, since social promotion was already the state’s main education policy. Maybe the results of completely remote schooling would not be so different from those of social promotion.

---

Chris Powell has been writing about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

Putting personal pique above the national interest again, President Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper the other day, apparently because of Esper’s opposition to sending federal troops uninvited to put down rioting in Democratic cities during the presidential campaign.

Apparently it doesn’t matter to the president that the next two months will be especially sensitive for national security because of the change in administrations and the temptation for the country’s adversaries to probe for weaknesses. For the president taking out his frustrations comes first.

Despite what they consider the Trump administration’s accomplishments — like securing a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, weakening Iran, and inducing more Middle Eastern nations to recognize Israel — few Republican members of Congress are likely to miss the president much. His instability, contradictions, and reversals are great drama but lousy government. Government needs stability, especially when changing course.

Joe Biden’s administration will bring its own problems but they are more likely to be matters of policy than personality. At least Biden seems to know how to behave in public, even if Trump lately has brought out the worst in his rival. Biden’s remark this week about the ability of the U.S. government to evict trespassers at the White House was as gratuitous as Trump’s firing of Esper. The new president needs to be unifying, not triumphalist. Repaying Trump in kind won’t help.

* * *

Connecticut’s Republicans shouldn’t miss Trump either, insofar as he just brought their ticket to another low with sound defeats for all their congressional candidates and serious losses for their minority in the General Assembly.

With J.R. Romano planning to leave as Republican state chairman at the end of his term in June and the party’s legislative leaders having just declined to seek re-election, the party may be weaker in Connecticut than it has ever been. The party’s candidate for governor two years ago, Bob Stefanowski, seems to be the only Republican still frequently heard across the state, on account of radio interviews and personal appearances that imply interest in running again. At least Stefanowski now takes more positions on issues than most of the Republicans who ran this year did.

Two months ago Stefanowski and House Republican leader Themis Klarides called for Romano to resign for failing to disclose an allegation of domestic violence against a candidate for the party’s nomination for Congress in the 2nd District. This business was embarrassing but Romano rode it out and it went away.

After five years as state chairman Romano may be faulted more for the failure of the Republicans to develop any strategy for the recent legislative election, which plainly was going to be difficult for Republicans because of the president’s unpopularity at the top of the ticket. Romano lately seemed to spend most of his time cheerleading for Trump. Maybe someone had to do it but it was always going to be a vain exercise when the party’s position in the legislature needed saving.

Of course no party chairman can impose a platform on his party’s legislative candidates, and Connecticut Republicans have shown no interest in even having a platform. In the recent election the most that could be construed about their principles came from campaign postcards: They like police officers and dislike taxes. That wasn’t much of a guide to state government.

So it wouldn’t be quite fair to claim that Connecticut Republicans need a new chairman. More than that, they need a raison d’etre, and the courage to explain it. The atmosphere for such an undertaking may improve once Trump leaves office.

* * *

As for Connecticut’s Democrats, there is speculation that their larger majorities in the General Assembly will push Governor Lamont leftward.

But the state keeps losing jobs in big bunches — most recently at Pratt & Whitney in East Hartford, ESPN in Bristol, and Genpac in Stamford — and its economy was terribly sick long before the virus epidemic. Reports this week said Connecticut is last in the nation in both job and income growth.

With his own re-election drawing closer, the governor is not enthusiastic about raising taxes and imposing highway tolls. And will the Democrats just elected to their first term in the legislature want to run for a second term on having raised taxes and imposed tolls?

—–

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By CHRIS POWELL

After the supposedly slow response by Eversource Energy and United Illuminating to the widespread electricity outages in Connecticut caused by the tropical storm in August, there were calls for state government to take over the electricity distribution business. Since that business is already a regulated monopoly, that’s a perfectly reasonable idea in principle.

But for several reasons it will never happen, and one was illustrated the other day by an exchange between Eversource and the state Public Utility Regulatory Authority (PURA).

The company wanted the agency to formally extend the moratorium on electricity shutoffs for unpaid bills that was imposed in March when Governor Lamont ordered businesses to close because of the virus epidemic. The agency saw no need to extend the moratorium because the usual moratorium on shutoffs during the winter is taking effect anyway. Eversource seemed to want the extension mainly to emphasize state government’s responsibility for payment failures and the company’s revenue losses.

