Sips of beer, gulps of reality
STAMFORD — What’s better than drinking coffee and calmly discussing current events and public policy with your friends and coworkers?
Well, possibly quaffing some beer on a cold night, in a mostly warm tent, gabbing enthusiastically, and trading a microphone backandforth with 50 almost strangers.
Of course, if I drank more beer, there would be a warming layer of the body fat that I needed Thursday, as I attempted to cuddle up to the inner tent wall, near one of the blasts from propane heaters in full throttle out in the lawn at the seasonally transformed Mill River Park.
But the point of the matter is, our Hearst political team had a decent turnout for the second “Pints and Politics,” with about 50 people who spanned the political firmament from left to right.
Even the Democratic Socialists had their own table.
Judging from the vocal support for impeachment, apologists for the president might have decided to stay holed up, across Washington Boulevard from Mill River Park’s temporary Winter Wonderland, in the 34story Trump Parc condos.
Or maybe they were skating in slow circles outside, on the ice rink, trying to catch a wisp of Columnist Dan Haar frothing at the bit in favor of highway tolls, while also supporting part of a Republican proposal to use some of the state’s $2.5billion emergency reserve.
It would pay down a little of the state’s huge $38billion combined unfunded liabilities in the pension plans for state employees and publicschool teachers, then free up a couple hundred million for transportation infrastructure.
As much sense as that may make, Democrats in the General Assembly are likely to reject it because ... well ... Republicans.
The crowd seemed mostly Democratleaning, which Tom Mellana, managing editor of the Stamford Advocate and Greenwich Time told us is par for the course these days. I didn’t have a chance to grab the microphone from Mellana at that moment and describe how Bridgeport is so Democraticheavy that they eat their young.
Stamford is the thirdlargest city in the state and arguably the wealthiest, without many of the inner city problems that Bridgeport, Hartford, New Haven and Waterbury have with lower incomes and underperforming schools.
In fact, with a sudden burst of 570 new school pupils in the local system this year, most of whom are English learners, the educational infrastructure here is being challenged. A consultant previously predicted there wouldn’t be this kind of population bump to 16,652 kids, until 2026.
Is to too late to retrieve that consultant’s performance bond?
Further complications emanate from the city’s school mold problem, a result of shortsighted pennypinching tactics that local governments are famous for. Why install airconditioning? Well, here’s why. Now whole schools are being closed and kids shipped to places such as the old Pitney Bowes headquarters, which back when I was a kid in the 1960s, was the city’s largest employer.
What else did we learn? That many thought Joe Biden is old, losing it and should be put out to pasture, and out of the electorate’s misery.
That Elizabeth Warren pushed too far with Medicaid for all, and is now walking some of it back.
That Democratic presidential candidates are still perfectly capable of overplaying a winning hand and doing something really stupid to lose the 2020 election.
That Connecticut Republicans, eager to change the subject when it comes to their leader in Washington, would still be likely viewed as Democrats if they all up and left for, say, Mississippi.
That the issue of highway tolls can become emotional and divisive. Well, we have known that for a while.
That the state’s Family and Medical Leave law will start taking small, halfapercent bites of people’s pay checks in 2021.
That the historic 1991 personal income tax won the support of thenSen. Bill Nickerson of Greenwich, because capital gain taxes became very advantageous for the very, often idle, rich who threw Lowell Weicker a bone even as he became the scourge of socalled conservatives.
That Hall of Fame second baseman Rogers Hornsby who joined the St. Louis Cardinals in 1915, ended up coaching third base for the hapless New York Mets of 1962.
Oh, and as usual I got horribly lost, in the city I grew up in, trying to find my back home.
The evening was put together as a followup to a successful October “Pints and Politics” organized and moderated, again, by Hearst politics reporter Kaitlyn Krasselt, with the support of the Half Full Brewery. Indeed, it’s the Half Full that has made this environment next to the skating rink until the early part of January.
There are comfy chairs, there’s conversation, there’s skating, there’s beer and wine.
Be on the lookout because we’re taking our community engagement on the road.