Commentary ––

Two Words For The Political Conventions

By Chris Powell

There are two words for last weekend’s Republican state convention in Bridgeport: smug and cynical.

To listen to Governor Rowland, everything in Connecticut is grand. Accepting his nomination for a third term, he promised to keep Connecticut first in several respects, including education, and cited student test score averages. But those averages only conceal Connecticut’s urban school disaster, about which nothing has been done, and about which the vaunted Sheff vs O’Neill lawsuit will do nothing either, except raise the cost.

The governor tried to draw a distinction between the Democratic leaders of today and Democratic leaders of old, listing four –– Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Gonenors Ella T. Grasso and William A. O’Neill –– as if he and not his Democratic opponent, Bill Curry, was their rightful heir. Time may heal all wounds and Curry may be too liberal, but in their time FDR and Truman were reviled by Republicans, and when Rowland first ran for governor 12 years ago, he was blaming O’Neill for the state’s financial mess, not promising to be a governor just like him.

More cynical may have been the recent Republican nominee for mayor of Waterbury, Dennis Odle, who cited his city’s large population of Hispanics and told the party it should appeal to them by supporting vouchers to help students escape bad city schools. With the voucher issue, Odle said, Republicans could force the Democrats to choose painfully between two big constituencies, Hispanics and teacher unions. That is, being largely Catholic, Hispanics might welcome a subsidy for sending their children to church schools, allowing them and everyone else to become indifferent to the un-Catholic minority remnant in city public schools.

It was all too clever, and it will go nowhere without determined leadership from the top –– and the governor has shown no stomach for the controversy vouchers provoke.

Two words for last weekend’s Democratic state convention in Hartford: sanctimonious and demagogic.

To the Democrats, Rowland’s refusal to go along with their party’s leadership in the General Assembly and put a special tax on millionaires is to blame for everything. In fact, even if Rowland had conceded the millionaires tax, it would have produced only a quarter or so of the money necessary to fill the growing deficit in state accounts. Postponing raises and benefit increases for state and municipal employees in hard times might have covered the deficit, but those people run the Democratic Party.

Curry told the convention that Connecticut needs “property tax reform,” and “everybody in Connecticut knows it except one guy,” the governor. But many others do not know either, in part because “property tax reform” has yet to be defined, just left implicit as throwing still more state money at municipal payrolls while leaving property tax rates high and rising. Connecticut has been reforming property taxes this way for 30 years.

Under Rowland, Curry said, Connecticut has become “the most corrupt state in the nation.” There have been a couple of big corruption scandals in the state lately, but one is that of Bridgeport’s mayor, a Democrat and Curry’s running mate in the 1994 campaign for governor. And both scandals fall far short of the recent convictions of the governors of Louisiana and Arizona.

“Every one of us knows we can win,” Curry said, taking the liberty of speaking for his ticket mates –– Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz, and Comptroller Nancy Wyman –– who declined to run for governor this year because they had thought otherwise.

At least Curry is the one Democrat who is not afraid of a political fight, and he had a good point: that the Rowland administration’s expensive downtown redevelopment approach to Connecticut’s cities will do nothing for their livability, especially as city schools continue to fail. And Curry dispensed with histrionics long enough to admit that the next governor is likely to start his term with a deficit of as much as a billion dollars, seven percent of the state budget.

Of course this is all the more reason to doubt the grand initiatives he and Rowland dream of in education, transportation, health care, and so forth. For without huge tax increases, the next governor will be lucky just to keep the lights on at the Capitol.

Two words for both state conventions: patronizing and stereotyping.

The Democratic convention was entertained at length by a black chorus, the Republican convention at length by a black jazz violinist. Their only relevance to politics was their willingness to be put on display. The parties seemed to be saying that black people may have rhythm but political power is something else.

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