The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Bysiewicz seeking accountability
MIDDLETOWN — Accountability: That’s how Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Susan Bysiewicz sums up her campaign and everything she believes in.
Described as hard-working, honest and genuine by her coworkers, the former secretary of the state is a fighter for small businesses in Connecticut, for making clean energy affordable and — above all — for the middle class.
She wants to see an end to the war in Afghanistan and an end to what she calls corporate welfare; she seeks to fight for immigration reform and she intends to hold Wall Street accountable for “this huge mess” the country is in, she said during a recent interview.
But mainly, the 51-year-old Middletown native is running for the seat that will be vacated when U.S. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman retires because she wants to make Connecticut a better state for her three children — Ava, Layna and Tristan.
“I would like my kids to have really good job opportunities,” she said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
One thing close to Bysiewicz’s heart is to keep Connecticut’s residents in the state, especially those who come here (or live here) to get an education. “Keeping people in Connecticut will be done through an economic plan that includes infrastructure improvements, renewable energy and a focus on manufacturing,” she said.
But manufacturing is a dying industry in many towns across the state. The focus, therefore, needs to be on companies that make things like solar panels or electric vehicle-charging stations, she said. “There’s a control module in Enfield that makes EV charging stations from start to finish,” she said. “They put 40 new people to work.”
However, when a California company got a federal grant and
gave away its charging units for free, the Enfield company could not compete. “We need to encourage local businesses to become successful,” she said.
More also needs to be done to help small businesses, she said, such as lowering utility costs, renegotiating fair trade agreements, offering access to affordable health insurance and letting small businesses buy into the state’s insurance pool. “We need to stop encouraging people to go elsewhere,” she said. But right now, “we are not on level playing fields with other countries.”
In December, Bysiewicz revealed her six-point plan of accountability, which includes making Wall Street repay the money lost during the financial meltdown, ending business tax loopholes (“corporate welfare”), reforming Washington lobbying, clean American energy, bringing the troops home and immigration reform.
“Voters are so disenchanted,” Bysiewicz said. “Voters are hungry for specifics. They want to know the details and they’re tired of the dysfunction and negative campaigning.”
“Congress is way too cozy with Wall Street,” which needs to be held accountable for “this huge mess” that we are in, Bysiewicz said. “The wealthiest are doing a lot better,” she said. “Everyone else is losing ground.”
Banks are also doing well, while everyone else is struggling, she said. “Give everyday citizens the same tax breaks. I can go to Washington and fight for those things.”
Bysiewicz said she wants to help homeowners who owe more on their mortgages than what their home is worth, which happened because of deregulation, she said. Her plan to hold Wall Street accountable, produced with help from economist Mark Zandy, provides $120 billion for mortgage relief.
“We need to encourage people to stay in their homes and give people more disposable income,” she said. “It would boost the economy.”
She also wants to reform Congress by banning lobbyist contributions and gifts, making it a law that former congressmen cannot become lobbyists for at least five years, and setting a lobbying limit, some of the things she helped do in Connecticut.
Bysiewicz said she also wants to see a constitutional amendment that laws will apply to those in Congress, particularly concerning insider trading.
Bysiewicz wants to see clean energy contracts in Connecticut that will help local companies like Starwood Capital in Fairfield build every part of their solar power plant in Connecticut. Right now, only part of the assembly is done locally.
Smart grids should also be required for utility companies, she said, instead of the “ancient structures we use today.” She also wants to require utilities to purchase power from homeowners with renewable energy, like Vermont does, and has come up with a plan modeled on both Vermont and Germany.
“We need a national clean-energy policy to help make us energy independent,” Bysiewicz said. “We need to encourage people to put solar panels on their homes.”
Bysiewicz is also advocating energy farms in Connecticut. “It makes for a jobcreation environment,” she said. “And it will make our country safer if we don’t rely on oil.”
The war in Afghanistan is costing the United States $2 billion every week, Bysiewicz said. “We could spend that money improving roads and bridges instead,” she said. “Focus on infrastructure.”
While she is happy the troops were brought home from Iraq in time for Christ- mas, she wants to see the safe return of the soldiers in Afghanistan as well. President Barack Obama plans to bring the troops home by 2014, but Bysiewicz would like to see it happen sooner. “Can we do it in 18 months?” she asked. “We can figure out a safe way to bring them home.”
