Date: Mon 30-Nov-1998

Publication: Bee

Author: CURT

Quick Words:

commentary-election-powell

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COMMENTARY: Rowland And Dodd Set Records, Kennelly Sees The True Parties

By Chris Powell

Jefferson was referring to the stodgy Federalist bastion of Connecticut almost

200 years ago when he wrote the letter from which history drew the political

saying "few die and none resign." He might be right at home here today, with

an intern substituting for a slave mistress in the White House and with

Connecticut having another election that has changed little. Power has gone

back into place almost exactly where it was.

Besides, much campaigning in Connecticut this year was as wretched as it was

in Jefferson's time, democracy's early days.

The high point of this year's campaign in Connecticut was its pandering,

particularly to the elderly, who were treated like children who couldn't bear

the suggestion that those among them who don't need government help might

forgo it in favor of those who do.

The campaign's low point was its hatefulness and ruthlessness, as exemplified

by television commercials almost totalitarian in their manipulativeness

broadcast by Democratic US Rep James Maloney and his Republican challenger in

the 5th Congressional District, state Sen Mark Nielsen, and by the last-minute

attack commercials, designed to preclude rebuttal, by the victorious candidate

for secretary of the state, state Rep Susan Bysiewicz, who now will be in

charge of ensuring fairness in elections.

But some accomplishments in Connecticut's election cannot be minimized. John

G. Rowland became the first Republican reelected governor in Connecticut in 54

years and won the biggest share of the vote of any governor since the 1920s.

And Democrat Christopher J. Dodd became only the second US senator from

Connecticut to win a fourth term, the state's longest-serving senator since

Orville H. Platt died during his fifth term in 1905.

If anyone had coattails, it seems to have been Dodd, not Rowland. The senator,

second on the ballot, seems to have succeeded as the "firewall" Democrats

farther down the ticket hoped he would be.

But then Connecticut long has been and remains a Democratic state, and

Rowland's victory is magnified by that history, despite his lack of coattails.

Amid the crushing returns Tuesday night, the defeated Democratic nominee for

lieutenant governor, former Vernon state Rep. Joseph D. Courtney, attributed

Rowland's landslide to his having changed his agenda out of fear of the

Democratic nominee for governor, US Rep. Barbara B. Kennelly. But this was

mere rationalizing, for Rowland's reopening what was supposed to be a biennial

budget and stuffing it with popular spending programs was only what the

growing state surplus allowed and what governors typically do in election

years.

"Be the sort of governor you were for the last year, not the first three

years," Kennelly told Rowland across the airwaves in her valedictory Tuesday

night. That is, cut taxes and raise spending and enjoy prosperity forever. But

who wouldn't want to be such a governor? The question is how long economic

circumstances will allow it.

And if, in edging toward the center from the political right, Rowland has

struck some Democratic poses, they are being criticized by Democrats who have

had nothing to say about the many Republican poses struck desperately by

Maloney to squeak through to a second term in Congress from Rowland's former

district. Assembling majorities is simply what politicians do; it is what

small-d democratic government is about.

Kennelly's loss may be attributed not only to Rowland's successful

administration and clever politics and to her own admittedly deficient

campaign but also to the Democratic Party's abandonment of its gubernatorial

candidate.

Dodd, the party's "firewall," made a TV commercial for the Democratic nominee

to succeed Kennelly in the 1st Congressional District, former state Sen John

B. Larson, but not for Kennelly herself. Democratic US Sen Joseph I.

Lieberman, even more popular than Dodd, went campaigning for Democrats out of

state as Kennelly sank. The leaders of the party's majority in the General

Assembly and its three other US representatives were hardly ever seen with

her. They seemed as satisfied to be doing business with Rowland as the public

was satisfied with his performance in office. It did not seem to occur to them

that, for the sake of the Democratic Party, they might prepare the way for

her.

Thus Kennelly learned painfully in what is likely to have been her last

campaign that the two parties are less the Democrats and the Republicans than

the Ins and the Outs, and that she had been suckered into joining the latter.

Indeed, the campaign's most pathetic moment came at the debate of the

gubernatorial candidates in New London, when Kennelly complained that Rowland

had told lobbyists not to contribute to her -- as if Rowland was supposed to

help his opponent raise money, as if Kennelly herself had not thrived on

special-interest contributions in her 16 years in Congress, as if she couldn't

function otherwise, and as if so many challengers in Connecticut during her

political career, including those who ran against her, had not suffered the

same fate without her objection. In this election Kennelly was outspent by

2«-1; but in previous campaigns she had outspent her opponents by as much as

500-1.

At the New London debate Kennelly added, a bit in puzzlement, that she had

always voted in Congress in favor of "campaign finance reform." But there has

not yet been any reform that makes challengers competitive with incumbents in

campaign financing. It would be a shame to lose Kennelly from public life now

that she has had such an enlightening experience on the disadvantaged side.

Of course some other capable challengers also lost in Connecticut on Tuesday.

Kevin O'Connor made the Republicans competitive in the 1st Congressional

District for the first time in 28 years. And in the 6th Congressional District

Democrat Charlotte Koskoff gave veteran Republican US Rep Nancy Johnson

another tough race, which, judging by her bombardment of Koskoff with

hyperbolic TV ads, the incumbent greatly resented.

Losing to Johnson for the third time, Koskoff becomes the Democratic

equivalent of former state Sen Ed Munster, the Republican who ran three times

against veteran Democratic US Rep Sam Gejdenson in the 2nd District. Koskoff

and Munster both came within a few votes of an upset in their second tries,

only to fall back under adverse circumstances in their third. That of course

is discouraging but there is nothing dishonorable about it.

Kennelly's father, the late state and national Democratic chairman, John M.

Bailey, who presided when the parties went by their right names, always

greeted political defeats by noting that tomorrow would bring a new ball game.

Today's losers can still play -- and should.

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