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2009: No Change, But Perhaps Some Hope? January 7, 2010 Yes, 2009 was a nightmarish year. But turn that frown upside-down -- some “green shoots” did emerge in Connecticut’s policy, political, and media environments. The choice for Man of the Year is easy. In April, Frank Ricci, the firefighter who challenged the City of New Haven’s corrupt and racist hiring practices, had his day in the U.S. Supreme Court. In June, a majority of justices ruled in his favor. Ricci, aided by indefatigable attorney Karen Torre, fought a multi-year battle for himself and 19 colleagues who were denied promotions because they were white and Latino. Their victory was a triumph for Americans who support merit-based employment and deplore racial preferences. In contrast to Ricci, state politicians remained cowardly and bereft of principle in 2009 -- Democrats protected welfare cases and unionized bureaucrats, while the idea-free GOP wallowed in another year of self-imposed irrelevancy. However, bold elected officials did emerge at the local level. In many cities and towns, legislative bodies demanded -- and occasionally, obtained -- compensation concessions from government unions. Another encouraging portent was the willingness of several municipalities to overturn labor contracts. Trumbull rejected a too-sweet deal for its clerical, IT, and library “bargaining unit.” The Stamford Board of Representatives declined to approve four contracts. (“We are at almost 10 percent unemployment rate,” explained one representative. “I’m willing to stand up and tell my constituents that I’m willing to hold the line for taxpayers.”) Meriden’s city councilors unanimously voted to kill a school-administrator contract that contained raises of 2.3 percent for each of the next three years. Monroe did the same with its school secretaries; in Wallingford, it was custodian and cafeteria employees who were given a dose of economic reality. For consistently delivering vital public-policy news and analysis, two reporters stand out: Paul Hughes of Waterbury’s Republican-American and Brian Lockhart, who writes for the Connecticut dailies owned by Hearst Newspapers. As they have in previous years, both exhibited an eagerness to follow a simple formula for competent capitol-complex journalism: 1) record the claims of politicians and bureaucrats Evidently, those steps ask too much of most Hartford-based reporters, who prefer to serve as stenographers for the power-crazed imbeciles who have ruined the state’s standard of living. Hughes and Lockhart stick to the formula, and even go beyond it. Highlights of Hughes’s year include his January look at the legislature’s “nearly 600 permanent staff members and sessional employees,” March finding that just “a handful of state lawmakers have volunteered to take pay cuts to help balance the state budget,” August scoop that hundreds of state employees failed “to file state income tax returns in the last four years,” October revelation that “eight out of every 10 Republican lawmakers” and “four out of every 10 Democrats” represent municipalities that received “Small Town Economic Assistance Program” pork in 2009, and December discovery that the “socalled ‘millionaire’s tax’ doesn’t appear to be producing the big dividends that Democrats and Gov. M. Jodi Rell had anticipated.” In July, Lockhart exposed the sham that was the legislature’s “Commission of Enhancing Agency Outcomes” -- the group had missed the deadline to issue its report, and had met only twice. In an August article on the federal “stimulus,” he wrote, “the total number of people being put to work in Connecticut remains in question, and the data available are far less than what federal officials had promised.” In November, Lockhart profiled the sleazy way gubernatorial candidate Susan Bysiewicz uses her position as the Secretary of the State to win support from veterans by giving them public-service awards. No glass-is-half-full overview of 2009 is complete without acknowledging the tea partiers. When grassroots opposition to Obama-administration madness sprang into life early in the year, the safe bet was that the rebellion would fail to establish a salient in Connecticut. Conventional wisdom was wrong. New York Times neocon David Brooks recently lambasted the tea-party phenomenon as “an amateurish movement with mediocre leadership.” However nasty, it’s not an invalid criticism. Many of the Nutmeggers who grabbed pitchforks and torches in 2009 are awfully sketchy on policy and woefully untrained in politics. But their energy and enthusiasm, amalgamated with the experience and knowledge of people who have been fighting Big Government in the state for years, could forge weapons the left has never faced. If that fusion occurs, and begins to score victories, there will be reason to believe that Connecticut’s decades-long suicide attempt can be stopped. D. Dowd Muska is a writer, commentator and lecturer. His website is www.dowdmuska.com. # # # # #
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