Ken Dixon's Blog-O-Rama

The Blogster, being a professional contrarian, can give you nearly any opposing view. Want to end the war in Afghanistan? Don’t escalate troops, but instead spend the several-billion dollars it would take to buy up all the annual opium crop and burn it, before the CIA grabs it. Want to talk about the need for raising taxes to support the state budget? How about cutting spending instead of playing the eternal shell game of legislative Democrats. 

This attitude has prepared the Blogster beautifully for speculating on Gov. Jodi Rell’s future. She’s been in the Capitol for 25 years now, after 10 years in the House, then nearly 10 years as lieutenant governor with John “Why Should I Resign If I’ve Done Nothing Wrong?” Rowland before taking over from the crook in July 2004. She’s won election in her own right. She’s had sky-high approval numbers in the polls that in the state’s budget mess this year, have still remained enviable. Chris Dodd would go to the extreme of, say, dumping that Irish “cottage” on the depressed housing market there (maybe one of the Countrywide guys would buy it as a vacation home), if he could trade it for Rell’s current above-50-percent numbers.

But Rell’s plowing into her mid-60s now. She has three grandkids. She’s been dealing with a bipolar Democratic leadership in a never-ending budget season that makes the 1991 income-tax year look like a walk in the park with Lowell “Big Guy” Weicker. Her trusted deputy/hench woman, Lisa Moody, has apparently been playing fast and loose with state election law and the eager-to-please UConn public policy professor, Ken Dautrich. This could possibly lead to a couple-thousand-dollar penalty from the State Elections Enforcement Commission next spring for crossing the line on free, so-called in-kind services. Those are all reasons to not seek re-election and most likely concede the Governor’s Residence to state Democrats who’ve been shut out since Bill O’Neill yielded to Weicker in 1991. You can only imagine the back-up of potential patronage employees (overpaid department commissioners and agency heads) that is symbolically constipating state Democratic leadership.

Ah, but the Nedster still walks the earth. Ned Lamont, the Greenwich multi-millionaire Democrat whose illustrious ancestor was J.P. Morgan’s Lisa Moody more than 100 years ago, still wants to start his political career at top, announced an exploratory committee the other day. His very proclamation was enough for Rell to finally promise a decision on re-election by the end of the month. (In 2005 she announced during the second week of October, but that was before public financing, which is whole ‘nother story, if the system gets thrown out early next year in federal-appeals court, giving Ned a leg up with his ability to self-finance) The Nedster’s candidacy could be enough for her to go for another four-year term. He can really dilute the Democratic primary field and virtually negate Dan Malloy, the outgoing Stamford mayor who is a nominal frontrunner for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, what with his 2006 primary loss to New Haven Mayor John DeStefano.

 Lamont, who ran a successful anti-war campaign against Jumping Joe Lieberman in the 2006 Democratic primary before disappearing on vacation for two weeks, then losing the general election (how many Lieberman supporters of 2006 have voters’ remorse now? the Blogster wonders), said in an interview Wednesday that his campaign will be about “jobs,” a rather amorphous code word that he’ll have until next summer, or beyond, t0 flesh out. Rell, on the other hand, has been stressing that same word while picking up, constantly, after legislative Democrats who simply haven’t wanted to cut spending. Heck, they were so timid, they (both majority Democrats and, shockingly, Rell and fellow Republicans) front-loaded the state’s budget “solution” with $900 million in bonding for the debt caused by the budget that ended June 30. Today, the state goes out to bid for those bonds. Yesterday, Rell announced $34-million in new budget cuts under her rescission authority.

“The economy remains largely unstable, job losses continue and the Legislature’s adopted budget has been built on unrealistic savings assumptions,” Rell said in a release yesterday. “I am determined to end this fiscal year in balance and that requires that action be taken as soon as possible. We have no choice but to cut state spending and these rescissions are but the first of many cuts to follow.”

So the Blogster says today that Rell will run for re-election and defeat whoever is the eventual Democratic nominee, whether it’s Jim Amann, the former speaker of the House, from Milford who is still the only ‘official’ Democratic gubernatorial hopeful; Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz of Middletown; Malloy; Rudy Marconi (?!?) the Ridgefield Selectman; or the Nedster, in all his Noble$$e Oblige.