Governor Malloy’s dissembling about the new state budget got worse this week, making him ridiculous.
Last week the governor said he “fought” for the budget he proposed, the budget that pretended to fulfill his campaign pledge last year not to raise taxes but mistakenly exceeded the state spending cap. He never bothered to correct it.
This week the governor said the budget passed by the General Assembly, the one with those big and now controversial tax increases, was better than his proposal, since it provided more for various programs he supports.
Chris Powell
That is, while during the campaign last year the governor stressed his intention to avoid tax increases, today he is stressing the need for state government to spend more. So the governor will sign the budget legislation.
Malloy’s performance here should be compared with that of a predecessor, Lowell P. Weicker Jr., in 1991. In his campaign for governor the previous year, Weicker struck a similarly adamant pose against raising taxes, opposing a state income tax, likening its imposition to “pouring gasoline on a fire.” Soon after his inauguration Weicker appointed as budget director a former legislator who long had advocated an income tax and soon after that proposed the tax himself, breaking his anti-tax pledge faster than Malloy just did.
But at least from that point onward Weicker was forthright. He would take responsibility for the tax increase. Indeed, he would demand the tax increase and settle for nothing less, vetoing three budgets that didn’t contain the income tax and thereby exhausting the legislature through a temporary shutdown of state government and a special session that lasted until late August.
With his budget vetoes Weicker, while elected as an independent, gradually herded the legislature’s Democratic majority behind the income tax, which was what most Democratic legislators privately preferred but what they felt they could not survive politically unless the governor took most of the blame.
Malloy has escaped his anti-tax pledge not through forthright repudiation, as Weicker did, but through awkward dissembling. The tax increases in the budget he proposed were hidden behind changes in subsidy policies. Now Malloy claims that the legislature made him go along with raising taxes outright, as if the legislature, not the governor, holds the veto power and controls the vast patronage of government, and as if the legislature really had to pressure him even as he says the budget he negotiated with Democratic legislative leaders is better than the one he proposed.
Weicker deceived the voters, got what he wanted, took responsibility, and paid for it with his political career, becoming unelectable, though nearly all the Democratic legislators who went along with him on the income tax and sought re-election the following year were successful. (Despite the turmoil of 1991, the political majority in the legislature resulting from the 1992 election was exactly the same as before, as if nothing had happened.)
Malloy similarly deceived the voters but is trying to evade responsibility, trying to portray the breaking of his campaign pledge as a triumph for the state and for him. If it is, then what he really wanted all along was just someone else to take responsibility for taxes.
It is hard to imagine that Malloy now can have any more of a political future than Weicker did after his own betrayal, hard to imagine voters giving Malloy a third term, easier to imagine him accepting an appointment from the national Democratic administration, leaving the public’s resentments to Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman.
But the governor can be tenacious when he wants to be, and, just as important to Connecticut’s political future, it’s not clear if the state’s Republican Party, when it again pursues candidates for major office, will ever run out of rich, self-absorbed, and clueless dilettantes who own yachts with sexually suggestive names.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.
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