But ultimately the electricity bills that are unpaid during shutoff moratoriums are paid through higher charges to all other electric customers. Neither state government nor the federal government reimburses electric utilities for continuing to provide service to customers who default on their bills, even when those defaults occur because government orders put people out of work. The state and federal governments offer some money to poor people who can’t pay their electric bills, but the electric companies are on their own with bad debts. The companies offer payment plans to delinquent customers, but according to Eversource’s recent application to PURA, half of those plans fail.

So that’s one reason state government will never take over the electricity distribution business. For then state government would have to take full responsibility for the public welfare cost of shutoff moratoriums, as well as responsibility for the cost of delivering electricity in general. Then elected officials would lose the ability to hide in electric bills the expense of public policy. They also would lose the ability to scapegoat the electric companies politically. Everything annoying about electric service, including interruption by tropical storms, would become state government’s responsibility even more than it already is through regulation.

The recent electric utility legislation passed by the General Assembly and signed by Governor Lamont was called the “take back our grid” bill. Of course it didn’t take back “our” grid at all, for the grid was built by the electric companies, and purchasing it would cost state government billions of dollars it doesn’t have. The legislation mainly kept the electric companies functioning not just as distributors of electricity but also as tax collectors.

* * *

IGNORE ‘ZOOMBOMBINGS’: The recent political campaigns in Connecticut were full of nasty interruptions of campaign events held on the internet. These attacks, often called “Zoombombings” after the internet conference service, were eagerly publicized, appalling people and gaining sympathy for the candidates who were targeted.

But the perpetrators were not caught and probably never can be, and the eagerness with which the attacks were publicized raises suspicion about them. For “false flag” incidents are increasingly common across the political spectrum, and what candidate wouldn’t want to be seen as the victim of something so vile and yet so trivial?

News organizations might do better to ignore these incidents, since that might eliminate them.

* * *

POLICE POLITICS: While their endorsements by police unions throughout Connecticut seem to have done little for Republican candidates for the General Assembly, election results from the state and around the country also seem to have provided little support for the recent clamor from the far left to “defund the police.” Indeed, in the days just before the election, businesses in cities afflicted by such people boarded up their windows in fear of political violence.

Officials who felt obliged to play footsie with the “defund the police” crowd, like Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin, may hope that it is forgotten soon. To placate the crowd the mayor arranged a million-dollar cut in the city’s police budget, only to ask Governor Lamont a few weeks later for help from the state police in confronting a surge of violence in the ever-troubled city.

—–

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

After warning that the U.S. Postal Service might sabotage the vast increase in voting by mail for last week’s national election, leading Democrats in Connecticut are renewing their calls for allowing everyone to vote by mail just for personal convenience, without having to claim illness, infirmity, travel, or religious reasons. A state constitutional amendment would be required for the change.

Secretary of the State Denise Merrill says mass voting by mail worked well in Connecticut and should be made permanent. U.S. Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy agree.

Maybe mass voting by mail worked well enough in Connecticut for an election in which no major races were close, but there were many mistakes in preparing the extra absentee ballots. While these mistakes were corrected in time, the more handling of ballots — the more intermediaries between voters and the casting of their votes — the more mistakes there will be.

The more opportunity for fraud too. There is a reason elections long have been based on the personal appearance of voters at the polls — election integrity. Identities are easily confirmed, ballots never leave the polling place, and the whole process is transparent.

Not so with voting by mail. As seen in states whose presidential tallies are painfully close, mailed ballots raise issues of timeliness. They require much more work to tabulate. Delaying tabulation, they raise suspicion of tampering and indeed invite tampering and forgery when it is seen how many more votes might change the outcome.

President Trump offered no evidence when he went on national television last Thursday night to accuse the tabulation in Pennsylvania and Georgia of fraud and thereby impugn the whole election. But forgery with late votes does happen. This was notoriously the mechanism by which Lyndon B. Johnson won the Democratic nomination for U.S. senator from Texas in 1948, giving him a path to the presidency.

And while Trump offered no evidence of fraud Thursday night, across the country there were many complaints about what were at least anomalies in vote counting. Some were innocent and quickly corrected. Most have not yet been investigated and so cannot be judged at a distance, but all serious complaints should and likely will be investigated in the usual procedures.

The closer the contest, the more incentive for fraud, and it would be miraculous if there was no fraud anywhere in this election. An election in which margins of victory are comfortable to overwhelming, as they were in Connecticut, and where no one bothers to look for fraud does not vindicate massive voting by mail.

Indeed, election fraud gets easier in heavily populated jurisdictions dominated by one political party, where fraud is harder to detect. Connecticut has several cities that sometimes can’t report their votes within 24 hours and that often have suffered political corruption. They always report huge Democratic pluralities.

