As the General Assembly staggered toward the finish line, the state’s nonprofit social service agencies were issuing their annual whine for more dough.
There are unmet needs, the price of gasoline has gone up, we’ve got plenty of money sloshing around. The social workers are prepared to storm the gates and steal bags of gold from the state Treasury.
To a significant extent, Gov. M. Jodi Rell has said, wait ’til next year; and even the Democratic legislators, to a lesser extent, have found other priorities, other special interests to feed and water.
How can this be? Jodi is a warm and fuzzy kind of Republican – and the Democrats remained committed to creating a permanent class of social service-addicted victims.
It’s the tactics. The social service types have tended to band together under the rubric of the “Poor Will Always Be With Us Coalition For the Care and Feeding of Social Workers and Other Helpful Liberal Arts Majors Who May or May Not Improve the Lot of Those Less Fortunate,” instead of skulking around up at the legislature, lobbyists in tow, one agency at a time, explaining why their particular agency is more worthy than most of the others begging for cash.
It is thought to be unseemly to engage in negative advertising; it is thought to be unsporting to suggest that for every three autistic kids Agency “X” might help, Agency “Y” could provide turkey dinners for 350 down-on-their-luck drug addicts.
But, with 7,562 different special interests constantly roaming around the General Assembly looking for love, the “helping professions” have to get tough and explain why the social workers down the street are underworked and overpaid, compared to the God-fearing, hard-working, saints who happen to work at certain other agencies.
In part, the social service types are disinclined to engage in what amounts to negative advertising because the target audience is government, which is also uncomfortable extolling its virtues by dumping on the competition.
In a city such as Hartford, for example, the grumpy, confused ambiguity of the charter school-magnet school-traditional public school market is caused in large part by the absence of marketing on the part of the alternative schools.
While almost everyone understands that the most compelling charter-magnet competitive advantage is that they are not completely under the thumb of the dysfunctional Hartford public school system, the alternative schools never communicate such negative chatter.
Even among government types who work in a semi-entrepreneurial environment, the instinct to trash the competition just isn’t there.
The travel-and-tourism bureaucrats tend to crank out lame, positive messages about their home turf, without explaining why the vast wasteland that is everywhere else would be a terrible place to go.
Connecticut, for instance, should be braced for an attack from New Hampshire, noting that our liquor is expensive, our bars close early, and a tourist on a Saturday morning in downtown Hartford could die of hunger or boredom. And a Connecticut marketing campaign should explain that currently, in Florida (a major tourism competitor), the “love bugs” (tiny black flies that have so much sex every day that the male bugs die from the strain of it all) are active, smashing into windshields and throwing wild parties in the hair of tourists, and building subdivisions in human nostrils and ears, and carrying off small human children as love slaves.
Much is also left unsaid in the dainty business of promoting states for “economic development.” When Connecticut touts its “educated work force” and its “quality of life,” it doesn’t explain that the alternative is some southern state where a fourth-grade education is considered a miracle and the local symphony orchestra sponsors cockfights. It just isn’t done.
Which brings us back to Connecticut’s impoverished social service groups. What is to be done?
Actually, the answer is clear. Identify the 30 percent or so of the nonprofit agencies that do the very best work, at the most efficient price, and explain in full-page ads in certain Hartford business newspapers that only these groups should be funded.
Negative advertising. Let ’er rip.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
