Lamenting the lack of a governor-leader

“Connecticut was hurting....Its cities were dying, its infrastructure, public and private, was in shambles, its defense industry in decline, its insurance industry ensnared in bad real estate loans and the government balance sheet ready to fly apart after decades of political chicanery.

“In all, 10,000 jobs a month were being lost. There was even concern that the state’s dairy industry was going to collapse because of plummeting milk prices.â€

It almost sounds like today, up to and including the plummeting price of milk, but it’s Lowell Weicker’s description of the state of the state when he became governor in 1991. A former Republican who had run and won as an independent, Weicker found himself with a Democratic controlled Legislature, a Republican minority “looking to punish me for winning the governorship†and the prospect of a $2.4 billion deficit within a year. There was not a single legislator from his “A Connecticut Party†in the General Assembly.

We all know what happened. Within a little more than a year, Weicker had formed a General Assembly coalition that passed a state income tax, and the state faced, not a deficit in the billions, but a $110 million surplus for fiscal year 1992.

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I bring up Weicker as a reminder that governors are elected to lead and from time to time, they do. In just the past century, Connecticut produced Wilbur Cross, Raymond Baldwin, Abraham Ribicoff and Weicker. Having such a governor tends to be more important than even having a governor who is nice.

We have bumbled along in Connecticut with Gov. M. Jodi Rell’s niceness since she made everyone happy by proving she wasn’t her predecessor when she succeeded the corrupt John Rowland five years ago. As a result, she has won election in her own right and been rewarded with record-shattering approval ratings while the state has descended into a fiscal crisis that makes 1991 look almost like heaven.

But she hasn’t been working alone. Rell has engaged in a taxing and spending game of chicken with the Democratic leaders in the General Assembly with neither side willing to admit the state can’t overcome an $8 billion deficit without increasing taxes and cutting spending, and that includes spending on the special interests that provide so many Democratic votes.

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With that in mind, it is also instructive to recall how Weicker and his chief of staff, Tom D’Amore, were able to find one important ally in House Speaker Richard Balducci and build a bipartisan coalition that won passage of the income tax despite considerable public opposition.

“House Speaker Balducci didn’t ask for cover,†Weicker wrote in his autobiography, “he went along because he knew it was the right thing to do. The exact opposite was true of Larson in the state Senate. He wanted to play politics, whether for re-election or greater ambitions. In one of the most extraordinary instances of nonleadership that I have ever seen, John Larson, rather than attempt to work out a Democratic-party resolution of the problem, threw in with the Republicans.â€

Larson has, of course, seen his “greater ambitions†pay dividends as he is now one of the top Democratic leaders in Congress.

Larson isn’t the only surviving Democrat Weicker cited for his less than courageous profile on the tax issue. After praising the late former Gov.Ribicoff for his help, Weicker noted that, “This personal act of courage contrasts with Connecticut’s two sitting U.S. senators, Dodd and Lieberman, who opined gratuitously from their aerie in Washington, D.C., that the income tax was not for them.â€

The income tax was not for most people in Connecticut when Weicker first tried to sell it, but he won the editorial support of most of the state’s newspapers and Channel 3, the one TV station that broadcast editorials (and at which I was editorial director). As Weicker noted, most people don’t read editorials, but politicians do.

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They still do and now, with the surviving editorial voices critical of both the governor and the legislative leadership, we can expect Rell to agree to a modest, if inadequate, tax hike in return for the Democratic majority agreeing on inadequate budget cuts. This will push the crisis down the road to the 2010 session of the General Assembly, which also happens to be an election year for the Legislature and the governor.

In the meantime, the legislators will go home and tell the folks how they were able to require restaurants to publish calorie counts or how they bailed out the state’s disappearing dairy farms, again postponing the inevitable. And Rell will resume her role as Governor Nice, recording those cute TV and radio spots encouraging us to fasten our seat belts, get flu shots and enjoy our “staycations†here in insolvent Connecticut.

Weicker, the last governor/leader, had to trade a second term as governor for passage of the income tax, but that’s part of a leader’s job description and, as he wrote in his autobiography, only four legislators lost in the next election because they supported the income tax.

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