The virus epidemic may have been good enough reason for the expansion of mail voting this year, but quite apart from election integrity, there remains a strong case for in-person voting: the demonstration of civic duty and community. The phrase “mail it in” long has conveyed indifference to an obligation, even as voting is cause to celebrate and give thanks for democracy and all those who make it work.

---

MORE ON BIG MONEY: Elaboration is needed about Democratic U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro’s denunciation of big money in politics the other day, after she had to wage her first vigorous campaign in 30 years against a self-funding Republican multimillionaire.

While she resented her opponent’s big money, DeLauro isn’t bothered by the tens of millions of dollars donated to the campaign of her party’s presidential candidate, Joe Biden, by Wall Street interests, which usually favor the Republican candidate but didn’t this year. Nor does DeLauro resent the $100 million spent in support of Biden in Florida, Ohio, and Texas by billionaire Michael Bloomberg.

Sometimes an oppressive establishment can be effectively challenged only with the help of rich angels, as when the eccentric philanthropist Stewart R. Mott financed Eugene McCarthy’s insurgent anti-war presidential campaign in 1968.

DeLauro may not grasp these ironies because, after 30 years in Congress, she establishment now.

---

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

Everybody in Connecticut is tired of the virus epidemic, and no one is more entitled to be tired of it than Governor Lamont. It has devastated the finances of state government, commandeered its management, crippled education at all levels, and worsened many social problems.

While people admire the governor’s calm and conscientious manner, they may lose patience as his plan for returning Connecticut to normal starts reversing. Of course the epidemic is not the governor’s fault and he deserves sympathy, but his reversal amid fears that the epidemic is surging again should prompt reconsideration of the measures being used to set policy.

Are the governor’s premises correct?

The primary measure of the epidemic, in Connecticut and other states, is the “positivity rate,” the percentage of daily virus tests reported as positive. One day a week ago the rate exceeded 6 percent, setting off hysteria among news organizations, before falling the next day to a more typical 3 percent. But these figures don’t mean that 6 or 3 percent of the state’s population is infected. These figures mean only that infection has reached those levels among people who chose to be tested in the previous several days.

Infection levels among the entire population of the state may be lower or higher than the daily “positivity rate.” Paradoxically, a higher rate might be much better. That’s because most people who contract the virus suffer no symptoms or only mild symptoms and do not require special treatment even as they gain antibodies conferring some immunity. Indeed, if the governor’s data is analyzed in another way, so as to calculate what might be called the serious case rate, the positivity rate loses relevance, the virus looks less dangerous, and the epidemic looks less serious.

For the eight days from October 26 through November 2, the governor reported 7,806 new virus cases, 50 new “virus-associated” deaths, and 107 new hospitalizations. If deaths and new hospitalizations are totaled and categorized as serious cases, the serious case rate for those eight days was only 2 percent of all new cases, substantially below the positivity rate for those days — 3.4 percent — and way below the one-day positivity rate that caused alarm.

The mortality rate for the eight days was only six-tenths of 1 percent of all new cases — and that is measured only against known new cases. If the mortality rate could be calculated from all new cases, including the week’s unreported cases — asymptomatic people — it likely would be much smaller.

After all, it seems that 7,649 of the 7,806 people who figured in the virus reports for those eight days — 98 percent of them — were simply sent home to recover, perhaps with some over-the-counter or prescription medicine.

At the governor’s October 26 briefing Dr. John Murphy, chief executive of the Nuvance Health hospital network, tamped down the fright. Murphy noted that treatments for the virus have gotten much more effective since the epidemic began in March — that while there is as yet no cure, there are medicines that slow the virus and aid recovery, and that as younger people with fewer underlying health problems have become infected, the virus fatality rate and the average length of hospitalization have fallen by half.

The great concern at the start of the epidemic — hospital capacity — remains valid, but it deserves reconsideration too. Back then the Connecticut National Guard set up field hospitals with nearly 1,700 beds, including more than 600 at the Connecticut Convention Center in Hartford. They weren’t used before they were taken down, and with fewer than 400 virus patients hospitalized in the state this week, presumably the state, if pressed, could handle at least a quadrupling of patients.

None of this argues for carelessness, like that of college students partying in close quarters without masks, nor for reopening bars, where the virus may spread most easily. But it does argue for continuing the gradual reopening that was underway before a bad positivity rate scared everybody.

Of course news organizations delight in scaring people with the positivity rate, but they are enabled in this by the governor’s stressing it instead of the serious case rate.

