2018: the cast of characters

No one quite knows for certain how the play will unroll during the upcoming 2018 elections, but the cast of characters is slowly taking shape.

Last April, Gov. Dannel Malloy announced he would not be running for a third term. Said Malloy, a rare emotional hitch in his voice, “I am today announcing that I will not seek a third term as governor. Instead, I will focus all my attention and energy — I will use all of my political capital from now through the end of 2018 — to continue implementing my administration’s vision for a more sustainable and vibrant Connecticut economy.”

Malloy’s announcement opened a Pandora’s Box. Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman, who rode shotgun on Gov. Dannel Malloy’s coach for eight years, has only recently bowed out of the race. Wyman, it appears, has children and grandchildren whose company, she has belatedly said, she at long last would like to enjoy. Her bow-out, we are to understand, had nothing to do with Malloy’s failed policies.

Comptroller Kevin Lembo, a young progressive relatively unbesmirched by the failed Malloy regime, considered running for governor but, on second thought, bowed out. Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin also has had second thoughts since Wyman’s announcement; he’s back in consideration. Middletown Mayor Dan Drew, the focus of an ethics complaint, is still plugging away, though one of his wings may have been clipped.

Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim, an ex-felon who very well might be the poster boy for Malloy’s “second chance society,” is making noises. West Hartford Mayor Jonathan Harris, former prosecutor Chris Mattei, former Wall Street finance executive Dita Bhargava and former State Veterans Affairs Commissioner Sean Connolly are all teasing us.

“On the Republican side,” a Hartford paper advises, “Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton, Trumbull first selectman Tim Herbst, state Rep. Prasad Srinivasan, former federal official David Walker, state Sen. Toni Boucher and Shelton mayor Mark Lauretti are among a large field.” Peter Lumaj, who has managed to light up conservatives, is yet in an exploring stage, and somewhere off in the distance Joe Visconti, who has described himself as “Trump without the millions,” is breathing heavily.

Most of the chaff will be sifted during the Democrat and Republican nominating conventions, after which the wheat will lie exposed. Until then, opinionators are keeping their powder dry, though it is not difficult to deduce their preferences from editorials and opinion pieces. In the recent past, editorial boards in Connecticut have voted more or less straight Democrat; endorsements of Republicans have been rare.

The truth of the matter is that modern progressivism of a kind practiced in Connecticut — which favors high taxes, the slavish support of state worker unions, an expansion of the role of government in business decisions, excessive regulations as a means of controlling unsavory business ethics, a view of state government as the principal business investor, a “forward looking” vision that discounts tradition and what G. K. Chesterton used to call “the democracy of the dead,” a utopian outlook that blithely ignores the real-world consequences of superficially appealing policies — is a demonstrable and disastrous failure that has, in the land of steady bad habits, reduced the prospect of business growth, job creation and most other joys that a pragmatic and realistic polity is heir to.

And the people in Connecticut most severely impacted by utopian progressivism are the poor who live in the state’s corrupt and deteriorating cities.

Politicians in the state are no longer in the saddle directing events; indeed, it is events that are now riding politicians — and the rest of us.

The way out of this dark and unwelcoming wood, far more menacing than anything one meets in fairy tales, is the way in — in reverse. You begin to work your way out of the enchanted wood by stopping your advance, reversing course and marching towards the beginning of your journey with a view toward progressing in an opposite direction.

Focusing all his attention on his visionary schemes for Connecticut and spending his depleted political capital, Malloy recently effectively vetoed the efforts of both Democrats and Republicans to restore in a bi-partisan budget crippling reductions in state aid to municipalities he had previously imposed, a provocative move that elicited from mildmannered State Representative Tami Zawistowski, “Outrageous that the Governor unilaterally cut $91 million from education aid to our towns - well beyond the reductions in the legislatively approved budget.” The larger part of Malloy’s legacy when he finally leaves office will be that he had his way with both Republicans and Democrats in the General Assembly.