Hard road ahead for lieutenant gov

In the 60 years Connecticut governors have been serving four-year terms, three lieutenant governors have become governor after the elected governor resigned and all three went on to be elected on their own. In those 60 years, however, no lieutenant governor has been able to win the office without first finishing a predecessor’s term.

This is because the office of lieutenant governor is largely invisible and the person holding that position usually leaves an imprint no larger than, say, the commissioner of agriculture. It is a fact of political life that does not bode well for the gubernatorial ambitions of the current lieutenant governor, Michael Fedele, who is seeking to move up to governor this year.

The three accidental governors were successful by most measurements. The first two, John Dempsey and William O’Neill, became the state’s longest serving governors, each getting elected twice on their own after completing their predecessors’ terms. The third, Gov. M. Jodi Rell, has enjoyed the highest approval ratings of any elected official in the state’s history after being elected once on her own and declining to run again.

Rell, of course, served the last two years of John Rowland’s third term after he resigned to avoid almost certain impeachment. Dempsey followed Gov. Abe Ribicoff in 1961 when Ribicoff became President Kennedy’s secretary of health, education and welfare, and O’Neill became governor in 1980 when Ella Grasso resigned five weeks before her death.

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Two other lieutenant governors, who didn’t enjoy the benefit of stepping in for their predecessors, tried to be elected on their own but only one, Eunice Groark, was even nominated by her party. In 1994, when Lowell Weicker decided his state income tax would make him a one-term governor, he endorsed his loyal lieutenant, Groark, to carry the banner of their third party into another three-way contest. Groark finished third to Rowland and Democrat Bill Curry.

Grasso’s first lieutenant governor, Robert Killian, had the temerity to challenge her after her first term and in doing so, abruptly ended what had been a promising political career — his. It was a colossal mistake as Killian’s replacement, O’Neill, succeeded Grasso when she resigned and was governor for the next 10 years and 10 days.

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I offer this brief history of modern lieutenant governors who made their mark one way or another because the incumbent, Mr. Fedele, is in the process of again showing us how hard it is to be a lieutenant governor with dreams of better things.

His first mistake was a “beaut,†as New York City Mayor LaGuardia famously described his rare mistakes. When Rell announced in December that she wouldn’t run again, Fedele made a little news of his own by announcing he had Rell’s endorsement. Only he didn’t. Rell later said she’d support the nominee of the Republican state convention and there are at least five other guys currently seeking that honor in addition to Fedele.

Then, there was the awkward dance by Rell and Fedele following the fatal explosion at the Kleen Energy plant in Middletown. At first, Rell did what governors are supposed to do when something bad happens. She went to the scene of the explosion. But with reporters and photographers barred from the site, there was no one to record that historic moment, so she went to the state armory in Hartford, where a crisis center had been established.

In the meantime, a similar center had been opened in a Middletown school closer to the power plant and Fedele showed up at a press conference there along with the city’s mayor and various officials actually involved in dealing with the tragedy.

The lieutenant governor/gubernatorial candidate had nothing much to say, except to announce Rell was monitoring events at the armory in Hartford. After the press conference, a TV reporter asked Fedele if he’d been to the site of the explosion and he admitted he hadn’t.

With Rell absent, Fedele had, intentionally or not, been handed a gift, a live television appearance on Super Bowl Sunday as the state’s man-on-the-scene of a major news event and all he said was Rell was watching things 20 miles away.

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The Hartford Courant reports that some of the seven Republicans seeking the gubernatorial nomination are actually jockeying to become lieutenant governor. Some would wonder why this job, with little opportunity for advancement, is so desirable.

Dick Ahles is a retired journalist from Simsbury. E-mail him at dahles@hotmail.com.