If the infirm elderly and the chronically ill are better protected, fear may subside and relatively normal life may be possible again.

---

Chris Powell has been writing about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

When he was inaugurated as president of the University of Connecticut a year ago, Thomas C. Katsouleas made a grand gesture. He said that henceforth the university would waive tuition for new students from families with annual incomes below $50,000. Katsouleas called it the “Connecticut Commitment.”

Last week that “commitment” turned to dust. Katsouleas regretfully announced that the university is running too big a deficit, around $70 million, and can’t find the $5 million needed to extend the program beyond the current class, so it is being suspended.

If Katsouleas had done a little research before accepting his job, he might have avoided embarrassing himself and the university with that “commitment.” For at UConn, as with most of state government, as a matter of law and contract it is almost impossible to reduce or even reallocate the budget in any significant way. Most costs at UConn are personnel and by contract all state employees are protected against layoff for another year and recently began getting raises estimated to cost $350 million annually.

That is the only “Connecticut Commitment.”

Still, if students from poor families mattered enough, Katsouleas might tap the UConn Foundation for the scholarship money, since the foundation is sitting on more than $500 million. After all, a few years ago the foundation found $251,000 to pay Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for an insipid public conversation on campus with Katsouleas’ predecessor as UConn president, Susan Herbst.

Now Herbst herself is enjoying a year’s paid vacation costing UConn more than $700,000 before she transitions to a cozy professorship.

Money goes fast at the university.

But maybe Connecticut should be grateful to Katsouleas for the embarrassment of the “Connecticut Commitment.” For it highlights the phoniness of what passes for political liberalism here. That is, it’s not really liberal at all. It’s just cover for government’s always taking care of itself first.

---

WORKFORCE PIPE DREAM: State government often likes to think big, which would be fine if it could do well with the basic stuff. Otherwise thinking big is a waste of time — like the elaborate report issued last week by Governor Lamont’s Workforce Council.

The council describes its objective as creating “a workforce that is inclusive, modern, and high-performing.” But how about a workforce that can even read, write, and do basic math?

While most Connecticut students never master high school English and math but are graduated anyway, and most students entering the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system require remedial high school courses, the report’s only relevance to basic education is its recommendation to increase computer science courses.

Connecticut is not going to get many of its young people into the highly skilled and highly paid technical jobs to which the Workforce Council’s report aspires if they lack basic education as badly as most do now. But addressing that problem would require restoring standards in school, which would be terrifying politically. Just finding the parents of poorly performing students is often impossible.

Until students get a basic education, the council’s report will remain another pipe dream sitting on a shelf in the state Capitol’s basement, just as demands that employers pay a “living wage” will remain dishonest when so much of the workforce is unskilled.

---

ROSA’S SILLY GRIPE: Is big money in political campaigns bad?

That depends.

In the campaign just concluded U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3rd District, was sore about facing her first serious challenge since entering Congress 30 years ago. The Republican nominee, real estate magnate Margaret Streicker, spent a lot of her own money on nasty TV commercials about the congresswoman. This prompted DeLauro to remark, “It shows what happens when corporations and billionaire families can use their money to try to determine who will represent the people.”

Of course Governor Lamont, a descendant of great wealth and, like DeLauro, a Democrat, lavishly financed his own campaign two years ago and ran some nasty commercials too without complaint from the congresswoman. So DeLauro’s lesson is that their big money is bad and our big money is good.

---

Chris Powell is has been writing about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

For four years any disparaging story about President Trump has been touted by national news organizations even if its source was anonymous. Of course given his business record and character it is easy to believe almost any disparagement about Trump, but before his election news organizations had begun to move away from anonymous sources for disparagement because they are unfair to both their targets and their audience. With Trump news organizations suspended their ethics.

Now a scandal is simmering about the president’s Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden — his helping his dissolute son, Hunter, trade on his father’s position. But most news organizations won’t report it. Their supposed doubt about part of the story — the incriminating material found on a laptop computer thought to have been owned by Hunter — is just a dodge.

For several people openly confirm the authenticity of some of the material, and more journalism easily could prove or disprove this. In any case it is agreed that the vice president took his son on official trips to Ukraine and China, soon after which Hunter went into lucrative business deals with rich Ukrainians and Chinese. There is evidence that some income was to be reserved for the vice president.

Additionally, a recent report by Real Clear Investigations asserted that nearly every job Hunter has had arose from the official influence of his father — that Hunter was hired and lavishly paid to curry favor with the government. That report also easily could be confirmed or refuted by more journalism.

