It’s been a tough month for public officials here in Connecticut.
There was Michael Hogan, whose decision to leave the UConn presidency was met with clenched teeth among the decision-making class. Heading the state’s flagship university should be a prestigious job but here was a guy tossing it back like an underweight trout. His brief tenure was marked by controversies about the remodeling of this office and his decision that the president’s residence didn’t fit his needs. He won’t be missed.
And, of course, there’s Hartford Mayor Eddie Perez, who spends his days in court battling corruption charges rather than at City Hall.
Susan Bysiewicz had her career path disrupted when the state Supreme Court ruled her service as secretary of state didn’t fit the definition of practicing law and thus didn’t qualify to be attorney general. Since the secretary of state job doesn’t require a law degree, that shouldn’t have been too big a surprise. Erase her from this season’s wannabe lineup and insert her brother-in-law, Ross Garber, who is a practicing attorney.
Then there is the odd case of Richard Blumenthal, the U.S. Senate candidate with foot-in-mouth disease.
In the realm of crisis management, the attorney general’s decision to say ‘I misspoke’ is sort of like BP saying ‘oops’ to explain its pumping of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. That explanation simply doesn’t scratch the surface of the issue and insults the intelligence of the audience.
It’s hard to fathom why he felt the need to embellish his service record and why he’d do so in such a sloppy fashion. In the case of all those newspaper reports that had repeated his ‘misspoken’ Vietnam service claim, failing to correct the record is akin to the dilemma posed when you hand a clerk a $10 and get change from a $20. We’d like to believe everybody would do the right thing, but we know they don’t. Still, it seems a minimum expectation for a man who is serving as the state’s top justice official and wants even higher office.
Obviously, each case is unique, yet, the common thread here is that each chose the ‘me-first’ road rather than the higher road of serving the interests of the people who hired them. In their zeal to advance their careers, they exposed personality traits that leave the employer — i.e. the public — shaking our collective head.
Hiring good people is a tough job. Employee loyalty is a thing of the past; many employees are more focused on the next job than the one at hand; inflated resumes abound and employee dishonesty is a significant cost of doing business.
There’s no reason we should be surprised when high-profile public employees behave the same way. Yet we are surprised. Repeatedly.
We’d like to believe the people we choose to lead us are of a higher character. They should be. We shouldn’t have to settle for less. And the events of these past few weeks should serve as a sober reminder that the process of choosing our leaders demands our full attention.
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 Finally, Good NewsÂ
Two news developments give tangible proof that there’s economic vitality in Greater Hartford’s unpolished gem of a health care sector.
First, as Greg Bordonaro reports on our front page, demand for medical office space is strong enough to justify building an 11-story office tower near Hartford Hospital. Even in a slow economy, pent up demand can only wait so long.
And a few inches to the right of this spot, Dr. Joseph McIsaac makes a strong case for a Hartford renaissance built around leveraging the area’s world-class health care industry. The devil is always in the details, but a research lab approach could be just the ticket to jump start redevelopment.
Bravo to all involved with both ideas.