Tone deaf ad launches bad week all around for Foley

With about a month to go before the gubernatorial election, presumed front-runner Tom Foley is still having bad days and weeks. 

He started last week with an ad touting his education plan while surrounded by beautiful, white children and then announced an urban agenda with an education plan that would leave the poorest minority children in schools worse than they are now.

Then we learned the  agenda was partly plagiarized from think tanks in Chicago and Louisiana and also lifted from a foundation Foley founded after losing in 2010.  

It took the opposition under three hours to find and release passages in the Foley agenda that had been lifted from the Heartland Institute of Chicago and the Pelican Institute for Public Policy in Louisiana, along with his own Connecticut Policy Institute.  

Instead of simply crediting the foundations with the pilfered prose, Foley’s spokesman Mark McNulty argued that “borrowing policy ideas from states that have successfully road tested new policy initiatives is not plagiarism, it’s smart.” 

No, it isn’t, Mr. McNulty.  It’s plagiarism and it’s dumb.  Smart is finding the ideas and crediting the originator.     

The incredibly insensitive ad on an issue of great concern to the minority communities that are home to the state’s worst schools also makes one wonder about the quality of that Foley staff and his ability to select smart people. 

The ad had some value for Foley because it took attention from the plan it was touting.  When Tom Foley becomes governor, we were told, solid business and market practices would be applied to the schools with bad schools going the way that famous mill in Sprague that failed because, as Foley keeps explaining on that TV ad, its workers failed.

Parents would be allowed to take children out of failing schools along with the money the state pays to educate them, leaving the failing schools — and the remaining students — with less financial support until the schools improve or close.  Foley figures they’d have an incentive to improve if their money is taken away because that’s the way the market works, except when it doesn’t.

“Institutions that aren’t performing lose,” said Foley.  “That’s kind of the way the private sector works, and it ought to be the way the school works too.”  In other words, what’s good for the Sprague mill is good for Connecticut’s public schools.

Foley would have the child leaving a failing school take the thousands of dollars it costs to educate him or her to his new school, leaving the old school with fewer students but basically the same operating costs for such things as teachers, to take a random example.

That the children remaining in these schools would often come from poverty-stricken  homes with absent fathers, teenage mothers and other disadvantages were not addressed in the Foley “market rules” plan.  

Foley would also help city residents by significantly reducing taxes on their cars — as much as 60 percent in Hartford and 18 percent in New Britain — with the state reimbursing the cities for the $30 million they’d lose in tax revenue.  

Reducing or  eliminating car taxes was proposed by both Governor Malloy and his predecessor, Republican Jodi Rell, and was shot down on both occasions by the Democratic legislative majority and therein lies the main, largely unaddressed problem of a Foley administration, if we are to have one.

The Connecticut General Assembly, regardless of who’s inaugurated in January 2015, will have a Democratic majority, which means we will have a divided state government if Foley is elected governor.  

This has happened in the past and isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  However, with a Democratic legislature, you can ignore all of the changes Foley is proposing — from the market-driven school systems to the reduced car taxes.  

True, we have had many governors of one party who managed to get the legislature of the other party to do their bidding on occasion, but without exception, they had one advantage Foley will lack.

All of them had served in the General Assembly — all of them.

Simsbury resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. Email him at dahles@hotmail.com.