A rationale offered for not investigating the Biden scandal is that it does not come close to Trump’s own corruption. Maybe, but so what? Why not let voters decide for themselves? The real reason there is so little investigation of the Bidens is simply politics. From their one-sided coverage it’s clear that most news organizations now feel that their highest calling is not impartial journalism but ousting the president.

Of course news organizations have the constitutional right to act from that belief. But anyone aspiring to be an informed citizen needs to understand that journalism is often politics by other means, because the selection of every significant news story is a political act. Even journalists trying to be fair inevitably view the news through their own politics, at least in the broadest sense.

There is nothing new in this. This country’s newspapers originated in partisanship as frankly party organs. Over time they shed their most brazen partisanship but partisanship still often guides them, though only the most sophisticated readers may discern it.

Connecticut provides examples.

U.S. Sen. Lowell P. Weicker Jr., nominally a Republican, was a longtime favorite of the Hartford Courant because he often criticized members of his own party. In 1988 Weicker was challenged for re-election by state Attorney General Joseph I. Lieberman, a Democrat. So the Courant published a series of stories about contributions Lieberman’s campaign had received from lawyers whose clients had cases involving the attorney general’s office. This raised a fair issue of influence buying, even as such issues are common to most major political campaigns.

Meanwhile in Washington Weicker had been taking “honorariums” — extravagant speaking fees — from interest groups seeking to enact or defeat legislation on which the senator would be voting. These “honorariums” were not mere campaign contributions; they were personal cash payments, attempts at bribery, and eventually were forbidden by Senate rules. Yet during the campaign the Courant never reported Weicker’s trafficking in “honorariums.”

In 2003 the Journal Inquirer began reporting in depth about the corruption of Gov. John G. Rowland. But the Courant loved the governor for the grandiose “Adriaen’s Landing” redevelopment project he had arranged for downtown Hartford a few blocks from the newspaper’s headquarters, so the Courant declined to cover the story. The governor even went on radio to declare that the Courant’s lack of coverage disproved the JI’s reporting. Only when other newspapers began reprinting the JI’s work did the Courant join in — and eventually the Courant even claimed credit for the resignation of the governor it had been covering up for.

Politics today is more corrupt and venal than ever. Unfortunately the public’s primary defense against it, journalism, is too.

---

Chris Powell has been writing about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell
Mike Riley Retirement Party
The Riverview, Simsbury, Connecticut
Thursday, February 18, 2016

I’ve titled my remarks “How Mike Riley Ruined My Life.” I got the idea from his wife, Kathleen.

I met Mike back around 1970 when he was clerking for state Sen. Bob Houley, Senate chairman of the Appropriations Committee. We spent many happy hours at the state Capitol, playing with the state budget, moving decimal points around, some to the left, some to the right. It would be months before anyone noticed and then it was too late.

After serving two terms in the Senate, by 1972 Houley had gotten to enjoy politics too much and was neglecting his regular job and about to go bankrupt, so he could not afford to seek re-election. The Democratic nomination for state senator in the 35th District was about to go by default to the party’s state central committeewoman, Naomi Hammer of Vernon. They couldn’t find a serious candidate. So on the night before the convention I persuaded Mike to run. We made a few hurried phone calls and the next day Mike was nominated unanimously. As I said, they couldn’t find a serious candidate, but at least it was my candidate.

The rationale for Mike’s candidacy was two-fold. First, that he was good looking, gregarious, and qualified by virtue of his clerking for Houley and his bartending at the Somers Inn. And second, that I would manage the campaign. That is, Mike would do the drinking and I’d do the thinking. (We thought about putting that one on a bumper sticker.) Mike would get the title and glory of being a senator and I would get his gratitude: a patronage appointment high enough in state government but also out of the way enough that I might never have to work again.

I was thinking of a position like the one held by the building supervisor of the water treatment plant in Cadiz, Spain, who was in the news this week. He skipped work for six years while staying on the payroll. They never would have caught him if they hadn’t decided to give him an award for loyalty and then couldn’t find him. So he was fired and had to give some of the money back.

Of course something like that would never happen in government in Connecticut – the firing and fining, I mean.

Anyway, that was my dream as Mike’s campaign began. One night soon after the convention I met Mike at the Somers Inn to work on his campaign brochure. That night I made the mistake of doing both the thinking and the drinking.

We did just about finish the brochure that night, but at closing time Mike and Pam Reid had to walk me up and down Springfield Road until I stopped throwing up and could stand on my own. Then they placed me gently on the floor in the loft next to the inn. At dawn we went up on the balcony of the inn and took Mike’s photo for the cover of the brochure, a copy of which has been placed at every table. Mike was never more handsome than he was that day, but if you look closely at the photo you may see under his eyes the evidence that he had stayed up even later than I had – being gregarious, no doubt.

