With the decision by Gov. M. Jodi Rell to ride off into the sunset when her term expires, the tiny little make-believe ethics investigation launched against her will probably go away, as well. That’s too bad.
No, no, I don’t want Rell sentenced to 10 years of hard labor, raking leaves along the Merritt Parkway. The ethics investigation is an act of desperation by the poor Democrats, who, after years of not being able to elect someone as governor, was facing a woman with popularity on the order of Cohen the Columnist. She is liked, if not loved; admired, if not worshipped — and she has a talent for taking potentially fiery political issues and boring you to death, until they go away.
The ethics accusation against her was so befuddling and seemingly so modest that ethics officers, judges, jurors and prosecutors would, at some point, run from the courthouse screaming — not that any case would have ever made it that far. At worst, she will shake her head and write someone a little check and explain away the ‘inadvertent” mistake she made.
At its heart, the ethics case centers on when she commissioned her University of Connecticut pollster pal to do a study on the public taste for streamlining state government, the polling gang gave her a little personal political data and advice on the taxpayers’ dime. The horror. The horror.
I wish the ethics complaint would linger a bit, not because of my fine-tuned sense of justice and ethical purity, but because the case actually does prompt a worthwhile discussion about pubic administration and policy and the political side of government.
At its philosophical core, the ethics complaint is dubious. Although Rell has been murky, bordering on incoherent in explaining why she commissioned a pollster to see which way the winds are blowing on “streamlining” state government, the justification seems clear enough. In a Northeastern, Democrat-controlled, tax-and-spend state, where the state employees expect to be coddled and the taxpayers expect to be abused, any serious talk of “streamlining” could only be done if the population were sufficiently angry — and the political leader making the case was sufficiently popular.
What the ethics investigation suggests is that Rell could commission a study on what the population thinks about chopping off a few state-employee heads — and somehow do the study in such a way as to not provide Rell with political ammunition that would, in the end, accrue to her benefit.
While Rell is no hard-nosed partisan, she is an elected official, not the town manager of some cushy bedroom suburb with nonpartisan elections of a tepid town council. Whatever “policy” a governor researches as a means toward effective governance, there is a political benefit to the incumbent as well. In truth, why she apparently had to pay a bit extra to get some “political” advice is more mysterious than the fact that anyone pretends to be shocked that politics and policy are naturally intertwined.
Based on the preliminary information, perhaps the UConn pollster offered up some ideas for questions to be asked in a private poll for Rell, while he was manufacturing a poll and/or focus group script for the more general study on streamlining government. Oh, he might have been kissing up to the boss and benefactor a bit, but at the end of the day, he was acknowledging an obvious truth: Any successful “streamlining,” whatever the merits, would have to be done by someone who was perceived to be Cohen-like in her remarkable demeanor and language and likeability.
Ethics problem? Probably not. Interesting subject for a conversation? To be sure.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
