The gubernatorial election results in Connecticut, if ‘results’ are the right word, as opposed to ‘ongoing situation comedy,’ brings to mind one of those old, semi-true anecdotes about the Nixon-Kennedy presidential election in 1960.
As Connecticut’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, Tom Foley, has discovered, when elections are close, urban districts often tend to find last-minute, misplaced bags of Democratic votes hiding in microwave ovens, waiting to be served.
And so it was that (at least as the story is told), with Nixon and Kennedy running close, the politicians in heavily Democratic Cook County (Chicago and environs) and heavily Republican DuPage County (west of Chicago) decided to play a little Election Night game.
The DuPage guys figured that if they reported their results first, before Cook County, then the Cook County guys would manufacture just enough votes to carry the day for Kennedy. The Cook County guys wanted to wait until DuPage County reported, just in case a ‘recount’ was needed to produce the right result.
On and on the counting went, with mysterious delays. Finally, DuPage County couldn’t stand it any longer and finished the count. Cook County took its sweet time. Congratulations, John Kennedy.
Connecticut Gov. M. Jodi Rell has sort-of-suggested that she may appoint the inevitable task force to examine why voting seemed to be such an adventure in Bridgeport and New Haven. But, in the meantime, we have a Democratic governor, Dan Malloy, who will sneak into a dark, underground bunker, drink whiskey with state employee labor union leaders, and emerge to announce that taxes are going to be raised to meet ‘emergencies.’
No surprise, of course. The good citizens of Connecticut have been smart enough for many election cycles not to elect a Democratic governor — with the understanding that the General Assembly would always be Democratic, as God and careful redistricting intended.
The Bridgeport-New Haven mystery-ballots magic has changed all that; Connecticut residents are now faced with the nightmare of a new governor who won’t veto the worst of the nonsense — and will suggest elaborate tax-and-spend nonsense of his own.
Cohen the Columnist has a personal stake in all this, not only because he is a highly paid Hartford Business Journal columnist — and thus subject to the inevitable ‘tax the millionaires’ fever — but also because the low-key Cohen For Governor write-in campaign lost ground when all of his vote totals were sent down to Bridgeport for ‘processing.’
I would have been a very good governor. My vision for Connecticut was to enhance our position as one vast, prosperous, low-key suburban office park — with state government in place to plow the roads and parking lots, arrest the bad guys, and play nice with the white-collar employers who don’t really care whether Connecticut is a ‘good place to do business’ for manufacturers.
That’s what China is for. China doesn’t have a Democratic Party. That’s where manufacturers want to be.
Connecticut, home to three million folks suffering from less angst, less Tea Party fervor and more reelect-the-incumbents disease than almost anywhere else in America, would have been a laboratory for tranquil change under Gov. Cohen.
Cohen would have privatized every state service that could be found in the Yellow Pages phone book through commercial vendors.
He would have proposed doing away with the state House of Representatives, empowering a nonpartisan State Senate of 35 members to take over — meeting 60 days every other year to pass a resolution demanding that the guys on Death Row actually be executed.
But, no, the dream died in Bridgeport. They just found the Cohen write-in votes under a mattress. Too late.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