Suicide rates are high for troops serving overseas, and 50 American lives can be saved each month if the war is cut short, she said.
Connecticut is a state with “a lot of immigrants,” Bysiewicz said. “We need to take them out of the shadow economy and bring them into full embrace of the American dream,” she said. “People should be able to follow the path to citizenship,” she said. “It will help raise wages.”
But she is opposed to a plan proposed by New Haven Mayor John DeStefano Jr. to let non-citizens, including undocumented immigrants, vote in local elections. “First, we need to fix immigration law to give people a path, a goal, get people to participate,” she said, “then they can become active voters.”
Stanley Bysiewicz, Susan’s father, is a 90-year-old World War II veteran who still runs the Middletown potato farm where Susan grew up. He rides a 1939 vintage tractor.
Shirley Raissi Bysiewicz, Susan’s mother, died at 59 when Susan was in her early 20s. She taught at the University of Connecticut Law School for 33 years and helped pass an equal rights amendment in the state. She was also the first female tenured professor at UConn.
“I’m glad she got to come to my wedding before she died,” Bysiewicz said. “But I’m sad that she never got to meet any of my children.”
Susan’s husband, David Donaldson, runs her father’s insurance business in Manchester. Her two daughters, Ava and Layna, are students at Wesleyan University. Ava is a junior and Layna a freshman. Her son, Tristan, is a junior at Middletown High School.
Susan has two sisters and one brother. Her sister Karen is a law professor at Penn State; her sister Gail works for UConn President Susan Herbst. Her brother, John, is a runner and works in sports marketing in Branford.
Bysiewicz said her family was excited when she told them she wanted to run for U.S. Senate. Ava and Layna are volunteering with her campaign and have gotten many other Wesleyan students involved as well, she said.
If elected, Bysiewicz plans to stay in Middletown, rent an apartment in Washington and return to her hometown on the weekends. She can’t see herself leaving, she said.
“I’ve lived in Middletown all my life,” she said. “My dad is here. I have many other relatives in the Middletown area.” Bysiewicz attended Middletown High School and was the editor of the Bengal Bulletin, a student-run newspaper.
She briefly considered going into journalism and did internships both at The Middletown Press and at the Washington bureau of the New York Times. In the summers growing up, she picked potatoes on her family farm.
After meeting then-Gov. Ella T. Grasso the summer after her junior year in high school in 1978, she was inspired to go into public service.
“(Grasso) described what her job was as governor, as secretary of the state,” Bysiewicz recalled. “I thought maybe some day I’ll run for office. Of course, I didn’t know at the time that I would sit in her office, at the same desk she used.”
She graduated from Yale University, where she wrote her thesis on Grasso (her book, “Ella: A Biography of Governor Ella Grasso,” was published in 1984).
She graduated from Duke Law School, where she met her husband, David Donaldson, in 1986.
Bysiewicz’s first job after law school was as a corporate and business lawyer at White & Case, a large New York City law firm. It was a great experience, she said.
“Negotiating financial transactions, nothing ever happened until everyone was on the same page,” she said. “How do I get people on the same page? How do you build consensus? It’s a very good background — makes you effective at passing legislation.”
Bysiewicz spent two years at White & Case, then moved back to Connecticut with her husband and worked at the law firm Robinson & Cole until 1991, when she went on maternity leave for her oldest daughter, Ava.
When Ava was 5 months old, in the spring of 1992, Donaldson read an article in the paper about the 100th District state senator retiring. “He said, ‘Look, honey, David Levine is retiring,’” Bysiewicz recalled. “‘Maybe you should run for his job.’”
Bysiewicz said her first instinct was “Are you nuts?” But then she thought about all the issues she would like to influence — improvements in the schools, for example — and decided to give it her best shot. In May 1992, she announced she would run for state Senate. She said she knocked on 5,000 doors to win the primary. After she was elected, she continued to work as in-house counsel at Aetna in the company’s Hartford office. Bysiewicz served three terms as a state senator, representing Middletown, Durham and Middlefield,
As a legislator, Bysiewicz helped pass several laws that eliminated special interest spending, banning “wining and dining” with lobbyists and ensuring clean elections. She also assisted with a direct primary law, she said.
She was elected to the secretary of the state’s job in 1998 after losing the Democratic Party’s nomination and winning a primary against Ellen Scalettar. She served the state in that position for 12 years.
