COLIN MCENROE
Night of the Pickle leaves a sour aftertaste
It’s always helpful to note precisely when things got weird.
I’m going to say it was the Night of the Pickle, May 15, 2019. That’s when Gov. Ned Lamont showed up at the House Democratic caucus to importune them about tolls. He brought the press, which is highly unorthodox.
You bring the press when the optics are on your side, when you are fighting to have land set aside as a Connecticut Sloth Refuge. You bring the cutest baby sloth you can find and cradle it in your arms as you implore the lawmakers to stop holding up the funds needed to protect this little guy and his family.
Tolls are not a baby sloth. They’re like the opposite.
The governor acknowledged the failure of tolls to be cute and furry by saying he had “put some of you in a pickle.”
Then Ned made it really weird.
He promised to raise a lot of money for the pickled re-election campaigns of lawmakers who get attacked for supporting tolls. “We’re going to be raising money for this caucus,” said Ned. “I’m going to have the business guys coming in . ... Labor is going to be there standing up for you, and I’m going to be standing up for you.”
Business guys! They really are the best, aren’t they? And to have a governor who can rub a lamp and make business guys come in, well, you can’t put a price on that.
As for labor, well, Lamont doesn’t have a great relationship with labor at the moment, and most of the people he was talking to have a better one. Lamont promising labor support to Democratic legislators is like me promising Mookie Betts I can get the Red Sox to support him.
The whole escapade was a little off. I guess it’s not exactly illegal for the governor to march into a caucus and promise lawmakers a whole bunch of campaign money if they’ll do this one thing for him. But it’s weird! Usually you would have those sort of conversations one-on-one and behind closed doors, not in some vast Moonie wedding of vote-buying.
Anyway, what good did the Night of the Pickle do? Tolls were subsequently taken off the table until a future special session, which means the votes aren’t there. Lamont promptly issued a 24-page draft of his toll bill, so legislators would know exactly what they wouldn’t be debating or voting on any time soon.
Lamont seems adorably clueless about the whole slap-and-tickle process of getting legislators to do stuff. This month he was also stung by the revelation that he had dangled the idea of keeping tolls off the Merritt Parkway as a bit of catnip for Fairfield County legislators.
There are so many things wrong with this, we may not have enough space for all of them. First, keeping tolls off the Merritt would flood it with traffic. Second, he was courting the votes of Republican legislators, who wouldn’t vote for tolls even if you gave every single one of them a jetpack. Third, he somehow thought this was not going to come out, because he confided it to Livvy Floren, a Greenwich Republican and an old friend. And, well, golly, remember the surprise engagement party for Digby Lovejoy and Bunny Pierpont at the Round Hill Club? People knew how to keep a secret back in the day.
Now that it has come out, new questions arise. The Merritt Parkway is not just any old road. It’s an internationally famous work of parkway design, and the greater Greenwich area is full of wealthy and wellconnected folks who are not going to let us slap some butt-ugly toll gantries over it. At minimum, they will have to be pastel gantries with Lacoste crocodiles on them.
I would be remiss in writing about Greenwich and weirdness if I did not briefly mention that rookie Democratic Sen. Alex Bergstein, of Greenwich, publicly announced last week that she is in love with the woman who originally showed up with her at the Capitol at the beginning of the session as some kind of paid (out of Bergstein’s pocket) assistant.
Bergstein denied that the woman, Nichola Samponaro, was doing legislative work, but this claim is somewhat undermined by an email from Bergstein’s estranged husband, Seth, who discussed ways of compensating Samponaro and said that ideally the Senate Democrats would hire her and another Bergstein aide.
If not, wrote Seth Bergstein, “then we need to hire them and pay them through Technopulp or Bergstein LLC or a new entity.” Reader, I extensively researched Technopulp, but I am not going to explain it here due to time and space constraints. Anyway, it no longer matters because Bergstein and Samponaro are in love. They announced it on Instagram! Nobody is working for anybody anymore, so just forget about it.
But we’ll always have Technopulp. I have found that, when considering personal expenses I have no way of meeting, it’s pleasurable to say aloud, “Let’s just pay it through Technopulp.”
I leave you with two thoughts. One, don’t put knotty or naughty things in emails! Do I have to say this every week? Two, don’t tell Livvy Floren anything, ever!
OK, three thoughts. When people find each other in a permanent and wonderful way, other people should chip in and buy them a present. Something that would harmonize stylistically with their new life in Greenwich. It rhymes with “pantry.”