As you’ll also see from the brochure, Mike had detailed positions on dozens of issues. Of course we did the brochure that way so Mike didn’t have to remember all his positions. As another bit of clever campaign strategy, whose purpose I can’t quite recall now, we also printed more brochures than there were residents of the 35th District. Maybe we were anticipating this retirement dinner.

Of course 1972 turned out to be a disaster for the Democratic Party nationally and in Connecticut. President Nixon carried every state except Massachusetts and the District of Columbia for the Republicans, and here in Connecticut the Democrats lost both houses of the General Assembly.

Mike carried Ashford, thanks to its large Democratic hillbilly population. He carried Stafford because people there somehow thought Riley sounded Italian. He carried Willington and Mansfield because those towns were full of dopehead UConn students and state employees. And he carried his home town, Somers, by 21 votes, the margin there being provided by members of Mike’s own family — the first and last time the Rileys were around when you needed them.

Unfortunately there were 10 other towns in the 35th District and when their votes were added Mike lost the election by 1,693 votes. But having gotten 43 percent of the vote in the district, Mike led the Democratic ticket in the 35th. I decided to take this 43 percent as proof of my political genius.

So I was looking forward to Mike’s running again in 1974, which was to be as much a Democratic year as 1972 had been a Republican year. The Republican who had defeated Mike, Tom Carruthers, had turned out to be as big a schmuck as Nixon was. But because Bob Houley thought he had straightened out his regular job, he wanted to go back to the Senate, and Mike deferred to him. Houley got the Democratic nomination, was easily elected, returned to the Appropriations chairmanship, and took Mike with him. I was stuck in the newspaper business.

Another opportunity to run awaited Mike when Houley retired from the Senate in 1978. But instead Mike went to work for Chris Dodd, then a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and soon to be a U.S. senator.

Mike’s most heroic service to Dodd came when he reluctantly accepted the senator’s assignment to return to Somers to meet with a constituent who was pestering Dodd to introduce legislation in Congress to outlaw Polish jokes. So Mike had to spend an evening at the constituent’s house trying to maintain a straight face while the constituent indignantly recited one Polish joke after another. “What’s the grand prize in the Polish lottery? A dollar a year for a million years.” That kind of stuff.

To survive that evening Mike had to tense his facial muscles so tightly that when he finally left the house and let go, they all tore loose. That’s why he looks as he does today. It’s not that he’s old. It was that awful night of the Polish jokes.

After working in Dodd’s office, Mike got into the trucking business. Realizing at last that there wasn’t going to be anything in it for me, I gave up on him.

So, Mike, I hope you’re happy now. As was said in “On the Waterfront,” you could have had class; you could have been a contender. And I could have been liquor control commissioner.

-END-

Weicker’s Memoir Is Breathtaking for Self-Contradiction and Omission

By Chris Powell

Journal Inquirer

Saturday-Sunday, July 15-16, 1995

Legend has it that the ancient Athenian statesman Aristides was stopped in the street by an uneducated man who didn’t recognize him and who asked for help in writing Aristides’ own name on a ballot in an election to decide who among the nation’s leaders would be banished. The man is said to have explained that he didn’t know Aristides at all but was simply sick and tired of hearing him called “the Just.”

It may be impossible to get far into Lowell P. Weicker Jr.’s autobiography, “Maverick: A Life in Politics” (Little, Brown, & Co., $22.95), without understanding exactly how that disgruntled voter felt.

According to the legend, Aristides silently completed the man’s ballot for him and was duly voted into exile, which is sort of where Weicker, Connecticut’s former U.S. senator and governor, now finds himself politically. Unfortunately, while Weicker was at the center of great events both in Washington and in Connecticut and has had the ghostwriting services of Barry Sussman of The Washington Post, this memoir is almost entirely without reflection even as it is often laughably and unintentionally ironic. Indeed, if there is even one insight in “Maverick,” it is lost under an avalanche of chest-thumping, self-congratulation, self-righteousness, and breathtaking self-contradiction and omission.

The self-contradiction begins right away, in Weicker’s introduction, where he denies the grievance of many Republicans, to whose party he belonged throughout most of his political career, that he lurched to the left after he was elected to the Senate in 1970 with less than half the vote in a three-way race. He insists that it is the Republicans themselves who have “moved so far to the right” since then.

