The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
What a 6-day campaign tells us
It was the shortest political campaign since Colin Powell toyed with the presidency, but it still said a few things about Connecticut politics in 2018.
Jim Smith — a largely nonpartisan, newly minted Republican — ended the six-day, public portion of his dalliance with the race for governor in a statement of disappointment Tuesday night.
Maybe we shouldn’t call it a dalliance because the 69-year-old Middlebury resident, who retired at the end of 2017 as CEO of the parent of Webster Bank, was intensely serious about running for the short time he considered it.
Since Smith isn’t an idle dreamer or a publicity hound, his brief exploration tells us that economic and financial issues, his wheelhouse, are probably even more important to this race than we thought.
“That ought to be about 70 percent of the weight of this election,” he said Wednesday. “It’s what the public arena needs in order to right the ship.”
And it tells us the state’s problems are deeper than most people realize. That was Smith’s a-ha moment while he was co-chairman of the state Commission on Fiscal Stability and Economic Growth — ohmygawd, we don’t have even a whiff of either.
In fact, as the commission’s findings showed, we’re losing economic size. Even the guy who built a $500 million Waterbury bank that his father founded in 1935 into a $26 billion super-regional financial corporation didn’t have a full sense of Connecticut’s woes when he was appointed to the three-month commission last fall.
Smith didn’t run for governor because of a legal problem.
He had committed to remaining nonpartisan until he was done with the commission. On March 21, he switched from the Independent Party — not unaffiliated — to Republican. That means by some interpretations of state law, he would not have been able to certify his signatures as a petitioning candidate until June 20 or so, but the signatures are due June 12.
Smith knows he could have fought that, as the language is far from clear. But he said in a written statement, “My goal as a candidate was to compete within the party, not with the party.”
Some critics, chiefly from organized labor, say Smith’s party switch and exploration as a GOP candidate so soon after the nonpartisan commission finished its work shows he was biased all along. They’re not happy with some of the recommendations that would rein in collective bargaining and binding arbitration rules.
That does look less than great, but the commission’s fixes lean many ways, taking some from labor and some from business, some from taxpayers and some from government spending. Smith seems to have been motivated more by a sense of loyalty and duty to the state than to ideology, in the 27 years I’ve known him.
And for most of his life, he was a Democrat. His sister-in-law is state Sen. Joan Hartley, D-Waterbury. One uncle, J. Francis Smith, was a state Democratic Party chairman, before the legendary John M. Bailey. Another relative, J. Joseph Smith, was a Democratic U.S. representative, representing territory that would now be part of the 5th District.
No, while we’re asking, Smith won’t consider running for that 5th U.S. House seat, now held by Elizabeth Esty. He’s interested in policy, yes, but as an executive, not a legislator.
Notably, in Smith’s view, the problem with his campaign wasn’t that he started too late to differentiate himself, “because there are so many people involved and nobody is gaining traction.”
An argument can be made that Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton is a frontrunner heading into the May 12 convention, but if that’s true, Boughton is far from comfortably out front. Rep. Themis Klarides, R-Derby, GOP leader in the state House, could probably still become the party’s nominee if she wanted it.
Smith would have raised money from donors, but would not have needed public financing. He holds or controls 1 million shares of Webster Financial Corp., worth tens of millions of dollars.
It’s not necessarily true, Republican state chairman J.R. Romano said Wednesday, that Smith’s brief exploration indicates the pre-eminence of business and finance in this election.
“We’re looking at an open seat and what I know is that so many people want to run as a Republican because of the likelihood that we’re going to win this seat,” Romano said. “To me it doesn’t matter whether it’s a politician or a business owner, each candidate has to make their case.”
The fact is, the GOP field includes three highly successful business executives and two who made their mark in public finance. And on the Democratic side, Ned Lamont, of Greenwich, who has momentum, if not the frontrunner slot, is a business executive and investor with almost no government experience.
Smith’s would-be candidacy, for those few days, amplified the theme.
Why be a Republican when his family is historically Democratic and the U.S. president is such an embarrassment? On state issues, that’s where he aligns.
“I didn’t join the party of Donald Trump, I joined the Republican Party,” he said.
“I’m disappointed that I won’t have the opportunity to participate,” Smith said, but he and his wife, Cathy, will “remain steadfastly committed to contribute to the betterment of the state we love.”