Malloy has a clue: Don't let Dems find out

Who ran Connecticut’s most successful city (maybe the state’s  only successful city) for 14 years, kept taxes down, suppressed crime, improved local education, is obsessed with public policy rather than politics, reeks of competence, and just got the Democratic state convention’s endorsement for governor for the second time?

Say his name with the sneer of this year’s campaign demagoguery — Dan Malloy, another “career politician.†(You know, like Lincoln, the Roosevelts, the Kennedys, and Reagan.)

But it is a strange “career politician†who, as he seeks votes in the Democratic primary on Aug. 10, keeps hinting that he knows a little better than the posturing he and other candidates do to ingratiate themselves with the interest groups that infest the party. Malloy has declared state government to be bankrupt, with revenues lagging expenditures by as much as 20 percent; pledged to order state government to follow generally accepted accounting principles precisely to end the pretense that state government is not bankrupt; threatened to veto budgets passed by Democratic majorities in the General Assembly if they are as full of accounting gimmicks as recent budgets passed by those majorities have been; and pretty much acknowledged that the initiatives he has gone around the state proposing — such as universal nursery school, expanding medical insurance for the poor, increasing state payments to nursing homes for the care of indigent patients, and improving mental health services — may be little more than wistful hopes for a better day that is likely years off.

All the same, it’s not easy to extract from Malloy any detail about how the budget gap is to be filled. In a recent debate with his challenger in the Democratic primary, Ned Lamont, both candidates gave the strong impression that they would not raise taxes. But in an interview with Keith Phaneuf of CTMirror.org, Malloy suggested that he probably could close only a third of the revenue gap through spending cuts and mused at length about raising taxes on the wealthy and business, sounding just like the Democratic legislative leadership that engineered the “fiscal train wreck†he has been lamenting.

As he is a Democrat and public employee unions are the party’s biggest constituency, Malloy can’t express the slightest doubt about Connecticut’s system of binding arbitration of public employee union contracts, which takes the great bulk of public expense out of the ordinary democratic process and makes it illegal for government to control most of its costs. But Lamont, with no record in office, seems to be getting union endorsements because Malloy, negotiating contracts as Stamford’s mayor, was not easily rolled. That is, Lamont is expected to put up less of a fight on behalf of the public.

But as experienced and prepared as he is, even Malloy may not yet fully perceive the necessity of confronting the most expensive and faulty premises of state government — not just the untouchability of government employees (who get raises and job guarantees while everyone else gets layoffs or tax increases), drug criminalization, and urban policy, but also the welfare coddling of childbearing outside marriage, which feeds the courts and prisons and perpetuates poverty generally; luxurious but unfunded public pension systems; educational inflation, the ever-increasing time spent by students in school amid their ever-diminishing learning; and the expendability of the entrepreneurial and working classes and the private sector generally as government takes more and gives less.

The question underlying Connecticut’s economic collapse is whether government ever again can be more than a pension and benefit society for its employees, whether it can still elevate society or mainly just burden it as overhead. Because of his record in Stamford, Malloy can claim to have pursued the more difficult objective. He narrowly lost the Democratic primary four years ago in part because people on the payroll feared that he’d keep pursuing it.

That is, Malloy has a clue, and if the party’s primary voters find out and play to type, he’ll probably lose again.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.