COLIN MCENROE
Mayor’s get out of jail free card comes with free TV time
On Sunday mornings, we are given an opportunity to contemplate sin, man’s depravity, the possibility of atonement and the illimitable nature of grace.
I am not talking so much about church as I am talking about the Sunday morning news chat shows, especially their coverage of the 2019 mayoral elections.
Last Sunday, a person could watch former Hartford mayor Eddie Perez on “Face the Facts With Max Reiss” on NBC Connecticut. The title of this show is mostly aspirational inasmuch as the whole point of being a Connecticut politician is to face as few facts as possible.
Perez is once again running for mayor. In the past, he pleaded guilty to accepting a bribe and to larceny by extortion. He did not go to prison. He is not an ex-convict. A lot of credit for that has to go to Attorney Hubert Santos, the master of the legal slow walk.
Santos has a magical ability to turn prosecutors and judges into bewildered tortoises, crawling toward their destinies at an agonizingly plodding pace. Witnesses die. The machinery of criminal justice becomes too exhausted to care about his client.
An example. When the state began investigating Perez, you did not have a smartphone, because they hadn’t been introduced yet. When he was arrested in 2009, you probably still didn’t, because fewer than 20 percent of Americans owned one. When he finally pleaded guilty in 2017, you regarded your smartphone as some kind of God-given right. The Eddie Perez case overspread and consumed an entire revolution in technology.
And now, he’s back. The interview was conducted by Reiss’s colleague Keisha Grant. Perez demonstrated an admirable command of the Fallen Politician’s Catechism Rite.
(The politician shall speak as would a child who has broken a thing of value.) Perez to Grant: “I made a Big Mistake, a Very Big Mistake, and I’m sorry that I did that.”
(The politician shall paraphrase the words of the 1990s British band Chumbawamba.) Perez to Grant: “I’ve fallen down, but I’m getting up to make a difference.”
(The politician shall speak of life as a journey.) Perez to Grant: “It’s been a long journey, a good journey, a journey of hope and opportunity.”
And that’s it. That’s how easy it is to re-enter the political arena after committing a crime. Right down the street, while this is happening, a baby is being baptized, and the parents have to promise to reject Satan and all his works and all his empty promises.
In other words, in terms of washing away sin, we have way higher standards for babies than for mayors.
But wait. Maybe you’re getting a little bored. Would you like to switch over to WFSB’s “Face the State?” (Apparently, in Connecticut politics, the only thing you don’t have to face is the music.)
Last Sunday, “Face the State” kicked off the program with a long segment of analysis by its handpicked duo of pundits: On the right, David Stemerman, exhibiting the same goofy charisma that fueled his march through the 2018 Republican gubernatorial primary and allowed him to rack up a whopping 26,000 votes, finishing a distant third. On the left, Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim, who was defeated by Ned Lamont in the 2018 Democratic primary in every single Connecticut municipality that is not named “Bridgeport.” (For the record, there are 168 such towns.)
As most of you know, in 2003, Ganim was convicted of 16 counts of criminal misconduct and abuse of office. He went to prison, got out, ran for mayor again, got elected. Now he’s running again. Right now.
WFSB has been turning regularly to these two men for insight, and a bromance seems to be forming! Ganim told host Dennis House he and Stemerman “are not on the same page in terms of issues, but we enjoy each other’s company.”
Crazy idea. I’m just spitballing here. Toni Harp is mayor of New Haven. She’s a woman of color and not an ex-convict. You’d get diversity and a clean record.
But you wouldn’t get this: here’s how Ganim answered House’s first question, about Lamont’s new “debt diet.”
“When you’re talking about the need to modernize or rebuild or build schools or put additions on — whether it’s changing populations or modernizing — especially in a city like ours, we’ve had the benefit of working with the state, and, as the governor has bragged about and the people around the state have seen, our new Harding High School (which is one of our high schools); Central, our other high school, another product of state support. We have those type of needs, so you have to be sensitive to those as you do try to make the difficult decisions and frankly I think the governor is doing that now. The debt diet kinda — you know we were together on St. Patrick’s Day, and we were like ‘Oh! What falls into that and what falls out of it?’ And I hope the process has the discretion — as it will, I think — with the governor’s leadership to allow for the needs of infrastructure throughout the state: bridges, all the things that — the pension: always a challenge. We can talk about that as part of this answer or another one.”
OK! Everybody good with that? It probably would have been better with bongos playing under it. You’re not going to get that kind of beat poetry out of Toni Harp. She would probably insist on speaking in clear English or something.
Actually, neither Harp nor Ganim should be appearing as political analysts anywhere because they are both in the middle of hardfought re-election campaigns. Two days after his appearance on WFSB, Ganim raised $80,000 at a pizza and beer party. You can’t cover somebody’s campaign and use him as a pundit at the same time. Can you?
Ganim’s likely opponent, state Sen. Marilyn Moore, will either face him in a primary Sept. 10 or in the November election. She declined to say which when she announced her run in January.
I just thought I would mention her because, lacking an action-packed criminal record, she’s unlikely to get the kind of television time she needs.