But only a few paragraphs later Weicker acknowledges having been a Goldwater supporter who, during his single term in the U.S. House of Representatives, endorsed a school prayer amendment to the Constitution and the impeachment of Justice William O. Douglas. In [ITALICS] this [END ITALICS] paragraph Weicker writes that he “matured and changed,” having just denied changing at all. And that is the extent of his explanation of his remarkable political metamorphosis. He doesn’t deign to address the old suspicion that he mainly adapted himself to suit Connecticut’s traditional Democratic leanings.

To explain his narrow loss to Democrat Joseph Lieberman in his bid for re-election to the Senate in 1988, Weicker writes, “I had remained the same persistent figure, fighting with the Jesse Helmses of this world….” A few pages later he discloses not only that he, the great maverick, actually believed fervently in the Senate’s seniority system but also that, in this belief, he [ITALICS] supported [END ITALICS] the very same repugnant but duly senior Helms against the tolerable but junior Richard Lugar for chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“By 1988 Connecticut citizens were tiring of a senator who kept focusing on annoying issues like discrimination, separation of church and state, health care, and AIDS,” Weicker writes, never mentioning the possibility that Connecticut also might have tired of a senator who was missing dozens of Senate votes to go out collecting a fortune in “speaking fees” from special interests on whose legislation he simultaneously was voting — the issue that actually cost him the election. Nor does he explain how, if benighted Connecticut really was so indifferent to those annoying issues of his, it nevertheless elected him governor as an independent two years later.

FIRST CIVILITY, THEN NAME CALLING

Weicker laments the loss of civility in public life and complains that his political opponents over the years have been hateful and vicious. Having disposed of civility, a few pages later [ITALICS] he [END ITALICS] calls [ITALICS] them [END ITALICS] names like “slimeball,” “chameleon,” “ass,” and “moralizing nuts.”

He can relate a trivial anecdote about playing in a tennis match for charity with Vice President Spiro Agnew but recalls nothing about the speech Agnew gave soon after, in the last weeks of the 1970 Senate campaign, calling Weicker’s Democratic opponent a communist — a damaging attack whose immense political profit was gratefully accepted by the fearless crusader for fair play.

Weicker calls former state Sen. Richard Bozzuto’s endorsement of Lieberman in 1988 “a stunning act of disloyalty to the Republican Party.” But Weicker neglects to mention his own frequent and stunning endorsement-like remarks from the Republican side in support of Connecticut Democrats in the thick of campaigns over the years. How someone who was elevated by Connecticut’s Republican Party and was never denied anything he sought from it and still sabotaged its candidates and then left it to deprive it of the governorship in 1990 can fault [ITALICS] others [END ITALICS] for disloyalty is … well, vintage Weicker. As he did in politics, in this book he simply waives all standards for himself, sometimes only moments after he articulates them for everyone else.

He praises his broadmindedness for having induced the party in Connecticut to open its primary elections to unaffiliated voters. But he fails to address the complaint that his underlying purpose was only to prevent Republicans even from [ITALICS] having [END ITALICS] a party of their own in which they someday might have a primary Weicker himself might not win.

“DIALOGUE” OR BAITING THE CROWD?

Even advocates of progressive taxation may gag at Weicker’s account of his imposition of the income tax on Connecticut soon after his inauguration as governor in 1991.

Weicker writes that he said during his campaign for governor that he “wouldn’t rule out an income tax.” But in fact he did rule it out — in general with his famous television commercial likening the tax to “pouring gasoline on a fire,” a commercial responding directly to his Republican opponent’s charge that Weicker [ITALICS] did [END ITALICS] support an income tax; and specifically, in writing, with a pledge to oppose an income tax at least through his first year in office.

He writes that he waded into the crowd at the mass rally at the state Capitol protesting the tax because “I wanted to keep up the dialogue.” A few lines later he remarks that the insults hurled at him there were “the kind of inanities you expect in that situation.” So might he really not have sought “dialogue” at all but rather an opportunity to taunt the protesters into discrediting their cause and to get himself on TV looking like a brave martyr to a mob?

This self-contradiction suggests as much, and sure enough, in the Weicker pattern, it is followed by an equivalent hypocrisy, when he condemns White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman for having done the same sort of thing, for having welcomed the chance that protesters would turn violent and obscene at a campaign rally for Richard Nixon.

Weicker writes that he refused to give state legislators jobs in the executive branch in exchange for their votes for the income tax. But in fact a good number who voted for the tax did end up with such jobs.

