The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Roll the dice on Election 2019 Name Game
It is fall in an oddnumbered year.
One thinks of Keats’ ode to autumn:
Hedgecrickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a gardencroft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the trees
At campaign signs mentioning STDs.”
Yes, as we prepare to check in on some of the municipal races, we must first visit Farmington, which has been beset in recent years by bitter infighting within its Republican party and a sex scandal so weird and gross that I am not going to recount it here, for fear of spoiling the bucolic mood.
Let’s just say it was not Farmington’s first choice for a way of attracting coverage from People magazine.
The mood in this cycle seemed better, calmer until a few days ago, when signs began popping up around town bearing the name of a candidate or candidates named Dripp Clapp Herpes on Row A. Row A is the Democratic line, and the bogus signs were placed so that they blocked Democratic signs. There is a Democratic candidate named Derek Slap whose may have inspired this effort, somehow.
There are several horrifying aspects to this. One is the way Dripp Clapp Herpes fits perfectly into the meter of the Foreigner song “Jukebox Hero,” so that an unsuspecting person can find himself walking around the house singing “Dripp Clapp Herpes, got stars in his eyes,” for hours. Do not let this happen to you. I should not even have mentioned it.
Then there’s the fact these appear to have been professionally printed signs. I mean, they weren’t made with a Sharpie. Somebody went to a quite a bit of trouble. Picasso produced 50,000 works of art. It’s possible that Dripp Clapp Herpes took longer to complete than many Picassos.
Lawn signs do not bring out the best in people. Every cycle, there are allegations and confrontations. In 2010, a Canton woman found her lawn signs knocked over on her property and signs for a rival attorney general candidate, Martha Dean, put up in their place. As she took down the Dean signs and reerected the other ones, a man — who turned out to be Dean’s husband — confronted her. She said he yelled and lunged and shoved her. (He denied touching her.) Cops were called. He got probation. Fun fact: the woman’s preferred signs were for AG candidate Ross Garber, who is currently one of the nation’s most soughtafter impeachment experts.
My favorite Connecticut lawn sign imbroglio concerned the 1992 state rep candidacy of West Hartford’s Phil Meister. Dozens of Meister’s signs were snatched from their location, and it eventually came out that people wanted them because of a character played by Rob Schneider on “Saturday Night Live.” Said character had a desk near the copy machine, and his entire raison d’etre was to repurpose the name of any person using the machine.
“Ken. The Kenmeister. Making copies. Kenorama. Kenman heading back Kentucky.” Like that.
Meister lost his primary and ran again in 1994. The same thing happened, even though Schneider was gone from SNL.
Let’s stay with names.
In Bridgeport, Marilyn Moore is running for mayor as a writein candidate. This is a very difficult proposition, despite the fact that Mike Jarjura won a writein campaign for mayor of Waterbury in 2005. That was different. First of all, he was already mayor at the time. Also, Waterbury is a magical place where anything can happen. If you told me a giraffe will be city clerk of Waterbury starting in 2025, I would not dismiss your claim as impossible.
When you run as a writein candidate, your whole campaign has to be about how to vote for you. Pointing out that your opponent is a horrible person is a luxury you no longer have. You have to tell people to look at the very bottom of the ballot. They have to color in the circle on the writein line AND squish your name into a small box.
A lawyer for the Secretary of the State made the mistake of telling a group of Bridgeport voters that “MM” would be sufficient to demonstrate intent. Then, at the last minute, somebody named MaryAnn McLaine registered as a Bridgeport mayoral writein candidate. What are the odds?
Say, you don’t suppose somebody on incumbent Mayor Joe Ganim’s team got wind of the “MM” option and decided to drop a fly in the ointment, do you? No. They would never.
Possibly the biggest municipal political news of the moment comes out of New Haven where incumbent mayor Toni Harp, having suspended her campaign after getting whupped by Justin Elicker in the primary, has unexpectedly unsuspended her campaign and is in it to win it.
There is no interesting name angle here, except for the fact that Toni Harp is a pleasantly musical combination. It’s difficult to say what is fueling this new twist. Elicker is now supported by all the big names who originally supported him plus all the political figures who stayed neutral plus a lot of people who used to support Harp plus 11 of the 14 Whiffenpoofs plus Charlie the Charger, a blue and gold horse who is the mascot of the University of New Haven.
And though Harp has secured the Working Families Party ballot line, the WFP doesn’t seem inclined to go allout on this race. It’s possible that Harp sees this race as her Thermopylae, a heroic overmatched battle that ends in demise. If she starts yelling, “Spartans! Today we dine in Newhallville,” it’ll be a clue I’m right.
OK, one last name thing. Mayor Nancy Rossi is seeking reelection in West Haven and, in a bit of unfortunate timing, her adult son is seeking probation in connection with charges that he embezzled money from two restaurants he managed. Both restaurants were called The Sitting Duck Tavern. Weren’t they kind of asking for it?
OK, that’s it. No more electoral name news. Thank God Roger Syphilis discontinued his campaign in Ansonia.