GOP playing tricks, Dems fumbling response

Folks, today we are going to try to sort out why Republicans want to spend your local tax dollars to prosecute a political dispute with their Democratic rivals.

Republican members of the Board of Estimate and Taxation have called for a “special committee” of the BET to investigate the Democrats’ campaign finance practices in their successful 2017 run for control of the BET.

The basis for the Republican call for its own probe seems to be that the State Elections Enforcement Commission is already reviewing local Democratic spending in the 2017 BET election. The SEEC has already fined former Democratic Town Committee Chairman Tony Turner a total of $50,000 for spending his own campaign funds to support other Democratic candidates. (Turner is not standing for reelection to the BET and disagrees with the SEEC’s conclusions.)

Apparently, Mason and his fellow Republicans think their redundant and perfunctory investigation will add substantially to the SEEC’s knowledge base.

“My understanding … is that the SEEC has not closed the matter and more action by them may be coming,” Republican BET member Michael Mason said last week.

It is not even clear the BET has the authority to investigate itself. But insisting that the BET form a special committee, hire investigators, take testimony and issue findings in a month or less puts the lie to the Republican claim that the party is motivated by a commitment to government transparency and holding public office holders to a higher standard. Those are lofty goals, but they are not the real Republican objectives. The only thing a onemonth investigation would accomplish is to make the “findings” the talk of the town in the days before the Nov. 5 election, no matter how hastily or incompletely documented those findings may be.

Greenwich Republicans are desperate to reverse the historic defeats the party suffered in 2017 and 2018. First, the party lost control of the BET for the first time ever, and then it lost the town’s state Senate seat, which had been reliably Republican since the 1930s. The GOP

also lost a state House of Representatives race in 2018, making the fourmember Greenwich delegation to Hartford evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, another first.

Many town Republicans blamed the backlash against President Donald Trump for the party’s previously unthinkable losses. And this year, the GOP let it be known, through two oped essays, that Trump is irrelevant to the local campaign and they will not let the Democrats tag them with the Trump label.

Greenwich has almost always been a oneparty town in municipal elections. But Trump changed all that the day he rode the Trump Tower escalator to a press conference at which he announced his candidacy, making shocking claims about immigration, bad hombres, his fellow Republicans, and otherwise trashing presidential campaigning and behavioral norms.

The big unknown in the upcoming municipal election is whether the disgust with all things Trump will overwhelm a focus on purely local issues this election cycle, and whether the Democrats have the campaign chops to wrest control of the race.

We won’t know the strength of the Trump effect until after the polls close Nov. 5. But we should get an answer about the local campaign in the next week or so, and it will come from watching how the Democrats react to the Republican gambit with the BET investigation.

At first glance, putting the Democrats under a cloud of suspicion seems smart campaigning by the GOP. It has put the Democrats on the defensive. But another way to see this sudden selfrighteousness about government transparency and ethics is as a page right out of the 24/7 teleplay by Twitter that was the Trump campaign and is now the Trump presidency.

Mason and his Republican colleagues are suddenly agitated about events of two years ago, screaming “investigate, investigate” when they know quite well that the 2017 campaign has been under investigation for more than a year by a state agency that is staffed to probe these very issues. There is nothing new here. That the GOP cares more about releasing its findings in less than a month, when the exact subject of their desired investigation has not even been defined, is pure campaign theater. Hand it to the Republicans, they have learned well the lessons Trump has taught them and they are dominating the campaign with the election just seven weeks away. Instead of being focused on the archconservative, antiabortion voting record of the Republican First Selectman candidate, state Rep. Fred Camillo, the Democrats are in reactmode.

I am not sure the Democrats have it in them to conduct an aggressive, critical campaign. Jill Oberlander, the Democratic first selectman candidate and current BET chair, cannot seem to distinguish between leading a political campaign and running the BET. Campaigns are partisan by definition. A campaign is the time to differentiate yourself from your opponents: not only telling your own story but explaining the weakness of your opponent’s positions.

Her response to the GOP request for an investigation was to defer to the town attorney, and rue that the Republican move might threaten the bipartisan nature of town politics. Greenwich has never been bipartisan. The GOP tolerates Democrats, as long as they know their place.

To gain the upper hand, the Democrats need to recast the Republican probe as the political trick that it is. Oberlander has to throw off her bipartisan shackles, and refocus voters on Camillo’s record in Hartford, and his claim that Greenwich has been the best run town in the state for at least the last 60 years. There is a lot to talk about in that statement. More to come.