Wanted: Some heart, brains and courage to save home

WASHINGTON — It’s not very often that a Wizard of Oz-themed column is right in front of me, perched like a farm house that just landed with a thud on the Wicked Witch of the East.

Yeah, Gov.-elect Ned Lamont is wearing the metaphorical ruby slippers.

I’m sitting in a big meeting room at the national headquarters of the AFLCIO on 16th Street, near Lafayette Square and the White House. At the table are a few national union representatives and 19 other reporters from around the country, in a program sponsored by the National Press Foundation.

Next to me is a modernday Glinda the Good Witch, who happens to go by the name of Sarah LaFrenz, who is the coordinator for the Kansas Organization of State Employees.

She is perfectly willing to accept credit for the failure of Republican Bob Stefanowski to win Connecticut’s recent race for governor, a campaign that was a gimme for the state GOP, until the primary selected Big Bob.

Kansas, you see, is where Stefanowski’s supplyside, trickledown economics famously went to work in 2012, and then was thoroughly repudiated. Republican state lawmakers there were forced to admit that Gov. Sam Brownback’s “red state experiment” gutted spending for education and transportation.

In some ways, Brownback was the perfect Republican. He rejected the chance to set up a health insurance exchange under the federal Affordable Care Act. He supported legislation that took away tax credits for abortion providers. In June, 2012 he signed a bill to drastically cut taxes. Surprise, the rich never transferred the money into the economy.

By June of last year, lawmakers turned back the damage, adopting tax increases over the veto of Brownback, who in early 2018 received a lifeline from President Donald Trump and is now something called the U.S. Ambassador-atLarge for International Religious Freedom.

Brownback’s economic gamble was the dubious work of Stefanowski’s budget guru, Arthur Laffer, who was President Ronald Reagan’s adviser back in the dark ages of U.S. politics. Stefanowski, a corporate suit from Madison with a spotty voting record, in his first campaign for public office, dodged reporters and literally hid behind the televised mantra of “cut taxes,” with no additional details.

Complacent Connecticut Democrats would likely have been doomed if any other of the four GOP candidates had won the governor’s primary. Instead, Republicans were conned by yet another “millionaire businessman” with no political experience.

The result was mildmannered Ned Lamont, a millionaire businessman with slightly more than no political experience beyond beating war-hawk Joe Lieberman in the 2006 U.S. Senate primary. Hard to believe it was just a month ago that he beat Big Bob by 40,000 votes.

My working theory is that since the “cut-taxes” battle cry failed so miserably in early adopter Kansas, it eventually became toxic to Stefanowski’s campaign. Enough voters realized, thanks to Connecticut news outlets, a vacant promise when they heard one. It didn’t help Big Bob when he threatened to bust public employee unions in the state Supreme Court if they didn’t knuckle under.

Sitting there next to LaFrenz, I want to give her some recognition for Stefanowski’s loss.

“I’m sure you guys are all aware that we had this super-awesome tax plan that went through nationally that does a lot with trickledown economics, right? So it says if we cut all these taxes, we’ll get all this money back and then we’ll spend it in our communities,” says LaFrenz, a state expert in water sampling and quality, who is also the president of her local union. “I’m here to tell you it doesn’t work, because we tried it in Kansas and it, you know, it nearly destroyed our state and our people.”

She talks about how even non-union workers need rights, which are threatened by ultra-conservatives.

“You still need to have the ability to argue about it, and that’s what we do,” she continues. “And that’s why you see employers and big people from these think tanks, you know, like the Koch brothers are from Kansas, for crying out loud. They will fund over and over again to silence working people. Silence them. Because they want all the money and they want all the power. That’s how that works.”

It will take a while before we find out whether Ned Lamont can make progress in dealing with Connecticut’s $100-billion pension shortfall and billion-dollar budget deficit, or if he is “the man behind the curtain” to whom we should pay no attention. Either way, we’re not in Kansas anymore.

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