When she first went to see her new office in Hartford, she was told, “Susan, you made history,” she said. She was the first person in Connecticut to lose her party’s nomination, win a primary as a challenger and then win a general election for secretary of the state.
“They told me at the time that it wasn’t possible,” she said. “If I’d known it was supposed to be impossible, then I might have said, ‘Oh forget it.’” But she prides herself on not being “the insider’s choice.”
As the chairwoman of the state’s Clean Elections Committee, Bysiewicz helped ban gifts and lobbyist contributions in Connecticut.
As secretary of the state, Bysiewicz put a focus on technology. She developed a searchable business database and implemented a new optical scan system for voting. She also lobbied the legislature to pass an amendment that would allow 17-year-olds to vote in local primaries as long as they’d be 18 by Election Day, something she traveled to local high schools to promote. Bysiewicz also traveled from town to town recognizing Connecticut veterans.
The things she is most proud of during her career are “things that have made voices of everyday citizens stronger,” she said. “I’m always happiest when I’m standing up and fighting for people.”
In 2005, Bysiewicz announced she would run for governor in 2006. However, she withdrew and instead ran for re-election as secretary of the state. In 2010, she said again that she intended to run for governor, before changing her mind and instead running for attorney general.
On the same day Bysiewicz announced her intentions to run for attorney general in January 2010, her qualifications for the job were questioned. State statute says that a candidate for attorney general must be “an attorney at law of at least 10 years’ active practice at the bar of this state.”
Bysiewicz claimed that in addition to her eight years of private law experience, she was a member in good standing of the Connecticut bar for 20 years and practiced law while serving as state representative and secretary of the state for a total of 16 years as defined by the Connecticut Practice Book.
Opponents, however, insisted Bysiewicz’s time as the top elections official did not count as legal experience toward the attorney general position. Four days before the state’s Democratic nominating convention, a state Supreme Court judge ruled that Bysiewicz failed to meet the requirements.
Bysiewicz appears to have bounced back from this decision. A poll Bysiewicz conducted after the decision showed that her job-approval rating was high and she had good job recognition, she said.
“This isn’t about 2010,” she said, “this is about Connecticut people’s dreams for the future.”
Her campaign spokesman, Jonathan Ducote, said what happened in 2010 is “over and done.”
“People care about the economy,” he said. “They care about seriousness of thought and purpose.”
As secretary of the state, Bysiewicz visited all 169 towns in Connecticut. Since January 2011 when she launched her campaign for U.S. Senate, she has visited 120 of them again, and she hopes to see all of them before the election. “They all have their own personalities,” she said.
Bysiewicz, who announced in January 2011 that she would be seeking the position, said she had been thinking about running for the U.S. Senate for “some time.”
“I look at Washington and there’s a lot that’s not happening,” she said. “I was raised by my parents to fight for what I believe in.”
Bysiewicz said this year’s election is “not about the money.” “None of the selffunded candidates won in 2010,” she said. “Money doesn’t necessarily win you the election.” What’s important, she said, is to “prove that you are willing and able to do more with less.”
Her plan is to get 90,000 voters out for the primary. “We have what we need to make it happen,” she said.
Ducote said his candidate has a genuine track record. “She can stand up to special interests, lobbyists,” he said. “She works hard, she is tireless, tenacious. She is good at rallying people around her, and she is taken seriously.”
But how would she, as a freshman senator, be able to fix what she calls the “dysfunctional gridlock in Congress”?
During her years in public service in Connecticut, Bysiewicz frequently met with entrepreneurs and small-business owners and understands their challenges, she said.
“My experience as secretary of the state will be helpful in Washington,” she said.
Bysiewicz said, confidently, that she can get things done in Congress because she has been successful at doing so in her home state. People laughed at her in the 1990s and said she would not be able to make change happen, but she did. Now she wants to prove she can make it happen in Washington.
Connecticut has never sent a female senator to Washington, and Bysiewicz is hopeful the first one will be her and not Republican candidate Linda McMahon. Being a female candidate in Connecticut is positive, she said.
“Fifty-seven percent of the primary electorate will be women,” Bysiewicz said. “When they have the option to choose a competent, qualified female candidate, voters of Connecticut usually do.”
When asked whether she thinks she, as a first-time senator, would be able to accomplish all her goals if she were to be elected, Bysiewicz was optimistic. “It’s difficult,” she said, “but I’ve shown that I can do things that are difficult.”