New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Stefanowski, Lamont differ in approach to healing state
At a superficial glance, they look like a couple of Connecticut shoreline CEOs, each funding his own campaign, separated mostly by where they stand on the political spectrum.
Ned Lamont favors investment in cities and health care, green energy, a higher minimum wage and revamped transportation infrastructure. That’s how we can reclaim this great, fallen state, he says.
He’s willing to say we may need to raise even more revenue — preferably, in his view, from wealthy folks like him, along with out-ofstate truckers — as part of a government overhaul.
Bob Stefanowski wants to see the state tighten its fiscal belt so brutally that he can eliminate the estate tax, eliminate the corporate earnings tax and, mostly, eliminate the $9 billion-plus personal income tax.
His anti-government, up-with-individuals bromides sound so clear that he looks, to believers, like the long-awaited savior of a battered state.
Both of them talk in soaring terms about restoring Connecticut’s glory by fixing what we all agree is a broken economy.
But the differences are far deeper than ideology, and they say something about how we as residents, taxpayers and voters see our way out of a two-decade economic fall, a slowly shifting sand dune under our feet that’s eroding with the wind.
It comes down to a deceivingly simple message of lower taxes and less government vs. a call for a tough slog of efficiency and investment with no easy answers.
Stefanowski spends a lot of time on what’s wrong and offers a quick solution — cut taxes and government involvement — with little detail. Lamont recognizes the problem quickly and spends his energy on the many hard steps of a fix.
Stefanowski, like President Donald Trump, depends on low information in the electorate, a tough-guy swagger and sweeping generalities shaped by anger and publicly expressed alienation — not only by voters but by himself.
How else could he have beaten back four other accomplished Republicans, two with government experience and two without, while refusing to answer why he went 16 years until 2017 not voting even in a presidential election; and why he spent nine months as a Democrat, not decades ago but from the month before Trump’s election until last summer?
The potent force of low information and alienation from the very government he wants to run allows Stefanowski to say he can eliminate the sources of 60 percent of Connecticut’s tax revenue — and amass enough support to win the nomination.
Obviously he can’t cut taxes and spending that deeply. Even the most conservative members of the General Assembly, among them his running mate, Sen. Joe Markley, have proposed nothing like that level of cuts. Anyone in the game knows that state government, unlike the businesses Stefanowski helped turn around, can’t just stop doing things if they aren’t profitable.
“For the first time in decades, Connecticut will actually have a real CEO,” Stefanowski said in his victory speech.
That’s true whether the November winner turns out to be Stefanowski, of Madison, a former financial executive at General Electric and UBS who later ran a highinterest, short-term lending firm in London; or Lamont, of Greenwich, who founded and sold a cable TV business; or R. Nelson “Oz” Griebel, the former regional bank and chamber of commerce CEO from Simsbury running as an independent candidate, who submitted signatures to petition onto the ballot.
Lamont has no such luxury of alienation and low information when it comes to winning votes. He’s less detailed about his economic plan than, say, the vanquished Republicans Steve Obsitnik and David Stemerman. But his ideas on rebuilding the state rely on a dense and coordinated mix of creative forces; and his momentum depends on a roll-up-the-sleeves will to take action in the thick of it, often without the liberal ideology that he’s rightly known for.
For example, while Stefanowski re-enrolled as a Republican and cast what might have been his first ballot of the century late last year, Lamont recruited his old business school pal, Pepsico CEO Indra Nooyi, to help bring Indian consulting and outsourcing giant Infosys to Connecticut for a commitment to add 1,000 jobs in Hartford.
There are no catchy slogans in Lamont’s economic view. He hasn’t held statewide office, but Lamont has slogged through the muck of making government work in various roles. That includes support for, and from, public employee unions — which will help him on the ground but not in the war of rhetoric in this age of union backlash.
By Wednesday, Lamont was calling his opponent — endorsed by Trump — “Trumpan owski” and Stefanowski dubbed Lamont “Ned Malloy.” That theater aside, both need to find a way to win the middle, where most Connecticut voters live.
I saw it at the Mary L. Tracy School in Orange, where Bill and Louise Weaver, Republicans, and Edina and David Ostreicher, Democrats, all talked about what they’d like to see after they voted. Big differences, but basically a middle path with smart investment, but more spending discipline.
“You’ve got to do both, that’s the reality. You have to find a way to compromise,” said Edina Ostreicher, a dean at the University of Bridgeport, who happened to run into her husband at the polls in a lovely moment. “I don’t hear anybody really with that message.”
Not so far, but a path of hard solutions is closer to it than bluster and magical thinking about tax cuts.