New GOP chair is good for Conn.
Let me apologize in advance for the harm I am about to do to Ben Proto, newly elected chairman of the Connecticut Republican Party. ( Clears throat.)
I think Ben Proto is an excellent choice and can do a lot of good, not only for his party but for the state.
Republican readers of these excellent Hearst newspapers have long ago identified me as the valedictorian of Communist Martyrs High School. If I think Proto is any good, they will reason, there must be something horribly wrong with him.
They are incorrect. I truly believe we need two high- functioning, conscientious political parties in this state and in this country. As George Packer writes in his new book about American politics, “Neither separation nor conquest is a tenable future.” We’re stuck with each other.
It would give me pleasure to vote for a Republican candidate, something I have not done in decades. I was so close in 2014! Frustrated with Malloy. Ready to color in John McKinney’s circle. Why, Republicans, why? A second Tom Foley nomination? ( McKinney was a Proto project.)
Actually, I sat down for an off- therecord coffee with Foley that cycle. ( He got a glass of water and tipped the barista a $ 20.) He didn’t seem like that bad a guy, and he had no idea how campaigns work, which was kind of charming. Like almost everybody who goes into politics, his notion of his own appeal bore almost no relation to reality. ( This is why impeachment lawyer Ross Garber doesn’t let his clients take the stand. They have an inflated sense of their ability to charm and persuade others.)
Let me confess something else. I have lost all interest in politics the way actuaries lose all interest in sex, which is to say completely and numbingly. This does not bode well for my future employment in this job. I am currently interested in God, fate, love, albumen, Gloria Estefan, the Comanche nation, the possibility of a multiverse, Italian white wine and Deandre Ayton, the center for the Phoenix Suns.
It’s not even clear to me what politics are anymore. The historian Michael Schudson wrote 22 years ago in his excellent book “The Good Citizen” that, “in the emerging age of rights, citizens learn to catalog what entitlements they may have and what forms of victimization they may knowingly or unknowingly have experienced.”
This is not intended ( by Schudson or me) as an indictment of either the left or the right but of both. Packer, in his new book, is of the same mind. He divides the American body politic into practitioners of four different narratives, two on the left and two on the right, all of them “driven by a competition for status that generates fierce anxiety and resentment.”
I like Proto. I should say that I know him a little bit, dating back to 2008 when, according to him, he joined me regularly on the air from the Republican National Convention.
He was a McCain coordinator in 2000 and 2008. The Connecticut McCain 2000 people were very “Braveheart.” They didn’t want to throw in the towel, and eventually Cindy McCain had to be sent in to remind the last few diehards that it was time to join hands with W’s people.
In 2016, Proto was Trump’s Connecticut coordinator. A lot of people held that against him.
Proto says a lot of people didn’t really grasp why he did it. “One, he was the Republican candidate and I have supported the Republican candidate for as long as I can remember. Sometimes you’re not always given the choices you want in an election.”
He also said he could not possibly have voted for Hillary Rodham Clinton. The kind of Republican people I know could not have voted for Clinton either but may very well have written in Edmund Burke or William F. Buckley, both of whom were dead, one of them for 220 years.
Proto wasn’t back in that job for 2020. He doesn’t cast that as a repudiation of the Trump years but draw your own conclusions.
In 2018, Proto, Hearst columnist Dan Haar and the late, much- beloved- by- me former state chairman Dick Foley all got moonstruck about the gubernatorial candidacy of tech entrepeneur Steve Obsitnik, which was just adorable ( and a trainwreck on multiple levels).
When he talks about the party’s “values and principles,” Proto can sound like an F. A. Hayek libertarian, leaning into “the individual being best positioned to understand how to create and live and live a life without the government interfering ... Live your life in the way that you think is appropriate.”
But I don’t think that’s exactly who he is. When we spoke Thursday evening, I pressed him a little about the idea of citizenship.
“I believe in the social compact,” he said. “I do believe we have an obligation to be involved and participate and make our communities better.”
He draws the line at government telling us we have that obligation.
The truth is, Proto will be riding a two- humped dragon. One hump understands that obligation to make our communities better, and the other hump is, as Packer says, that rattlesnake on the Gadsden flag. Don’t tread on ( or even near) me.
He’s a good guy, Proto. Politics eats good guys alive.
Meanwhile, the sun is setting. The Enrico Serafino Gavi is chilled. Gloria is singing through the speakers. Deandre Ayton is getting loose for Game 3 against the Clippers.
Who needs politics?