Connecticut was once called (by its residents; who else would come up with such crap?) the Land of Steady Habits. That was then. Now we’re closing in on South Carolina for weirdness champion of the mid-terms. Setting aside the groin-kicking GOP senatorial candidate, Linda McMahon, the mogulette of pro wrestling, let’s concentrate for now on the governor’s race.

The Republican candidate is one Tom Foley, a money manipulator from Greenwich who drives a hundred-foot yacht named “Odalisque” which proudly flies the flag of the Republic of Marshall Islands.

Let’s set him aside, too, and return to the Democrats. The losing candidate in Tuesday’s primary was Ned Lamont, who came from family money, as we WASPs delicately say, and made millions more in cable television.

The winner was Dan Malloy, born in Stamford as the youngest of eight children. He got his law degree from Boston College and rose to become Stamford’s longest serving mayor. If he has a million dollars, nobody has heard about it.

So there’s the cast of characters as we close the first act in the race for governor. (If I mix metaphors, why then I mix metaphors.) As the second act opens:

1. Connecticut’s campaign financing law provides extra money to a publicly financed candidate who is outspent by a millionaire;

2. The Second Circuit recently ruled that the initial grants given to candidates who chose public financing were okay, but the law’s extra grants to match millionaires were unconstitutional;

3. The Connecticut legislature then passed a law that simply increased the size of the post-primary grants to gubernatorial candidates;

4. The outgoing Republican governor then vetoed the law increasing the grants;

5. So the Democrat-dominated Senate then voted to override the veto;

6. The gubernatorial primary occurred. Result: the GOP nominated Foley, a self-financed millionaire, and the Democrats in an upset nominated publicly financed Malloy;

7. Tomorrow, the Democrat-dominated House votes on veto override. The Democrats will be doing their best, that is, to benefit one single person in Connecticut: their own gubernatorial candidate.

To complicate the equation further, the Speaker of the Hous backed the losing Democratic candidate, the self-funded millionaire Lamont. And Malloy won’t be able to lure votes with the promise of jobs, having already promised all the good ones to win support in the primary. Or so rumor has it.

Are you with me so far? Good, because I’m not. Stay tuned.

Posted by Jerome Doolittle at August 12, 2010 07:33 PM

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