He writes that his income tax saved Connecticut. He doesn’t mention the tax’s cynical “Greenwich” nature, its replacement of capital gains and dividend taxes on his wealthy friends and neighbors with taxes on the ordinary earnings of the middle class. Nor does he mention that, whatever the cause, Connecticut remains severely depressed economically and has lost population every year since the income tax was passed, the only state in such a long downward trend.

WHO MANIPULATED WHOM?

Weicker denounces the manipulation and self-perpetuation of the two-party system and cites an example of it: the attempt of Democratic and Republican legislators who opposed the income tax to build support for their alternative tax proposals by promising not to nominate candidates against each other in the next election. But then he boasts that he got votes for the income tax by promising his third party’s cross-endorsement to the same legislators, who, with that endorsement, survived to perpetuate the very system he just denounced.

He describes as his great personal victory the 1992 state legislative election, which returned to power the Democratic majority of the income-tax session, without mentioning the possible influence of the Democratic presidential landslide at the top of the ticket. He does not explain why he did not dare to seek re-election himself two years later.

To hear Weicker tell it, he didn’t just end up on the right side of the Watergate drama but rather was its central figure. (Putting Nixon rather than Weicker himself on that postage stamp apparently should be considered doubly unjust.) Weicker didn’t just work to clean up the oceans and integrate the disabled and retarded into society and so forth. No, Mister Bluster singlehandedly saved the world — and in a mere 224 pages.

HE’S AGAINST THE WAR … NOW

As he has been doing in speaking engagements for a few years now, Weicker blithely rewrites history here, portraying himself as the anti-Vietnam War candidate when, in both 1968 and 1970, his two congressional elections during the war, he was entirely Nixon’s candidate and supported Nixon administration war policy. He may be escaping exposure in this because most of those who supported the war don’t want to have to account for it now and because most of those who opposed the war give him a free pass for having come over to their side on big issues since then.

Amid all these self-contradictions and omissions he writes that his “first truly hypocritical act in politics” was only to eulogize Malcolm Baldrige at the dedication of a research ship named for the late commerce secretary. According to Weicker, Baldrige’s unforgivable sin was that he had tried to carry out the cuts proposed by his president, Ronald Reagan, in the budget for oceanic research. (Of course if Baldrige had [ITALICS] resisted [END ITALICS] carrying out the will of his boss, Weicker now might be sneering at him as well as at Bozzuto for “a stunning act of disloyalty to the Republican Party.”)

While his once having spoken a little too well of the dead is the most Weicker can fault himself for in “a life in politics,” it was not policy or ideological disagreement but his making a whole career of flaming hypocrisy that created such apoplectic animosity toward him among certain political people in Connecticut. Indeed, here and there in this book he actually makes good if all-too-brief arguments for particular policies, like means-testing entitlements and relaxing the U.S. embargo against Castro’s Cuba. But these are overwhelmed by the blustering pose that he has been so much better than all other politicians in methods, tactics, principle, and personal virtue.

NOT REALLY CANDID AT ALL

In fact Weicker regularly lowered himself with the worst of them. Maybe that is why there is no mention in this book either of his too-cozy relationship with the contrivance that calls itself the Mashantucket Pequot tribe, to which, by gubernatorial fiat, he granted a monopoly on casino gambling in Connecticut and from which he received, seemingly in return, a $2 million contribution to a charity he chaired and controlled, the Special Olympics — which promptly provided many of his political cronies with cushy jobs and a comfortable place to land as his administration was coming to an end.

If Weicker’s predecessor from the Democratic old guard, William A. O’Neill, had taken personal advantage of his office like that, Connecticut’s largest newspaper, The Hartford Courant, would have led the state’s press in demanding impeachment on grounds of corruption. But since their darling of political correctness did it, The Courant and most other Connecticut newspapers never even reported the
connections.

Weicker has cultivated a reputation for candor, and the publicity for this book tries to perpetuate it. He [ITALICS] has [END ITALICS] taken many forthright positions over the years and no one would accuse him of timidity, but, as this book inadvertently suggests, he may have been the [ITALICS] least [END ITALICS] candid politician of his era in Connecticut, the distinction between candor and mere bluster having been lost.

Weicker notes that he has been married three times and acknowledges shortchanging his family during his 30 years in politics. As he took this book on the road to receptions at bookstores last month, he said his family was the most important thing in his life now. A few days later came the announcement of his exploratory committee for an independent presidential campaign.

“Maverick” may be less an autobiography than a hasty and self-serving text for that campaign, establishing that its author isn’t always wrong, just insufferable.

---

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.

-END-